RSC NewsFeed

The BBC claims to have identified 8 ‘species’ of web animal and over at the Lab UK section of the BBC website.

They are challenging you to discover which sort of creature you become when you go online. To establish this you’re asked to take a short online test.

Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of people have participated in online experiments from the BBC. Lab UK builds on this legacy and brings BBC experiments together in one place. Click here for more info on Lab UK.

(For the record, the eight categories are: bear, elephant, fox, hedgehog, leopard, elk, octopus and ostrich.)

Date: 29th October
Venue: University of Stirling
Cost: £50 (inlcuding entry to Pre-Conference workshops)

There are a few places left at Virtual Worlds 2008, a conference organised by the two Scottish RSCs, in partnership with the Higher Education Academy and with financial support from Eduserv. Hosted by the University of Stirling, this is your last chance to sign up to one of this year’s most exciting events!

This is the first time that Scotland has hosted an event on such a scale dedicated to exploring the educational value of virtual worlds.  We’ve managed to bring together examples from all across the country of how lecturers are using the technology to stimulate, engage and most importantly, educate their students. You’ll not only have the opportunity to meet with the lecturers, but also to experience virtual worlds for yourself as your led through the learning sequences in one of the many hands-on workshops on offer.

Download the conference programme here (PDF, 69KB)

With so many parallel sessions running, it’s likely that you won’t be able to go along to every workshop/presentation that you want to attend, so we’ve set aside some time in the day so that you can meet with presenters and colleagues to discuss how your students can benefit from the technology on offer.

The conference schedule is as follows:

09:30 Registration (with breakfast served from 9am)
10:00 Introduction – Sarah Price, JISC RSC Scotland North & East
10:10 Keynote 1: Virtual Worlds in Education, Andy Powell, Eduserve
10:45 AM Parallel sessions
12:15 Lunch
13:15 Meet the presenters (with refreshments)
13:45 Keynote 2: Implementing Virtual Worlds, Pauline Randall, Virtual-e
14:20 PM Parallel sessions
15:50 Closing – Fionnuala Carmichael, JISC RSC Scotland South & West
16:00 End

Remember to turn up early if you want to grab a quick breakfast!

Some of the hands-on sessions require a level of competance with Second Life or its open source equivalent, OpenSim. For those new to the platforms, or those who want to brush up on their virtual skills,  we’ve organised a series of Pre-Conference workshops that will be running around the country in the two weeks before the event. There’s no additional charge to attend any of these workshops.

15th – Aberdeen College, 13:00-16:00
20th – North Highland College, 13:00-16:00
21st – RSC Scot S&W (Glasgow), 09:30-12:30 & 13:30-16:30
22nd – Carnegie College, 13:00-16:00
23rd – Angus College, 10:00-13:00
24th – University of Edinburgh, 09:30-12:30

There are only a few places left at the conference, so if you don’t want to miss the chance to see what Virtual Worlds can offer you and your students, book your place now!

Click here to book a place at Virtual Worlds 2008!

The two Scottish Regional Support Centres, in collaboration with the Higher Education Academy (Scotland), are delighted to announce Virtual Worlds 2008. The one-day national event that seeks to answer the question,

“Do virtual worlds have a place in education?”

Arguments in favour of using the technology with students are varied – it’s engaging, immersive, and limited only by your imagination. If the hype surrounding virtual worlds like ‘Second Life’ is to be believed, then it’s only a matter of time before the avatars start taking over the classroom. Indeed, several colleges and universities have already set up (virtual) shop in this brave new world. And yet, those against the use of such technology see it as frivolous and time-wasting. It’s just a game. Besides, surely students are there to learn, not to enjoy themselves!

It would be reassuring if you could see and experience for yourself what the technology has to offer, before making up your own mind.

Virtual Worlds 2008 brings together the best of virtual worlds used in education today, with the opportunity for you to learn about and talk to people who are successfully using the technology with real students. There’s nothing like trying it out for yourself though, so throughout the day, you’ll be able to attend hands-on workshops where you’ll experience actual learning sequences ‘in world’. This participative aspect of Virtual Worlds 2008 promises to make it a conference quite unlike any you’ve experienced before.

Below is a brief selection of the workshops on offer:

• Free me from my Second Life. Step back in time and walk down the streets of ancient Greece via St. Andrews University’s OpenSim – the open source version of Second Life.

• Meet the Virtual Patient. Feel the virtual pulse, this won’t hurt a bit! Daden Ltd, leading virtual world and AI consultancy, introduce their virtual patient technology used by St George’s Hospital, London.

• Give me the Tools… Put on your hard hat and toe protectors and join Jackie McMillan from Learn Direct & Build (and North Highland College) on a virtual building site. See how virtual worlds are used to teach real life practical skills.

Workshops and presentations are available also from other leading-edge experts in the use of virtual worlds for education, including Altered Learning, Coventry University, Eduserv, Heriot-Watt University, JISC Services, Leeds College of Art, University of the West of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh.

Places for this conference are limited, and demand is expected to be high. Please make your booking early and note that our funding requires us to give preference to persons from Scottish institutions of further and higher education.

Date:       Wednesday, 29th October
Venue:    University of Stirling
Cost:       £50

Click here to find out more about the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference

If you’re looking for free quality online interactive resources, look no further than the US-based Edheads site. Try your hand at replacing a virtual hip (not for the faint-hearted), investigating a car crash, or learning how to predict the weather. These Flash-based materials come complete with additional teaching resources (worksheets, lesson plans, etc.).

It’s a great example of what can be done with Flash, but the limited materials on offer give some idea of the work and time that must have gone into producing these great resources.

Don’t start; I’ve heard them all before! ‘Why don’t you get yourself a first life…’ together with many other variations and comments about my sad lack of a real existence. But funnily enough, what really resonates is the similarity with the comments people made in the early days of the Internet and we know what happened to that idea! So I’m old enough and thick-skinned enough not to worry too much!

My Second Life started in October 2006 after reading a story on the BBC website about Reuters opening a virtual news agency. I’d vaguely heard of Second Life, but didn’t know enough to comment on it one way or the other, but the fact that an organisation like Reuters was taking it seriously enough to get involved piqued my interest. On the same day that the story was posted, Liz Ferlinghetti was born and took her first stumbling steps around this new world. Having inherited my curiosity gene, Liz started to explore and began to get the hang of the environment. She purchased her first plot of land and started building. OK, burying things in the ground at odd angles might be a better description of her early attempts, but developing her building skills certainly improved my geometry and math skills. Fairly quickly, Liz and I merged into one persona and I stopped referring to her and started talking about me. After all, it was me who was doing all the work!

Exploring this world further I discovered virtual shopping, virtual art galleries, virtual pubs (and virtually no hangover!). I also discovered shopping malls, rented some space and opened my first art gallery – mmm, this was getting more interesting now. Next step was to start a landscaping business as I was getting fed up of demolishing my virtual garden just so that I could rebuild it again. All these ventures helped me understand how Second Life worked and started to feed ideas of other possibilities. Roving around Second Life, I saw what other people were doing. Lots of socialising, building, selling, in fact if it happened in real life, it happened in Second Life.

I was also finding a lot of educational content, whether it was from a commercial viewpoint for educating customers and training staff (Intel and IBM for example) or from the academic side (I fell over the University of Ohio on one trip, and it’s hard to miss the International Spaceflight Museum – Spaceport Alpha). This encouraged me to look further into the educational uses of Second Life and start to consider how/whether we should be looking at using it at Elmwood College.

One of the key things that must be considered, particularly from an FE point of view, is which grid to use? Second Life runs on two separate grids – Main Grid where users must be age 18 or over and Teen Grid where users must be over 13 and under 18. In common with most FE colleges, we have students in both groups and frequently classes will comprise of a mixture of ages. This left us with a conundrum as to where we located out pilot study. Because the Teen Grid is limited to under-18s, we would naturally have a problem with staff. Adults can go into Teen Grid, however they have to go through the American equivalent of disclosure and they can only go onto the island (65km² space on a server) that their establishment owns. This gave us two problems – the time to get disclosure carried out and the fact that we would have to buy an island at an early stage of our planning. In the end we decided that we would stick with Main Grid. We would select students who were over 18 and we would rent space for their project.

In the next episode of this story, I’ll let you know how the project develops, what the pitfalls and high spots are and whether it was as good an idea as we had first thought!

Pauline Randall

Elmwood College

Notes: Second Life Growth

Since I joined, peak concurrent logins have risen from about 8,000 to over 50,000. At the moment Linden Lab (the owners of Second Life) are putting approximately 500 additional islands online a month.

Notes: More Information

• Main Second Life website
• Schome
• Second Life & Education
• Second Life Education Wiki
• Second Life Grid
• Second Life Wiki

Check out this very useful site from Nobel Foundation - the people who invited dynamite and the famous prizes – which uses online games to explore complex concepts in science and engineering. This example explores Integrated Circuits which can be found in almost every modern electrical devices from cars to i-Pods. But what is an integrated circuit and what’s the history behind it? Learn about Nobel Laureate Jack Kilby and his part in the invention of a building block of modern technology

IBM have launched Innov8 , a state of the art 3D business simulator that takes you through the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, and optimization of a company’s business processes.

The new video game is designed to help university students and young professionals develop a combination of business and IT skills. Thousands of universities around the world now have access to IBM’s new “serious game,” available at no charge as part of their Academic Initiative.