The conference this year proved to have some particularly interesting parallel presentations for me as they included two on the use of Second Life and one on collaborative distance learning. For our own part I felt the Bromley session ‘Virtual Landscapes’ went down well, as we tried to leverage out the clear success of the four trials that we had conducted with student groups, against the clear and obvious problems that we ran into while driving OpenSim to its limits with multiple physics objects in a mega region. On balance though, I felt it was all received very positively, given that we were able to produce some good student feedback and evaluation of the platform, after all lets remember the software is still in Alpha release and given that fact , its actually amazingly robust. I was going to include links to my resources on the day in this blog but decided instead to give a single link to the presentation where you will find them on a links page toward the end. Apart from the three student feedback reports, you may like to have a listen to the mp3 file. I decided that the standard feedback forms did not really support a few questions that I had in mind, and so collared three of my group who seemed to be hanging around with not very much to do and asked them, not much of an approach to random systematic sampling I agree. Anyway apart from the very rewarding responses that they gave, a surprise was that they felt the thing that made a virtual world a real benefit could also be its downfall, so see what you think on that one. The final link on the page is to an swf movie that I captured using CamStudio of the Maze game; the file is big so will take a while before it starts to play. As always it was good to network and meet up with old friends, which leaves me looking forward to next year. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.
Kind regards Vega
Kind regards Vega
