This past weekend I attended a small "Ideas Exchange" conference. There were about 95 participants, and I was doing a 45 minute talk on online consulting using Second Life opposite another online presentation. Apparently, the other session had a lot more people than mine, all wanting to know about Second Life!! Go figure. But I digress.
The four people that were in my session had lots of questions and seemed intrigued by the idea of running an online writing center. So it surprises me that so many people are interested in the prospect, but are resistant to the actual doing!!
To be fair, it's not an easy feat to run a writing center in Second Life. There is the training of the consultants that has to take place, and so far, I have found no easy way to accomplish this. We have tried it by training large groups at one time in hopes that those who catch on quickly or have used it before can help others who are less sure. This would work if we weren't all in the same physical room at one time, using the same bandwidth and resources. There is also lag on the sim to consider when dealing with large crowds, but it would work if everyone were in different physical locations.
Now I have taken the approach of training a few who are really interested and letting them work individually with the other consultants. This seems to be working better, but there are still issues with consultants saying they will just direct clients to Skype or AIM. This will not accomplish the same thing as a session in SL.
Other issues in SL surround hardware. Second Life is a hardware whore. It requires high video hardware, and thereby, processor and ram. To be fair, though, I have run it successfully on a netbook. I've conducted numerous class sessions in SL, and most students have little problem with their machines. Of those who do, their biggest complaint is getting kicked off.
And of course there are the issues with Linden always changing things or making things more difficult by requiring people to constantly update their software. Today, for instance, we had our first of the semester consultation (we just went live today) and what happens but Linden Labs decides to do a rolling restart of sims. This is kind of like the rolling blackouts in certain areas during peak electric usage times. They go through and restart the servers. This is quite inconvenient when you are trying to conduct a consultation.
New technologies take time to catch on and be used. The books that exists about higher education in SL are mainly written by people in the UK where one author notes that nearly 2/3 of the universities in the UK have a presence in SL. It will just take us time.
The four people that were in my session had lots of questions and seemed intrigued by the idea of running an online writing center. So it surprises me that so many people are interested in the prospect, but are resistant to the actual doing!!
To be fair, it's not an easy feat to run a writing center in Second Life. There is the training of the consultants that has to take place, and so far, I have found no easy way to accomplish this. We have tried it by training large groups at one time in hopes that those who catch on quickly or have used it before can help others who are less sure. This would work if we weren't all in the same physical room at one time, using the same bandwidth and resources. There is also lag on the sim to consider when dealing with large crowds, but it would work if everyone were in different physical locations.
Now I have taken the approach of training a few who are really interested and letting them work individually with the other consultants. This seems to be working better, but there are still issues with consultants saying they will just direct clients to Skype or AIM. This will not accomplish the same thing as a session in SL.
Other issues in SL surround hardware. Second Life is a hardware whore. It requires high video hardware, and thereby, processor and ram. To be fair, though, I have run it successfully on a netbook. I've conducted numerous class sessions in SL, and most students have little problem with their machines. Of those who do, their biggest complaint is getting kicked off.
And of course there are the issues with Linden always changing things or making things more difficult by requiring people to constantly update their software. Today, for instance, we had our first of the semester consultation (we just went live today) and what happens but Linden Labs decides to do a rolling restart of sims. This is kind of like the rolling blackouts in certain areas during peak electric usage times. They go through and restart the servers. This is quite inconvenient when you are trying to conduct a consultation.
New technologies take time to catch on and be used. The books that exists about higher education in SL are mainly written by people in the UK where one author notes that nearly 2/3 of the universities in the UK have a presence in SL. It will just take us time.
RSS Feed
