Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
platform. Users can communicate through
means such as text and voice. In addition,
users can upload textures, or stream audio
and video into the world. Support for col-
laborative viewing and manipulating of
documents will enhance the educational
and pedagogical performance of the plat-
form, as will application sharing.
•
Principle 8:
Design a place for many peo-
ple with different roles: An e-learning sys-
tem should support a variety of roles, each
with different access rights. For example,
in a collaborative learning scenario the
participants could be moderators, tutors,
or learners. The virtual space should be de-
signed accordingly in order to differentiate
these roles. One very important in-world
function included in SL is the creation of
groups. This function permits the group
creator (owner) to assign different roles to
group members and to set access rights to
each role. However, this process is still not
as straightforward as it should be. For ex-
ample, although users can be assigned to
groups, it is difficult to distinguish groups,
group members and group roles when us-
ers intermingle. Issues such as this have
been addressed in our case study, presented
in the following sections.
•
Principle 6:
Ergonomic design of a virtual
place accessible by a large audience: the
designers of a virtual place should take into
account that a virtual place for e-learning
could be used by various individuals with
different backgrounds and level of exper-
tise in information and communication
technologies. SL is accessible since the
provided in-world tutorials guide the user
during his/her first actions. Moreover, a
simple Internet search yields huge amounts
of information on 3D object modelling,
scripting, avatar editing, building, etc.
•
Principle 7:
Design an inclusive, open and
user-centred virtual place: SL membership
is free, anyone above 18 years old can join
(there is also a separate world for teenag-
ers) and the virtual content of the world is
created by its users. However, the platform
is not open source. A significant drawback
is the fact that organizations must pay
monthly fees in order to own and admin-
istrate land parcels in the virtual world.
While this may be reasonable, since the
SL developers takes care of the mainte-
nance and expansion of the virtual world,
some organizations would rather invest
these resources in customizing the world
for their own needs. Relatively recently,
OpenSim, a platform for operating virtual
worlds, supporting multiple independent
regions connecting to a single centralized
grid has been developed. OpenSim can be
considered the open source counterpart of
SL, and much future research work will be
focused on it.
Second Life has been identified by many
educational institutions internationally as having
significant potential for teaching and learning and
there is a current plethora of projects looking at
educational possibilities. Almost all reports of
educational activity in multi-user virtual environ-
ments (MUVEs) are about Second Life (Salt et
al., 2008).
FeATUReS ImPLemeNTeD
INTO SeCOND LIFe
As mentioned above, SL seems to be one of the
most promising CVEs concerning online educa-
tion, offering, among others, full customization
of an avatar's appearance and its gestures. Col-
laborative educational techniques depend greatly
on users' interaction with each other and with
the environment. Thalmann (2001), describes
a direct relation between the quality of a user's
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