Subject Matter Content Creation for Second Life Delivery - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 419

- that of the myriad possible options for course
development Second Life provides and how to
use those tools to make the transition from the
real world to the virtual world. These tools are
substantial, they are immersive, and for the most
part, free or inexpensive. But tools are of little
use unless you know how to apply them. In this
instance the application of the tools is aimed at
building learning objects.

modified to help the learners generate movement,
graphic displays, and thousands of other in-world
effects.
Other advanced skills include creating poses,
and animations of both avatars (the Second Life
inhabitants) and primitive objects. There are tools
available for creating simple combinations of
existing gestures (such as clapping hands, or wav-
ing) to make more complex animations. The more
intrepid animators might choose to use a variety
of available “puppeteer” tools that record and
playback movement, or even use free animation
tools outside of Second Life such as Qavamator ©
that allow the user to create whole dances, skating
animations, and many more and then import them
into Second Life. Many other related skills can
be exercises such as graphic design for those who
want to design clothing or hair for avatars and
designing and photographing Second Life scenes,
and even producing movies of simulations either
for the cinematography student. These will require
graphic design software, screen capture, and
movie capture software for the computer but allow
for their incorporation within Second Life. The
students can then participate actively in their
learning.

Learning the Tools of Second Life

Best practices in education dictates that you do
not teach material with which you are unfamil-
iar. This typically applies to the content you are
going to deliver but it can, and often does refer
to the tools and techniques used to use, deliver,
or explain that content. The specific tools you
might employ differ both based on content and
on mode of delivery. If, for example, you are a
science teacher wanting to demonstrate the parts
of a machine or an insect, you can use a tool as
simple as a graphic display so you can explain it.
In Second Life this will require that you learn how
to use the basic building tools to produce primitive
objects (prims) such as a flat board upon which
to place your display. Your display is based on a
graphic you will need to either produce digitally or
convert to a form that can be uploaded to Second
Life as a graphic called a “texture” that can then
be placed on the object (Figure 4).
More advanced skills might be required if, for
example, you are teaching computer science,
computer graphics, visualization (Bourke 2008)
or computer game development, and you want to
use the in-world procedural programming lan-
guage called SLSL (Second Life Scripting Lan-
guage) (Figure 5). The language is built in to
Second Life and provides an ample opportunity
to both generate and test the programs but to col-
laborate on their development as well. There are
many in-world resources for acquiring these
programming skills and examples abound, many
of which come with scripts that can be copied and

employing the Tools of Second Life

Although experience has shown that using ad-
vanced tools, including those in second life, is not
something one can reasonably expect to employ
in the earlier part of course development, using
them eventually tends to engage the students
more than other more passive approaches. The
in-world tools such as the scripting language and
the 3-D building environment are both robust and
relatively easy to learn if taught incrementally.
I have generally focused on using the building
tools both because they lend themselves to my
subject matter and because their three dimensional
nature tends to be visually engaging. Moreover,
because the student actually creates these objects
it is especially engaging to tactile learners.