Them Bones Them Bones: Making a Crypt in Second Life

Location: House of Usher, Lowest Level

I've spent way too much time making sure that walls are textured, prims are linked, and permissions fixed. All in all, however, making the House work has been a great experience. The next time a faculty member wants to embark on a building project, I know to orient the student team first to lessons we've learned the hard way:

• Have one owner for every prim
• Have all prims set to full permissions and shared with the group
• Lock stuff after linking large segments together
• Don't give tours to anyone outside the building team until steps 1-3 are completed.

Despite the hard work, we have had a lot of fun and our two NPC avatars, Roderick and Madeline, are both in-world as noobs. The look and garb will come later.

Jordan, our student builder, put up with lots of SL-related messes. Permission for items she made changed in mid-build, perhaps because I laid on textures with different permissions. Little details fixed one day looked not so great the next. In the end, however, she was a great sport about this project. I'm overwhelmed by the prim-work she did, without sculpties, on the stairs down the Crypt levels.

Speaking of, I must say that my gaff of sending the following invoice out to the SL Education Roundtable group, instead of our campus group, was a moment of good humor for one and all. How else could I brag about buying BONES??

To wit: This has to be the funniest invoice I have ever prepared. Fred gave Iggy 5000L

Here we are so far:
--230L: 23 uploads @10L each
--450L for 3 ravens and some bones
--200L for Vamporium's "Regal Tomb"
--173L for sculpted gargolye for door
--78L for hitching post with ropes (no it's not kinky) by the front door
--300L for "Display Skeleton"
--99L for cheap pine box coffin
-- 99L for RATS
--20L for spiderweb
--1000L for student-builder's wardrobe "I'm wearing a body suit! I need real clothes!"


Full immersion in a simulation of a Poe story: priceless.

Lessons for Teachers New to SL

Location: Working on my Syllabus Wiki

It's been a busy week working on the House of Usher and preparing for Orientation Week...hence, no posts for seven days.

It might be another seven before I add to the blog...so it goes. School begins.

This year will mark my fourth time using SL with a class, and it will be my second use in a writing course that worked very well last fall. Here's some advice I've culled over my time as an SL educator:

• Don't Cheerlead: US Millennials are goal-oriented and like "games with a point." This means that non-game SL will see odd to them. I prefer to orient students to the pedagogical goals of class, first. My students learn that the goal of the class is to teach them to reason to claims and not from them, all in the service of learning to write for academic readers. Students hear about SL as a new form of communication, not the "NEXT BIG THING THAT WILL CHANGE HUMAN CIVILIZATION." Ho-hum. When they find out that SL will not run easily (if at all) on an iPhone, they know such claims are hype.
• Set Policies Carefully: I now have a "no goofing off in the lab" policy. The first time I catch a writer Facebooking or surfing, I give them a "mark of shame" in my grade book (and retain my good humor in class). In a British accent, I say "You have been warned" and show them the policy: every instance after means an absence and a note to their advisor and residential dean (we are a hands-on private university). I fail one student a year, on average, for excessive skips. If students use SL in class (in mine they don't) faculty may have to consider what constitutes "on task" SL usage.
• Be There When They Rez: More than anything last fall, this made the engagement in SL better. I was present when my students drew up avatars and rezzed them in-world. I'll be bringing my class in through the New Media Consortium's portal this fall, not Orientation Island, precisely so I can be right there for the crucial first hour. My students make appointments for this time, and we sit together, in person and in SL, for my tips, freebies, and landmarks to the campus island.

Before classes begin, I hope to trot out some tips on writing good assignments about SL (using Rezzable's OpenSim build to Tut's Tomb as an example).

Granting Permission

Location: House of Usher

Poe's ghost is after us. Or maybe it's just Linden Lab's quirky permissions system.

Jordan, the student builder on this project, swore that she had shared many items with our group, so I could lay down textures and add details at the House of Usher. And so she had.

When we both walked the space today, we found that her changes had come undone.

Thanks to Viv Trafalgar, no slouch as a builder, I found that mixed-permission/ownership builds are tricky in SL. Permissions tend to change for shared items. It becomes endlessly frustrating to go back to a wall or floor that I'd partially textured yesterday to find it locked to me today.

It's small wonder to me that so many builders don't trust the LL system for their content and want to back it all up offline. The brou-ha-ha over Rezzable's decision to sell a BuilderBot to export content caused an uproar. Seems to this non-technical blogger that LL needs to fix the permissions system--if it can be fixed--quickly. An entry in their blog today does at least show that they are weighing IP issues as well as the need for secure backup.

When Richmond's build is done, we'll "sell" it to an avatar from our builder's group who can then retain ownership of the House.

Ravens included.

Chinese Walls & Second Life

Location: Alphaville Herald

There's an interesting story over at the Herald about China's government trying to block access to Second Life. It may be part of a larger campaign to protect youth from violence in gaming. China has, of course, blocked Twitter and YouTube for political reasons.

Yes, they've put up a wall that, in the long run, will crumble as surely as the Great Wall itself.

I chuckle at China's efforts, even though were it the US government doing this, my blood would boil. I don't take well to being told what to do.

Time for another revolution, folks. China's geriatric government is just postponing its Day of Doom. All those bright Chinese students who study abroad and the return know what lies beyond the Great Red Firewall.

As much as I like the quotation attributed to him, I don't think Chairman Mao was correct when he said "It's always darkest just before it gets completely black."

As bad as it looks for civil rights in China, it's just a matter of time before repressive governments like those in Beijing and Tehran are undermined by the very tools they provide workers and students to boost their economies. Both nations have good I.T. infrastructure and large numbers of educated young people. Old theocrats like Ayatollah Khamenei and old Chinese autocrats like those in China's Politburo will have to live with the results.

A nice ray of hope in troubled times, that.