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Disruptive technologies in education

Getting started in Second Life

There are a mixture of resources available for those who are new to Second Life and want to hit the ground running that vary from training videos, through to tips and interactive slideshows. The difficult part is selecting those are well made and useful.

Training videos:

http://trainingvideos.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/second1/index.html Second Life video 1
http://trainingvideos.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/second2/index.html Second Life video 2

Specific skills:

Torley Linden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63bxfweC5iE Navigating in small spaces tutorial

All of Torley’s tips of the week can be found at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorials

Interactive slideshows:

Voicethreads
http://voicethread.com/#q.b8878.i68335


Blogposts:

A good resource for newbies can be found in “What every Second Life newbie should know - 10 secret tips that will boost your experience from the get-go” at http://npirl.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-every-second-life-newbie-should.html

Architecture and builds

New Schome park.

http://danseamans.wordpress.com/the-making-of-schome-park-beta/

Second Life and streaming audio without a streaming server

This is a useful if slightly elongated tutorial on the simple way to stream your own audio into Second Life using the voice/audio functionality provided in-world. This is for Windows users and demonstrates a stream from Apple iTunes.

Audio Streaming With The Second Life Voice Feature

Managing graphic performance in the Windlight SecondLife viewer

The Windlight Second Life viewer renders beautifully but it can be a real struggle to get good performance from the client such that Second Life does not slow to a painful crawl. This post from Torley Linden is excellent for helping demystify the new graphics tab. The additional diagnostic tools, 'lag meter' and 'statistics', that come with the Windlight viewer make adjusting settings a breeze. There are visual indicators for client, network or server issues, and allowing one to actually monitor FPS in real-time makes the impact of each change in the graphics settings tab visible on the frame rate and easy to monitor.

Example assessment tool for learning and teaching in Second Life

One of the few examples, currently, of an in-world assessment tool. This particular tool is a MCQ scripted object that links to a managed learning system (Moodle is a suggested environment) that acts as a back-end for saving and collating the avatar name, time spent on question and test results.

 

Related links
http://www.secondlifeenglish.com/
http://eslteacherlink.com/