Kim Anubis

I've dropped you a friend request inworld -- let's talk!

Hi, 8bitBiologist! Just thought I would point out that if you did choose to bring your younger high school students into SL that you wouldn't have to be concerned about them mingling with the general SL population. Teens between the ages of 13 and 15 are locked to their school's region and cannot leave the region or interact with unauthorized avatars. This is the sort of arrangement you would make directly with Linden Lab. Info available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Teens_in_Second_Life These restrictions really do work -- I have worked with educators in SL since 2005, including projects with teens/in the former Teen Grid, and the restrictions have been consistently reliable. There are, of course, other reasons for choosing OpenSim, and added challenges in using it. I noticed you had posted a couple of questions in the scripting area of these forums. Just in case you weren't aware of it, there are differences in functionality of SL and OS, including some script functions. A script that runs fine in SL might not in OS. This is something that gave my team headaches when we first began to do development work in OS. If you choose to work in OS instead of SL, I would suggest finding an OS-specific source of scripting advice. Anyway, now I will get back on the main topic! As others have commented, the outline you posted seems to cover more information than would be reasonable to expect a typical student to learn in the amount of time available. If you would like to learn more about what other educators in SL have found fits into a quarter or semester, you might do better to post someplace more specific to your needs, like the SL Educators Mailing List. Here is a link to info and signup: https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators As to what to include if you decide to narrow down what you will cover, that is a question I cannot answer without asking you more questions. What is the goal of the class? Is it an overview of virtual worlds, or more about learning programming, or 3D graphics, or something else? What previous applicable experience do the students have? To what sort of class would you expect the students to go on after this if they take an interest in the subject, and what prerequisites will that require? Which skills are you an expert at and able to teach yourself? What sorts of guest lecturers or consultants are available to fill in the gaps? For example, if you are teaching a course on virtual worlds in general, you might want to cover many topics in a shallow way, including LSL and building with prims. But if this is a class about programming, then I wouldn't spend much student time learning a scripting language that has very limited career applications (and I say this as someone who does make her living from developing SL content for educational projects). Similarly, if the students are expected to go on to study graphics in a more advanced course, I would skip the prims and take the students right to mesh. I wrote a couple of books which might be of use to you. One is about using SL for projects, including educational projects like yours. The other is a book about SL content creation, which has been used by a number of educational institutions as a textbook for courses similar to what you have outlined. Here are a couple of links, if you would like to check them out: http://www.amazon.com/Second-Life-Grid-Communication-Collaboration/dp/0470412917 http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Your-World-Official-Advanced/dp/0470171146 If you'd like to talk about your class, I might be able to offer some more advice or point you at some other useful people or resources. Just drop me an IM. Best of luck with your project! :-)

Griffin, I mentioned the policy that might hinder someone from exporting content because it was information the OP should know, based on questions he (or she?) was asking. It would be useful for Rstan to be aware of something like this before he buys content or has it built. And I also told him to mention to any developer he hires in advance if he wants to have the ability to export his content. That's really important, too, because along with the developer needing to prepare things for that eventuality, they also are going to need to include it in their contract. LL had policies and tools for clearing IP for export during the Enterprise program. They had big plans along those lines at the time. It's not only a realistic possibility, but is actually also something that the Lab was able to do in the past. I don't think a modified viewer similar to copybot is the right way to do it -- I think the Lab was already on the right track. I know all about exporting content in pieces -- have done plenty of it. I can tell you haven't done much of it, or you would be a little less flippant about it. We don't seem to be talking about the same thing. You are thinking about Jerky The Anonymous Thief stealing a pair of shoes using copybot. I'm thinking about an educational institution or corporation contracting with the Lab for the service of exporting entire regions of complex content. The Enterprise export (for example) involved real world contracts with real, traceable, prosecutable names on it and fees that I doubt a copybotter would be likely to dig from their couch cushions. That sort of solution is easier to manage, and is a step on the way to something more accessible. Anyway, I am not talking about copybot or modified viewers, and I am not free to tell you the details of how the Enterprise exports worked, so you will just have to use your imagination for that and maybe find an actual copybot proponent to debate. Have a nice evening. :-) (Edited to clean up a few of the most egregious typos. I bet I still missed some, too, but it is late. G'night!)

Griffin, the current policy is a hindrance to many who would like to export content to which they legitimately own appropriate intellectual property rights, or which they have built in collaboration with others, even when they have signed, hard copy, real-life contracts to demonstrate their rights. Stating that is not an endorsement of copybot. It should be possible to export content when it has been vetted, and in fact the Lab itself has done so under specific circumstances (from SL to Second Life Enterprise -- they had tools in place for this purpose at the time, which I thought were pretty nifty when I used them). That's not copybot, and neither are the other methods I use. (Edited to add: at the recent Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, Ebbe Linden, during his keynote, said himself that he feels that people who own IP rights to content should be able to export it, and that he planned to look into making it easier to do so.) I have both exported and recreated custom content which my company created for clients. I own the rights to the content and licensed it to my clients. Whatever I didn't create myself was created by content creators employed by my company. There is a difference between purchasing a chair in a shop in SL versus hiring someone to create custom content for you under a legally binding agreement that details a rights transfer or Work for Hire agreement. I'm not talking about ripping a chair you got for a hundred L$ from a Gatcha machine, but about something else entirely. Your insinuations are so off base that your post cracked me up rather than offending me. I understand completely your concern about copybot, as I am someone who makes her real-life living from this IP. I'm not the droid you're looking for.

Rstan, I have in the past set up multiple accounts with the same email address in order to meet the needs of clients (I'm a professional SL developer). Contact Linden support, explain the situation, including the number of accounts you need, what for, and some info about your organization. (Edit: as has already been mentioned, you can create up to five accounts with the same email address, but allowing others to use them is the issue. You will need to be white listed by LL for that, or to create more than five with the same email address.) It is possible to export content from Second Life to Open Simulator, but it isn't always simple. Script functions are not exactly the same in OS, nor is the physics engine. Another hindrance is the SL policy that says you cannot connect to the service with a viewer able to export content that you didn't personally create or upload. However, there are ways to recreate content despite it, as I have done for clients. (Edit: It is entirely possible to own intellectual property rights on content without having the correct SL permissions in order to export it. If you do have custom content built for you, be sure to tell your developer up front if you want to have the ability to export it.) Developing content for OS is often more difficult and more expensive than creating the same things in SL, for a variety of reasons, and you will not have the same large community, Linden support, and as many options to buy content from shops (which of course costs less than creating every rug and sock custom). However, you may have certain abilities you don't have in SL, depending on what grid you join or whether you set up one of your own. Some find that OS costs them more, despite lower region hosting expense, because content costs more. My company works in both SL and OS. If you need a hand with any of this, please drop me an IM in SL. Best of luck with your project!

No, Maelstrom. Like I'm gonna pass up free plants?

The furniture set comes with plants? Yay! Logging in to get mine now ....

Format is mangled on IE 8 running on Win 7, with overlapping and nonexistent elements. Compatability View helps, somewhat.

I'm very interested in this thread, and I'm reading every post that's forwarded to my mailbox. But my work keeps being interrupted by incoming email full of snide comments about who needs a better PC, who's got powerful friends and which is just some little girl in a wheelchair, who is or isn't elegant, who does or doesn't have class, who's an elder or an idiot, and just what they can stuff where. I'm sure your flamewar is really important to you, but I really don't want it shoved in my face. Please stop clogging the blog and my inbox with your personal issues and go inworld and pushgun each other to death or something.

Why is there no Gold Solution Provider icon on my profile?