How to Start

That's wonderful, and we'd be happy to have them on board. Farhad and I and a few others have spent a good deal of time with this in the last few weeks, and so here's some starting points. Please distribute them to your team, and we can get started!

• Everyone needs an account on second life. They are free, and you can sign up at www.secondlife.com. One word of caution. The paid (authenticated by credit card) accounts allow you to own land, which is great - but if it's for work, you could end up charging your card for work stuff- which is hard to reverse. So if you do a paid account, use the card that would be charged from that point on. It's $70 a year for one, which includes an "allowance" - and if you've room in your budget, it greatly increases ones sense of ownership to do so - but not necessary. Because of the steep learning curve, a lot of this work will by necessity be outside the office.
• The graphics/bandwidth demands of second life (SL) are pretty heavy. I am able to run it off a new low-end dell laptop, but not off a PIII at home. I've heard that some machines here on campus can't run it- but so far the lab machines I've tried could (but they were newer, in the IT building).
• Everyone needs a skype account, and the equipment to do voice. At a minimum, mic and speakers, or a headset with mic. We've been doing it both ways- and CDWG has mics for under 4 bucks, and headsets for about the same. Skype reduces the reliance on typing. Once skype is set up, please ping farhad and me and add us to your contact list. We'll give you the other team members' info (including gary gilbody, alberto botero, and others).
  A review of www.secondlife.com/education is also important, and I'd strongly suggest a subscription to the SL in Education (SLED) newsletter, which is comprised of hundreds of educators working with this.
• Consider joining sloodle.org, which is working to combine moodle with SL and for which i'm on the admin team.
• Step by step: So for SL, these are first steps
  a. Create account - it makes it easier to match your first name, but not required.
  b. Go thru orientation island (give yourself half to a full hour to do so) and do minor setups to your character (you can tweak this over time). Specifically you need to learn how to:
  
  • fly and land
  
  
  • center on an object
  
  
  • rotate view around that object
  
  
  • zoom and pan on centered objects (including yourself)
  
  
  • use the chat feature
  
  
  • then send a friendship invite to me (icabad vallejo) and farhad (farhad sakai)
    
  • Explore, and use the search tool to find education related places. A few of note:
    
  • Education Island, Edunation, NMC library, SDSU campus, Glidden campus, Australian School of Film and Sound, and others
• Once these things are done, we can take everyone on a tour. We did this thursday night with me up here, farhad and alberto in their offices, and students in the lab. We all chatted via skype, and hooked up with some educators from nova scotia, and another from San Diego. Sometimes a little guidance goes a long way.
• If you'd be more comfortable walking thru some of this in person, we can arrange a meeting on campus, but no sense in wasting time on things like account creation. For the next few days i'm in Mass for a death in the family - so the skype option works nicely.
  Please let me know when i can expect to see everyone on board. I'm the project manager on this, but will rely heavily on Farhad becuase he's actually got an architecture degree, and all the background (and students) with the SGD program. He has also committed to running one or more classes in SL next semester, and his students are already working with it and logging in every day.
• If you know of other teachers who are willing to try this out, please include them. I think i've got alisa hylton on board, and imagine there are others that should be - i just don't know who they are yet. We need innovative, out of box thinkers. In a world without real gravity or distance, you gotta think differently.
• For marketing purposes, please refer to second life as second life or as a "simulated environment" - not a game. It's not actually a game anyway, but calling it that just causes problems - if it were a game there might be battles, or objectives, or points- but there are none of these (though you can have battles in some places I suppose).

This should be enough to keep you busy!!

d.i.