The Second Life Educators Listserv is a real must for those interested in teaching in Second Life– the number of people getting involved has exploded and each day there are great shared ideas and discussion.
The following was something I posted in response to someone looking for “how to present powerpoints” and “use audio” in SecondLife, part shared information, part opinion, open to comment.
Bottom line, as we conceive activities to bring education in SecondLife, we ought to think differently about the environment from the RL classroom, especially so we don’t result in pictures like this:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Question: Does anyone have any idea of how to use powerpoint slides in SL? Also, how have people communicated during lectures with their class? I want the ability to use voice, since typing or IM is awkward and delayed. What have others used?
It’s an interesting, and I think, positive effect that you cannot simply dump a 120 slide PowerPoint deck into Second Life. As noted, you are uploading images, or screenshots per se, and at the effort and $L cost if uploads, it ought to give thought to making more effective use of fewer slides and to the questionable value of having people look at pictures of text that you might be saying. And the experience of being in SL, where you can do so many other things, pushes the kinds of modes of presenting beyond what happens when in RL you are physically “trapped” in a chair of a darkened room.
So maybe it means using images in a rotating deck as more background, than talking to the slides. Or just using the most important slides to show what you cannot illustrate directly in words/chat… surely it means we don;t need bullet slides of talking points. If that is needed, you might was well like the same uploaded images, drop them into a notecard with your bullets/notes, and distribute as side material. Move the activity from absorbing content to activities built around it.
The usual reference for getting the images out of PowerPoint and into SL is Giving a PowerPoint Presentation in Second Life.
Images extracted from the PPT are then uploaded ($L10 each, kaching!) as textures, which are dropped into one of several varieties of slideshow screen objects, and yes, AngryBeth’s Whiteboard is a very viable (and affordable thanks much!) option. Slide order is controlled by file name, so it helps if you have your image files names in the same alpha order as your “presentation”.
The low tech, and no cost version, would be loading your images onto a webserver, and use a simple script URL loader that your audience would click and it load the image in a web browser, pretty bad experience as it takes you outside of SL. It surely is time for SL to be able to interact much more with external content, but there are also examples like Kisa Naumova’s demo and script of being able to bring a flickr slide set into SL (I am still tinkering to get my version working).
Audio is a mixed bag; we’ve done a number of iterations on NMC Campus. For doing small group intros to SL, tours, helping newbies, being able to communicate back and forth be it Skype or even a teleconference call, is really helpful. We’ve used TeamSpeak with some benefit; the biggest hangup is it requires a dedicated keyboard combo used as your “push-to-talk” button (so it cannot be a key you need in SL; about 50% of the people seem to miss the step of assigning the key, and you get terrible artifacts when someone does not release their talk key.
Running a Skype conference call (small numbers) or Skypecast is a bit more viable, since it does not require holding a key to talk, but Skypecasts get a little out of hand when the mike is wide open; quality can vary. It can be more effective for one-to-many setups.
The downside of both is that it can fall over if not all participants can get audio working. We had a few meetings where we tried to have both audio and chat going, which does not go well. The dynamic is very different in audio group communication, single threaded, versus chat, which can be multi-threaded, layered with rich (or problematic) back channel talk. In an environment that is very visually engaging, the typical passive act of a RL classroom lecture begs for audience distraction- communication via chat, while seemingly at first chaotic, messy, etc, is much more active. I recently observed a gaming class form Trinity university who visited SL, and have rarely seen such an active level or rich, continuous dialogue that was all chat based. It does call for a new and different skill set of facilitation. If you are going to lead a chat discussion, it may be of benefit, especially if you have poor typing skills like myself, to have some amount of the cut and dry content prepped as text you can copy paste (but don’t make that 100% as it will sound canned)
Finally, having access to a streaming audio server or a delivery network, can make it work well for one-to-many sessions, where the audio streams over the music channel– this is how we do most of our large audience presentations events at NMC. But to have more than a few listeners, you need to hook up with a streaming audio provider, unless you have tons of free fast bandwidth, since each listener is another audio stream connection.
Elsewhere, I have a short write up and diagrams covering our set up at NMC.
We have a streaming server through Limelight Networks, and have had more than 70 streams from our larger events. We use both Shoutcast , one of us in the PC environment, and I use NiceCast on a Mac to send audio to our server. We have done events where we use a teleconference for a speaker panel, a box that routes phone audio out through Shoutcast; or have used Skype for the audio portion and sent out via NiceCast. It is somewhere between rocket science and shoe tying in complexity Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Bottom line- think differently about the environment, experiment with new modes that watching words on a screen (I have too may years of being subjected to conference presentations I could have read at home).