Tech Issues and Collection of Data from within Second Life

This post is about a few of the technical issues we have been through, which has basically been how we have trialled the program this year to try and establish a presence in what is new territory for youth and technology in Australia. To our knowledge, we are the only group in Australia who can give teens(14-17) access to the Teen Grid of Second Life, and this has been quite an interesting journey in itself.

Our first experience was to trial teaching Second Life out at a Western School for 16-18 year old school leavers. The general idea was that they would be an ideal group to engage with and put into a new environment. Most of the kids had heard of Second Life, and were in particular keen on the money making element of it. Working with very small samples using our avatars, an immediate trend developed where the males were shooting each other, and the females working on their avatars.

We then ran into several issues as we tried to move beyond a basic demonstration and involve the kids on a deeper level.

These issues included;

•  Bandwidth - It was so bad that many of the students avatars were appearing unclothed (not so much naked as like a blank barbie doll) and movement within Second Life was impossible.

• Graphics cards - The computers were not really good enough to run Second Life, and due to a combination of borderline graphics cards, limited RAM and slow processor speeds they crashed often.

Unfortunately what this meant, was that the experience the kids had was not very engaging at all, very similar to trying to use the internet on a 56k modem. Many were migrating back to the net during class, playing flash games and the like online because at least they ran properly (Pacman was one example). Myspace was also commonly used.

Other issues which were going to effect us continuing the program included;

• The School network in Victoria has the ports Second Life requires blocked (security reasons) meaning that generally, high school students cannot access Second Life.

• Second Life itself had no provision for Australian teens, meaning we had to get our own front end registration page developed, allowing us to approve and register teens. (We have had this created, still a few bugs but it’s getting there and will be incorporated into the website).

Our conclusion from this experience was that we needed to look into sorting out a ‘mobile lab’ system which would allow us to take Second Life wherever we went.

At that point we had one wireless broadband modem, which we traded for a couple of 3g wireless modems, which have proven much quicker. We currently have 7, and will be getting more to equip schools which have sufficient facilities so they can access the Avatar Project Island.

I think one of the things that perhaps needed a change in mindset was just how close to the cutting edge we are, and how much that is going to cost us in terms of the technology. Initially we were looking at venues which could handle Second Life, even Internet Cafes, I think all of us thought we could find a solution, but in the end we just had to do it all ourselves.

The other thing in relation to having the mobile lab was to get 5 laptops (four more) so that we didn’t have to rely on the school’s facilities. What this means now is that in conjunction with the schools who do have the facilities (one Northern School is ordering graphics cards) we will be able to engage a reasonable community of teens in this virtual world across several locations.

COLLECTING DATA FROM SECOND LIFE

(Just the technical side, there is a lot more data collection happening ‘physically’ through Dr. John Martino)

Collecting data from within Second Life has also been quite interesting.

Initially the idea was to monitor the text chat from within the virtual world, as well as avatar visit times. We have set up a feed which collects this information from Second Life, and emails it to the Avatar Project website where it is stored in a hidden database.

However the issue with this method of collecting data is, it doesn’t catch terribly much for us at the moment. All the people we have engaged so far have been in the same physical location, meaning they just talk rather than use text chat, and if people do use the text chat, they will use private messaging which cannot be ‘collected.’

The visit times will obviously prove more useful in the future, and the text chat logger can be used for things like meetings and group forums, however we needed more focussed ways of collecting data which was relevant to the key themes and outcomes in the Mental Health Promotion Framework.

The approach that we have ended up with, based on some ideas from around the global SL education community as well as the project so far and some classes we have done this year at Victoria University, is to run projects which are directly linked to those key themes and outcomes.

For example - Lessons

Basic lessons include;

• Placing a photo of themselves within Second Life, and taking a ’snapshot’ of their avatar in front of their real life photo.

• Basic building exercises, which include building a house, building scripted objects like spinning globes, and gradually learning to build over several weeks. Any interested student so far has been suprisingly quick at picking it all up.

• Building something they would like to see in a Future Melbourne. Then…Working with the City of Melbourne to have young people create a virtual Future Melbourne in Teen Second Life, based on what they want in the Future.

This project will achieve many of the programs outcomes, involving the young people in community and group activities, and giving them a sense of civic engagement, as well as valuing diversity and controlling one’s life.

Students from my Interactive Storytelling class are just completing a similar project (an evil Melbourne) - I will post more details about that when it is complete, within a week.

Machinima cinema

• A Northern School will be building a machinima cinema where their students work can be exhibited, culminating in an Virtual Film Festival for teens later next year (2008).

I still have to post about the actual human experience which I will do tomorrow, hopefully that’s a lot of the tech stuff out of the way.