Archive for May, 2007
Campus Security in Second Life?
May 22nd
“My campus was bombed and will be closed for the next two days?”
Physorg.com reported that the Second Life island owned and developed by the Australian Broadcast Company was griefed. According to a spokesperson,
a hacker had “bombed” the island and various features that users had painstakingly created had been removed.
What sort of havoc would such an attack cause for an educational institution conducting classes via Second Life? Certainly, being griefed is an annoyance that any SL resident and business would prefer to avoid. However, in my opinion, a grief against an educational institution would have greater consequences to the institution than an attack on the servers owned by a mainstream business. Certainly, Circuit City, Sears and other businesses cannot afford to have SL developments destroyed or interrupted by a grief attack, but the business they conduct via SL is secondary to their primary business in RL; they’ve not yet transferred a core business activity (sales or services) entirely to SL. For educational institutions, however, if a course is being offered – in part or whole – via Second Life, there’s an entire unit of core business that will be interrupted by a grief attack.
The ABC representative commented further:
We will now be looking closely at security measures, investigating how the hackers breached the existing security and, of course, making changes to protect the island’s future development . . . In the meantime the ABC’s island remains off limits to cybernauts for the next day or two.
To what extent are educational institutions currently considering security measures to protect against grief attacks? How effective are those measures? And, this sounded absurd to me at first, but seriously, are there “disaster recovery” plans for the Second Life campus? What happens if an institution’s island has to remain off limits for the “next day or two?” Will an educational institution be able to recover as quickly from a grief attack?
I know that faculty currently working in Second Life have lost content or materials and had to recreate it; I know the grid has been offline unexpectedly and interfered with class communications or a griefed area impacted learning activities. However, when we scale Second Life out to the institutional level and continue to increase the quantity of business and instruction conducted via SL, aren’t there greater expectations of security and continuity? What happens if a learner sets fire to the campus (following a poor test score, perhaps?) in Second Life rather than in Real Life?
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Loading ...Survey: Institutional Engagement of Second Life
May 11th
I suggested in March that I want to research the extent to which institutions - rather than individual faculty – are engaging Second Life. At this point, the first draft of a survey to measure that engagement is 95% complete. When it’s complete, I’d like to test the survey with a few willing, interested faculty before releasing it to the real life education community in Second Life. If you would be willing or interested to help in that regard, please post a comment to this entry.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The "F" Word(s) and Second Life
May 10th
Funding.
After a week or two of exploring Second Life, educators will either drift away from “the grid” to become just another avatar that hasn’t returned in the last 30, 60 or 90 days. Or, the “F” word likely becomes an issue.
So, how does one go about getting funding for a project in an environment that is not a proven instructional tool, comes with arguably more hype than the internet did more than a decade ago, and has a terrible reputation in the media for being full of sex-starved avatars looking for throw-away virtual sex?
It’s certainly an issue, and I know there’s any number of projects that have been funded. However, to give our Budget Managers a break for a moment and setting aside the Funding question, I’m curious how many institutions have considered another “F” word regarding Second Life.
Fiscal Policy.
Maybe I’m missing the boat on this one? Is this not an issue? Or, has everyone else simply been avoiding their institution’s Director of Purchasing? Or, are we just not talking about the issues that potentially make our CFO’s collective heads spin faster than Linda Blair’s?
Sure, when there’s only one or two faculty members or specialized departments engaging Second Life, it’s perhaps not an issue. Is it just me, or is Second Life not potentially the purchasing department’s tempest in a teapot when talking about broader, institution-wide implementations of Second Life?
If faculty are going to make instructionally-related purchases in Second Life, do they just use institutional purchasing/credit cards? Did I miss the “We accept Purchase Orders” sign at Second Life? Do I mail my institutional check directly to Rosedale?
What about Budget Control? Don’t we need to verify what we purchased with our institution’s $200US? Will indicating the purchased item to be “Lindens” – quantity “6000″ – be enough for the auditors? Granted Lindens are virtual and arguably part of a software acquisition, but is purchasing Lindens all that different from purchasing a Euro? or a Peso? If I need to verify the commodities I purchased with the 6000L provided to me by my institution, do I really need to list 600 different file uploads at 10L each? Is my “Dress Shirt with Flexi-Tie by Blaze Fashions” a valid purchase; I mean, after all is said and done, shouldn’t my institution help me establish my virtual presence necessary to teach my students? Ah… and then there’s the custom laptops for my student avatars to have for my class at $1000L each. Can I buy materials for my students in my class? Is that a lab fee or rolled into tuition?
Even if I list everything out – piece by piece, file by file – who’s going to verify it? What really constitutes misuse of virtual funds in a virtual world? And, if I purchase something with institutional funds, it belongs to the institution, right? What if the privileges are no transfer, no modify? To use it, my avatar has to own it, but how do I give it back to my institution? What if I use institutional funds to support my building of a project – say uploading textures etc using school funds – but I own that project. What if I decide to keep it? How will my institution recover that virtual product they funded if it’s in my virtual pocket? Oh… wait… that’s more along copyright and IPR policies, but that’s virtually a different ball of wax all its own.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Further Clarifying Quality Integration/Use of Second Life
May 5th
I originally suggested the quality integration of Second Life into learning spaces to be:
to develop authentic learning projects that allow learners to engage learning content through interaction with communities and/or creation of content or products in a manner not possible through a physical or standard web-based learning environment.
However, after reading an insightful post by Beth Ritter-Guth, there’s an element of quality instructional design that should perhaps be added. Beth’s post highlights an issue I mentioned but did not include in the, to use the term loosely, definition: using technology for technology’s sake.
Using technology simply because we can runs contrary to an essential principle of of instructional design and technology, one that I typically refer to as Occam’s Razor for Educational Technologists: use the simplest technology necessary to accomplish the learning objectives.
Unfortunately, we often do not adhere to that principle; that’s how I’m sure some faculty will bravely lead their students into Second Life to have a class discussion. Certainly, class discussions are beneficial, but if all we do with SL is provide the forum in which the discussion can occur, we’re simply adding complexity to an activity that could be conducted via any web-based synchronous text chat tool: Blackboard’s Virtual Classroom, WebCT’s Chat tool, IRC channels, any of a thousand HTML/Java based chat rooms, Group Chat via AOL IM etc.
There’s a variety of reasons to avoid adding complexity to a learning environment, but I do believe the issue Beth raises and discusses represents perhaps the most significant risk of new technologies. If we use technology for technology’s sake, it is possible to lose sight of the learning objectives while focusing on the technology. Beth provides several examples which I’ll rely on you reading rather than restating them here. Go to her blog. Bookmark it. Add it to your reader.
While quality instructional design begins with a clear understanding of the desired learning outcomes, it may be important to emphasize that point when considering exactly what represents quality integration of SL into learning spaces:
while maintaining proper focus on the desired learning outcomes, develop authentic learning projects that allow learners to engage learning content through interaction with communities and/or creation of content or products in a manner not possible through a physical or standard web-based learning environment.
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