Monday, August 03, 2009

Teaching With OpenSim

The drama teacher in my school asked me to look into setting up a virtual world like Second Life that he could use for his students to produce and perform a virtual play, with an eye towards eventually collaborating with another school. It's an amazing idea. I looked into a few existing options--Second Life and There. But neither fit our needs. SL is bandwidth heavy and segregates teens from adults unless you purchase a private island for a grand and while There is more affordable you can't share the prims you've purchased (I don't think you can actually make things yourself), which rules out easy collaboration. I have more thoughts on the ideologies of SL and There here.

So I settled on OpenSim for an adventure. Now that it's set up it is the perfect platform. Permissions can be managed, prims can be shared with other users, and in many other ways you have full control over your region.

A couple of other ideas that have occurred to me are virtual soccer (just for fun), and sculpture exhibits. I would like to have a department meeting in there, too. If anyone has more ideas let me know.

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