noob alert: question about building stuff

I am a total noob here (I wish the Forums had a Beginners forum at the top of the list, I did not see that), i have a question about building objects. yeah i saw there is a FAQ but it is fricken huge, hoping i can just get a basic question answered here: I am an educator interested in constructing a course here on SecondLife (SL), I suppose in the form of a small building. Can I do that with my basic free noob account, or do I need to pay money? And if I create a building/course with a free account, does it disappear after a time? I guess i am just trying to decide if SL is the place to be for construction a virtual 3D course, if I can do it with a free account, or if I am going to have to pay money to do this project. Any help to this question greatly appreciated, thank you.

Hi and welcome

It doesn't cost anything to build, though uploading or buying textures might well be needed if you want something specific. People are generous though.

It does cost to have land, unless someone can donate to your cause.

People here will help (IM me in world for some textures and some building bits and pieces if you like) - there is a content creation forum which could help you out too (and it's dedicated to content creation instead of the morass here!)

Oh yes - check out events for building classes at Tui ... these are free, it's where I learned the very basics

Welcome, Tharin. Yes, you can build anything with your free account. But the thing is that you need land to build upon. You can build things in free public sandboxes or private sandboxes to which you have access but if you want to build something that is relatively permanent on the landscape, you must either rent or buy land. There are many free courses and you would be well advised to visit New Citizens Inc. in Kuula to see their many classes on all kinds of subjects, as well as the content creation forums (Building Tips, Scripting Tips, Texturing Tips, etc.) beneath Resident Answers.

Depends on the course.

Is it a physical course, like an obstacle course? Or is it a classroom type course, where people sit around and talk?

If the former, then you will need to find a piece of land. You can rent land, or you can own land. This is a topic in and of itself, but suffice to say that you do not need to be a Premium member (i.e. pay Linden Lab) but eventually, to hold a parcel, you'll need to pay someone, somewhere. Just plonking down a building will result in its return, probably by the land owner.

If the latter, there are thousands of places designed for people to just hang out and talk, be they gardens, clubs, board rooms, or docked ocean-liners. You don't need to own land to use them.

You will need a group so that you can keep in touch with your students. Someone else can cover that because I need to go deal with some movers.

Good luck and welcome to Second Life!

I'm a bit confused by your post.

Do you mean you are an educator interested in constructing a course - as in developing a class...

OR

You are interesting in building something - which if I understand you correctly - a small building?

For the latter, the only things you cannot do as a basic account holder is own mainland and get a $300L weekly stipend and a few more avenues to ask questions of LL.

If the question is, "How do I learn how to build" I would highly recommend going to NCI and check out their basic building classes. (There are other schools as well you. You can find their classes in the SEARCH menu - select EDUCATION. That function is available on this website as well under EVENTS.

There are sandboxes all over SL to then practice your building. They have varying times that you can leave your build out while working on it before it is automatically returned to your inventory. Most of the schools I mentioned also provide sandboxes for this purpose.

Now if your question is "How do I design a course to teach" - that is a whole other discussion.

Welcome to SL (tm) and the forums!

EDIT: Dang you all are fast typers!!!

You might also talk to the people who run the schools in SL. If you are an expert in something that would fit their curriculum, they might be willing to provide a place for you to teach. I know most of them constantly look for new teachers.

Cheree kind of hit on the same thing, but I'll reiterate. There are already lots and lots of courses taught in Second Life on just about any subject you can imagine, so plenty of people have decided that Second Life is a good place for learning. The thing to remember is that land is privately owned, so you can't just go building anywhere you want. There are public sandboxes where you can build to your heart's content, but your items will usually be returned to you within a short period of time if you leave them there. They would be a bad place to hold a course, unless your course is on building, I guess.

Look inworld for classes. There are lots of classrooms out there. Maybe take a few classes and get to know the teaching community. Someone might be willing to let you borrow their classroom or rent it for a small fee. Otherwise, your best bet is to rent a parcel and build your own classroom, or go premium and buy a parcel. In that case, I strongly suggest you take a class on building so you don't get frustrated trying to teach yourself to build on a really important project.

To clarify as requested by a few responders (and thank you all, I am amazed at how fast responses came), I am a college biology teacher, full time tenured all online college teacher. I am looking to perhaps put a course on SL, which means constructing a shack or building of some sort with clickable items, images, streaming videos, notecards (lecture notes), etc. This would be for my students (and I suppose for other SL users?) to access. Sounds like I would need land, which I needed to know, in order to request the funding from my college.

For my sabbatical project next year I might even explore setting up a server with open source secondlife type software to avoid the whole land issues; but it would be nice to work with SL which is already in place.

Hi Tharin, and welcome! For building, there are classes available from NCI (New Citizen's Incorporated), TUI, and other inworld guided learning schools. All are free. It is considered nice to tip the teachers some small amount, but I went to many classes before I learned that, and my questions and gushings were still handled nicely by the teachers.

You don't need to be a Premium account to do anything in SL. You will probably find it convenient to put payment information on file with LL (in the My Account page on this website), and use it to buy a few lindens.

There are a lot of real-life teachers and schools who conduct classes in SL. Education is HUGE here. You might start by looking at their wiki: http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Have fun!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B2RNFA_en___US218&pwst=1&q=teach+online+virtual+world&start=10&sa=N

A quick google on the subject- Buried in the pages of the undying thread there is a specific post by me with a link to a teacher oriented Virtual World- Good luck finding it though- I'm sorry- I do not have the link out side of it.

Welcome to SL.

Here I go, reiterating what others have said...

Tharin, you do NOT need your own schoolhouse to teach your course. Most of the SL schools stand empty much of the time (like ALL SL venues...if we were crowded everywhere all the time, the servers would go up in smoke). Contact some of them and discuss having your classes there.

Existing schools that I'm familiar with are GQ Start (IM kelley Griffith) or New Citizens, Inc. (NCI) (IM Carl Metropolitan) and Help People! (IM Brett Dumont). All of them have facilities in which you can teach your classes, if they are willing to loan or rent them to you.

If you insist on having your own facility, and your institution will give you some financial support, look into Linden Labs' program for "educational" sims. They offer a discounted price to people who buy private islands for educational purposes.

Some logistical considerations:

Second Life is quirky, and goes down fairly often...both for "scheduled maintenance" and due to unexpected problems. You'll need a backup plan if it's time for class and nobody can log in.

Your class size can't be too large. In general, 40 avatars will "fill up" a region. Performance will go way, way down, and at some point additional people will be automatically turned away ("The sim is full. Try again in a few minutes"

Unless you are operating on land you or your group own, anyone can drop in on you. It's possible that some joker could drop in and think it was fun to disrupt your class by creating hundreds of giant phalluses and burying everyone. Or maybe one of your students might decide to play a prank. Consider what sort of security measures you will need to keep order.

Tharin,

Sounds like a WAY cool project. I bet there are people out there with land to spare for something like this... the larger landowners might be able to write you off as a non-profit donation.

I'd start networking inworld: like others have said, take some building classes, join like-minded groups (who knows, maybe a biology sim is already out there!), and start talking to People Who Know Things, like the teachers at NCI (which stands for New Citizens, Inc) and various real estate folks.

A few more links for you:

1. Linden Lab's wiki on education in SL (it's on SimTeach, the one I gave you before, but may be hard to find): http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

2. The "Learning Spaces" page on that wiki can point you to places that offer classrooms that you can use, without your having to create your own. http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Learning_spaces

3. Let me particularly draw your attention to New Media Consortium (NMC), which is a very prestigious and generous educational sim (or set of sims). They operate in several virtual worlds. I'm sure they have a group inworld, or many, that you could join.

4. There are many biology departments/institution inworld, working on various teaching techniques. You might try contacting some of them to get some hints on what works and what doesn't ... may save you some time.
.

Thank you. I have yet to decide whether I even want to do it or not. Just signed up on SL today, been flying and teleporting around. Problem is I have not seen even one other avatar/person; it all feels like a ghost town/world, which is not much of a social community; reminds me of being in an old realm of World of Warcraft where I was still level 15 and most players were so advanced nobody was around except at least there were NPCs like shopkeepers. Where could I teleport to in order to see that there are actually other people on Second Life?

The whole thing could falter if my administration does not come up with land money. A shame. I am quite a geek as well as an educator, I was actually instrumental in starting the whole online education thing in the USA, one of the first several teachers to do online college courses, including science. It would be interesting to try out a 3D virtual learning modality for my students and others to learn science.

Hi Tharin, Welcome to Second Life!

I work with several Universities that are building whole-sim and multi-sim campuses within Second Life. For example, Rutgers University has 5 sims now in SL (80 acres of land), and I am developing them into their campus. That is the high-end, where a school buys and pays monthly maintenance fees for a huge tract of land and has a very visible permenant presence in SL, with classes and labs that remain set-up in-world all the time, classrooms with multimedia screens where you can watch pre-recorded video lectures... The works. If you want to see an example of this sort of campus, teleport to the sim "RUCE 2" (Rutgers University) or to the sim "HHP at UH" (University of Houston's Health and Human Performance division). I built those college campuses, and they are open to the public.

On a more modest scale, you could purchase a small plot of land (2048 M2 or so) and set up a one-room or small schoolhouse there, with some stuff that always remains on display, and some stuff that only gets set up when a particular class is in sesion. Just as a physics teacher does not have every physics experiment for the school year set up and ready to use in their classroom, you meet in one spot, but set up what you need, when you need it.

As for getting that plot of land, as a free Basic member you could rent the land from any of a number of private sim owners, or from land owners on the mainland. You would most likely pay a fee up front for that parcel, and then an ongoing monthly fee to retain the parcel. Shop around, and you may be able to find a pretty good deal. You essentially have some other Player as your "Landlord, which can be good or bad, depending on the landlord. Just like renting an apartment or office space in the real world, renting gives you a lot of flexibility. If you don't like one area or one landlord, move somewhere else.

OR you could upgrade to Premium membership, and buy your own parcel on the mainland. There, you pay an annual membership fee to Linden Lab, most of which you get back in weekly "Stipend" payments of L$300 per week. This would enable you to purchase a parcel of land on the mainland, and once you do that, your only "landlord" is linden Lab. You still pay an up-front fee to obtain the land, but the monthly fee is free for the first 512 M2 of land that you have (An area about the same size as an urban home lot, with an allocation of 117 prims to use as you please.) You'll probably find that 512 M2 is not enough for your school building and in-world exhibits, so you would still have a monthly fee for any additional land beyond that first 512 M2. Cost-wise, it's likely to be similar to renting, but you do have the advantage that there is no middle-man between you and Linden Lab who might evict you or sell the sim or otherwise act in a way that could disrupt your pland. But at the same time, you also have no control or recourse over your neighbor's actions, so if you get a nasty neighbor, you have no sim owner who can enforce any sort of standards for local conduct..

As a beginning instructor in SL, your BEST solution would be to contact one of the existing groups that teach courses in SL, like New Citizen's Institute. Rather than building a classroom or schoolhouse of your own, make exhibits and displays that you temporarily set up, as needed, in their faciliity when you are there to teach that class. Rember that physics instructor example... You don't need all your toys on display all the time. Just what is needed for the class you are teaching. By hooking up with an existing teaching group, you can do without the land fees and membership fees, and can get a better idea of how teaching works in SL.

Some day, you may want a sprawling 16-acre campus all your own, and be willing to pay a fair amount of real money up front and each month to own that campus. Educators do get a discount on whole-sim purchases of private sims. But for now, think small. Start at someone else's teaching center, or rent a small chunk of land, like maybe 2048 M2, and see how that works for you.

Good luck!

Hi again

SL is so vast - you just have to know where the people are

To see people involved in SL education, go to your SEARCH button at the bottom of your screen then select PLACES. Type in any of the places suggested in this thread (ie. NCI, TUi) and teleport over. Those two places in particular generally have a lot of people present at any given time.

Or contact the names of people provided within this thread and they can further direct you.

That Rutgers project sounds awesome, Ceera. I knew Harvard had a presence here but wasn't aware of Rutgers. I need to check that out somewhere down the line myself.

Thanks. Right now I am building RUCE 1, which will be their "Orientation Island" sim for new students (access closed right now, while I build it, though you can peek at it from the other RUCE sims. RUCE 2 is a very detailed re-creation of their Old Queens campus, and will be their faculy and staff offices and an information center for info on the RL campus. RUCE 3 is their Competition field and sandbox, and is a full-scale football stadium, plus several sky platforms. RUCE 4 is an open field bounded by streets and sidewalks, that will eventually be classroom space for in-world reaching, and a student recreation center and student store. RUCE 5 was just moved into the project, and its development hasn't been planned yet. RUCE 2, RUCE 3 and RUCE 4 are open to public access at this time.

"RUCE" stands for Rutgers University Continuing Education, which is the division of Rutgers that is running this project.

Hi Tharin, Welcome to Second Life and the forums. There are educational establishments from all over the globe working in Second Life. I suggest you search for groups in your field of expertise and make contact wih them.

Oh - and don't forget to visit the Ivory Tower of Primitives. It will solve at least 3 of your problems:

- learn how to build
- see how a learning centre works in Second Life
- find a place where there are people about.

Also see the fantastic in-world texture tutorial by Robin Sojourner Wood, at :

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Livingtree/126/102/25

Robin has landmarks there for the Ivory Tower and other useful in-world tutorial sites, as well.

I can explain about that...

There are arount 28,000 regions in SL. At any given time, maybe 55,000 people are on line. If we were evenly distributed, that would only be about 2 avatars per sim. And that is a good thing, because the system starts to break down when the concurrency figures start to get to 65,000 or so. LL is working to support higher concurrencies, but that's the way it works today.

But we are not evenly spread about, we tend to congregate at events like concerts, classes, and store sales. This makes for a lot of very empty regions.

Plus, a lot of the avatars in that concurrency number are campers and bots...either people who just sit their avatar down to earn a few L$ per hour boosting someone's traffic count, or avatars run by a program doing the same thing.

So we are spread pretty thin on the ground.

Adding to Lindal's feedback: Also bear in mind that SL is world-wide. The sim that is a ghost town when you happen to be on-line might be a jumping hot spot when the people in Europe or Asia are on line. Depends on who owns land in the sim, and where they live in RL...

SL can be empty in places and jam packed in others depending on timezones too, you can also rent land so you can work out how much you need, there is heaps of it for rent at the moment so shop around for good prices, but don't pay more than a month in advance either as some people have lost money like that when land they rented was sold out from under them, don't be too trusting, some in here are out to make a $ anyway they can.
Before jumping in with your idea explore & meet people and get the hang of wow SL works, there are a couple of Lindens who are involved in educational projects too, maybe catch one of them inworld at their office hours. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Office_Hours
And SEARCH > EVENTS > EDUCATION will help find a lot of free classes and would be where you would advertise your classes too.