Educational organization seeks info/help.

Hey all, hope everyone is having a good week!
I signed up to the forums for the first time now, I researched a bit around and I was amazed by the amount of good info around here, I should have signed up here earlier, but anyways, I would like to know if anyone would be able to answer me some questions.

I'm part of a educational project to bring a huge community of people (around 830 thousand members) into SL, our educational project is about a Role Playing Game to improve the players skill set on the construction of good sentences as well as their grammar as whole while they role play and have fun. We intend to hold classes and create schools later, I was wondering if anyone could point me out any existing edu organizations/groups/communities already in SL of the same theme or goal, so I could try to approach for some sort of partnership. We'd probably be needing some virtual land and all, and we're not very experienced on those matters and would be nice to have someone to explain how that and other things work. Any ideas? Thankyou and have a blessed day ahead.

Don't let them near this forum then.

I think this is one for LL ,they are keen to promote this kind of stuff,it's good for their image.I would contact them direct and they should give you all the info you need.

I'm not sure about a similar theme but this resource might be helpful:
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Physician, heal thyself. That is a run-on sentence; the comma after "SL" should be a full stop, or at least a semi-colon. You are missing an "a" between "as" and "whole" as well.

Pep (or should "as" and "whole" be elided?)

Also try http://secondlifegrid.net/ .

Welcome to the forums, Narayan!

You may find Nik's tutorials on using Second Life to teach English interesting:

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/02/second-life-teacher-training-videos.html

If you wished to hold some experimental classes before committing to your own land, you might contact SL's nonprofit commons (http://nonprofitcommons.org/)

or NMC (New Media Consortium)

to borrow one of their already built spaces.

Let us know how it goes!

Something like that, if you are *really* going to bring 800,000 people inworld it might be good to be in contact with the business development team: Glenn, Katrin and Mahdavi Linden.

However my guess is you'll actually succeed with far fewer. There are some fairly steep computer requirements to run SL effectively, plus, the good ol' learning curve.

You'll need either a regAPI or a community gateway at the least, if it's really to take off big though.

I know some of the other language development businesses on the grid; I am fairly sure they are *highly likely* to see you as direct competition. Because they are; they offer language classes just as you intend to do. Might be wise to tread softly ~ but who knows, maybe they won't care.

As for land, you are going to need so much land you'll be buying your own region ~ so even though I'm in the land business myself here I won't be able to do much for you that way. By the time you need a few regions it makes sense to buy them direct.

If you want, email me at desmondshang 'at' gmail 'dot' com.

Best of luck.

It would be interesting to see if LL can handle a concurrency of more than 900,000 people.

830,000!

Bear in mind that as currently set up, the entire Second Life world starts to get unstable and crash when somewhere between 80 - 85,000 are using it at the same time.

A region (the basic unit of virtual land in Second Life) can support about 20 avatars before performance begins to noticeable degrade. It's maxed out at 40 avatars.

Those two numbers should give you something to think about as you plan how you are going to use SL to advance your goals.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

They cannot even handle 90,000 yet.

Desmond knows whereof he speaks. Also, educators also are often leary about SL distracting their students, or inadvertantly exposing students to SL's seamier side. Many educators are doing one of the following:

1. Speaking directly to LL about creating archipelagos that are linked to SL via a highly controlled gateway. This addresses the security/focus issue (so that student's don't go TPing out to lucky chairs during class, for example), but still requires SL's rather demanding client.

2. Creating their own 3D gamespace using SUN's Java-based Project Wonderland (https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/). With a browser-based client, technical requirements for users are much relaxed. However, there's a good-sized technical barrier to decide what you want and set it up.

3. Active Worlds Educational Universe (http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/awedu.asp). I don't know much about them myself, but they are very popular with educators, have a browser-based client (therefore fewer demands on user PCs). There are already many many "learning games" in Active Worlds.
I doubt Narayan is planning to bring them all online at the same time

when you said 830K members I almost thought it was Friday.

SL crashes at what now...about 90K? I forget.

Good luck with that. The total concurrent user base for SL right now is 1/10 as many as you are proposing to try to add, and the system strains to handle that many at a time. And it's been estimated that half or more of the 80,000 "users" on line at any time aren't real users at all, but "bots", avatar accounts being run by specialized application software to do automated tasks such as snatching up land at bargain prices when someone makes a mistake in pricing, or just standing amid a clump of identical bots to artificially increase the apparent traffic level at a store or business, trying to get people to come there by offering a false impression that it is a popular location.

Any given 16-acre area in SL can only handle 40 avatars at a time, and even if you stand at the intersection of 4 of those 16-acre regions, no one person there will be able to see and interact with all 160 people that could presumably congregate near that point.

It sounds to me like a purely text-based roleplaying environment would work far better for your goals and aspirations. Your goal of better grammar and language skills doesn't need a 3D virtual world to run around in, distracting them from communicating clearly and eloquently in text.

As usual, you have nothing worthwhile to offer other than to pointing out errors.

How terribly tired you must be by the end of the day. Tis a large burden to carry, this daily nit-picking. I can see you gleefully opening up thread after thread, jumping up in your seat as you spy yet another poorly spelled word. It's like a brain fart for you, isn't it? Just bursts right out and you can't help it, eh?

I hope you have a large basket to place all those incorrect words and run-on sentences into. Please put it on a shelf to admire, as most likely that basket will be all you'll have to talk to when you have pissed off enough people here.

It's not going to be that bad. Say 30% of 800,000 are active.

That's maybe 250k people.

And of those, how many are really gonna come over here and try it, 10%? At best?

So 25,000 people.

And then how many of those will stay ~ let's say 5%. We are talking about 1000 to 1500 people here.

Lets say that they spend 2 hours online every day (what active people!). That's a concurrency boost of maybe 100 people on average, or maybe 300 at peak, tops.

So we are looking at 3 or 4 regions and no big surprises. So hey... this suddenly looks very much like other comparable edu efforts! Funny thing, that.

I haven't read it yet but the latest SL blog entry is titled
Virtual Worlds in Education, Global COnference in Second Lif March 27-29

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/03/25/virtual-worlds-in-education-global-conference-in-second-life-march-27-29


The title at least sounds like something you might be interested in.

If my information is not out of date, I believe that Pathfinder Linder is the one charged with interfacing with education institutions. You should be able to find his profile under the People Tab in Search, and contact him directly.

Re: Originally Posted by Pserendipity Daniels
I can't tell you how much I agree with you on this. It would almost be excusable if the person in question never made a mistake himself, but on several occasions I've had to stop myself from being equally petty by pointing out his errors and omissions.

Worse, someone so hung up on the use of the English language should really learn the difference between sarcasm and outright arrogant rudeness. The use of irony is intended to simulate ignorance, not demonstrate it.

He can't help it. He's Welsh.

/me grins

So this would be a free service?

With over 800,000 people, why do you need to find a partnership in order to afford land?

To answer the question: No, I don't know of any. Would it not be cheaper to have a website in which people could RP in text only and level up as they improve?

A grammar roleplaying game sounds aimed at children or ESL students perhaps. Is it?

You missed out the apostrophe, and the use of Shakespearean archaisms is generally deprecated in electronic communications media.

Pep (Irony is soooooo difficult to get across subtly in text, is it not?)

Shall I put you on the 3Ring list of "me too" posters with nothing original to say and only willing to pop out redundantly when someone else has already said it?

Pep (Please feel free to attempt to criticise; I would suggest that you are sure of your ground before you do so, though!)

Did I hear a squeak? Perhaps someone thought I was talking to him, rather than about him...