Serious changes needed to make SL work in K-12 schools

(This may be the wrong forum for this, but I cannot find a forum for discussing the integration of SL into real-life educational environments such as public schools and universities.)


While SL certainly has applications in education, there are a number of problems with it.

- the full experience requires at least 500 kbit per user to work acceptably

- it needs a fairly high-end computer and 3D card to work properly

- the experience is easily disrupted by anyone who wanders by


My job is to provide technical support and network administration for two very small rural school districts in Wisconsin. I am intimately aware of the technology limitations facing schools, and how hard it is to make new technology like Second Life feasible in an educational environment.

Just this last summer, the Internet connection was was upgraded by the state educational network. At each school, we moved from 1.5 megabits to 3.0 megabits, with about 175 computers and 600 staff and students sharing that 3.0 megabit connection. The average computer speed is about 800 mhz - 1.8 ghz, and there are virtually no 3D cards anywhere except in the drafting/CAD labs.

At least for us, Second Life being used in the classroom is totally pie in the sky. It isn't going to be even barely feasible for us to achieve for several more years to come. Linden Lab would need to make some serious changes to the environment and its technology to accomodate this sort of usage.


The biggest strike against SL is its network inefficiency. Each user needs at least 500 kilobits of dedicated bandwidth for the environment to perform acceptably. If streaming audio and video is included, that pushes each user to perhaps 700-1000 kilobits of dedicated bandwidth.

But meanwhile here I am running an entire school off of 3.0 megabits, which will not be upgraded again by the state for perhaps another five years. At most we could handle about five students using SL before they'd eat all available bandwidth and drag everyone else's Internet usage on the network to a crawl.

We might seem an extreme case, but I know a nearby large metro district with about 10,000 students uses a 20 megabit Internet connection for all their buildings. For them, out of the 10,000 they could only handle about 30 students in SL before those students would also eat the Internet connection alive.... and they already do that with their regular Internet activity.

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Something major needs to change with SL to make it practical to use across many users with a limited shared Internet connection, and that change is going to have to involve the SL asset caching mechanism.

Linden Lab is going to have to bite the bullet and accept that they must provide a way for a school to establish a local object cache, so that frequently used objects, textures, animations, and sounds can be stored on a cache server physically located at the school.

The cache would work like this:
1. SL client requests action to rez an object
2. SL client is set to use SL proxy/cache server at the school
3. The request is sent to LL server farm, which replies with a list of object keys needed
4. Local cache server checks its own cache for the data the keys represent
5. If found, the data is sent to the client, statistics are sent to the LL farm, and the last-accessed datestamp on the cached data is updated
6. If not found, the local cache requests the data from the LL server farm, sends the data to the client, and also stores it in the cache for a period of time specified by the network administrator
7. Each night the cache server runs a cleanup job which defragments and optimizes the cache, removing objects that haven't been accessed for the set period of time

This alone would drop the amount of data sent back and forth over the Internet connection by 90% or more, and allow me to have several classrooms of students use SL without overloading our 3 megabit Internet connection.

Meanwhile the cost of memory and disk space keeps coming down, so it would not be very expensive to have a local object cache server outfitted with 2 gigs of memory and 300 gigs of RAID storage.

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Of course the safety the asset cache is a high priority for LL, and for that perhaps some creative solutions are possible:

1. Only sell the cache server software to schools and universities
2. Require product activation similar to Microsoft
3. Encrypt all data with a large (512-bit or bigger) DES key assigned exclusively to each site
4. Give content creatiors the ability to deny caching permission, but also give end-users the ability to deny downloading/rezzing of noncachable content

The third option of encrypting the local cache might be the easiest remedy for content creators in Second Life. Using a very strong key makes the data difficult to extract, and issuing different encryption keys to each school prevents anyone from performing a key search that could unlock everyones' cache content.

The fourth option is perhaps the most drastic, but if a content creator chooses to put their content protection concerns above their potential involvement in educational environments, this option would give them that choice, plus also give the network administators the ability to exclude those people and their bandwidth-sucking content protection decisions. (Users of the proxy cache wouldn't be allowed to set their own objects as non-cachable.)

Note that without a very fast local cache server, encrypting the local cache data may introduce a decryption delay that seems similar to the delays caused by downloading the data direct from the LL server farm.

However, such a decryption delay is not an isssue or a concern -- the real issue is taking load off of the limited Internet connection. A small delay on the part of the cache server is acceptable, compared with the overload and Internet lag caused by 50 lab students trying to pull 25 megabits of object data over a 3 meg pipe.

You probably want to chase down Pathfinder Linden. He's been working with RL educators for the last while on all sorts of issues relating to the use of SL in RL education.

1.8 ghz and 3d graphics cards? Since when? I use a 1.3 ghz and an old 32 bit nvidia geforce 2, and aside from all the crashes I run it just fine. It also runs fine on the 1 ghz laptop.. sl doesn't seem too graphically intensive to me. Shrugs.

Jes

Scalar, some residents are working on custom, third-party clients that may be able to address some of the issues you face:
http://www.libsecondlife.org/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/

Otoh, Linden Labs may have something in the works in regards to a "local hardware cache." Linden Labs has said "software first, then hardware." They've never really clarified what they mean by that statement...

That there would be a 3D graphics card.

I gotta say Scalar, I can't think of any way SL could work without 3D graphics cards.

'Serious changes needed to make SL work in K-12 schools'

No, sorry, the School's Computers and Internet Connection needs to be changed.
LL can't do Miracles to get SL running on PC's without 3D Card -
and the very slow Internet Connection... i think its hopeless.

It might be possible for LL to give you SL Server Software,
so you can run your own School Metaverse
- but you will still need 3D Cards.
I wonder what LL says about that Idea ?

When im not at home or in the office where my specs are 1gb ram, 3d gfx card, 1mbps connection and 3.4ghz...

i run sl on the go, from my car using a cell phone connection @ 64kbps and 1.7ghx centrino + a intel 900m gfx card

i like the cell phone option better than the other specs.. i get to camp out inthe desert and use sl with nature

i pre-cache at 1gb on the mobile option. cheers!

I'm sorry but what practical purpose could SL serve in an educational environment below the 10th grade level? I can't possibly think of one off the top of my head.

10+ I could see for perhaps a geometry class where seeing something in 3D might actually make the math "click" for some students easier than a drawing on a chalk board. Or for a CAD or engineering class of some sort. Art classes I can see possibly, maybe even a home economics sewing class as far clothing design. But in general, none of these classes are available below the high school level where the student level of understanding is sufficent to warrant school district investment in SL.

If you want an "interactive computer learning experience" for a younger set of students invest in leapster devices and programs, or allow the children to bring theirs from home.

There are plenty of lower cost alternatives than SL for general education enhancement. The simplest is to shut off the tv, take the child to the library, pick out books and READ to them.

Also, I would expect that each school district, if not each school would need to purchase a private sim that can be locked down so the children are not exposed to inappropriate content. So not only would you have the cost of the bandwith, the hardware upgrades, and such, but you would also have the purchase price of a private sim and the monthly tier.

As much as I love SL, I think I would be the first person to throw a screaming hissy fit if the Public Schools Board proposed implementing SL into the classroom, when they are crying they do not have enough money to buy basic text books, and have cut out music, art, drama, PE and etc. on budgetary grounds. The money would be better spent actually teaching the kids.

Students actually being able to read and comprehend at an actual 12th grade level at graduation, as well as writing and mathmatics, a good base in science and a basic understanding of history, and ready for college would be a nice change of pace in the USA.

My tax dollars can be better spent elsewhere. If I want to expose my child to SL, I will sit with them and let them play with me or buy my own sim where they can be relatively safe and build to their heart's content, supervised.

SL is by no means anywhere near far enough along in its development to be seen as useful in general education at this point in time.

In 10th-12th, yes I can see it may have limited merit. College, I can see it there as well, and I know that several universities are using SL now, which is awesome. But I can not for the life of me figure out why a 6 year old needs to know how to rezz a cube.

What LeAnna said.

IMHO computers have very little place in schools when teachers are expected to buy basic supplies like books and paper out of their own pockets.

Additionally, I'd suggest that advocates for computers in schools including SL, first demonstrate the applications and show they have some instructional value, then worry about getting the technology. I suspect it will take so long to do that, that the technology won't be an issue by then.

Scalar Tardis was talking about the needs of remote rural districts. Such districts often lack the critical mass of students needed to offer specialized classes at the high school level; as a result, the needs and interests of some students are neglected. Distance learning is a possible way to meet those needs, but to succeed, it must overcome the shortcomings of distance learning, notably the lack of involvement with teachers and other students.

Virtual classes in an environment such as Second Life could be a real boon for students like those. The relevance, or lack thereof, of 3D building tools to the educational purpose is irrelevant; the real question is whether an immersive environment like SL provides a better learning experience than traditional methods of distance learning. My experience in the <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu">Harvard CyberOne class</a> (at the university level, but I think the points I'm making would also apply to high school students) suggests that it does. Although most of our classroom time is spent chatting or listening to lectures, sometimes with the in-world equivalent of PowerPoint slides -- all stuff that could be done with the combination of a web browser and an IM client -- the sense among all the students is that having this sort of discussion inside a virtual world just works better. Having the visual cues to attach to students makes it much easier to hold a coherent discussion. What we see is a big part of what us human beings use to identify people, and having that identification with the other participants in the discussion gives our brains something to attach the conversation to.

But his point about hardware and bandwidth requirements are also valid. The fact is that the current implementation of Second Life needs fancier computers than most schools have; the 3D graphics cards, in particular, will be a problem. (Heck, the majority of <b>offices</b> don't have SL-capable systems, though that could change if the Aero interface in Windows Vista catches on.) And the intense bandwidth use of SL is also a problem, maybe an even bigger one for rural districts where high-speed internet options tend to be limited and costly.

A final problem, at both the high school and university level, is the separation of the teen and adult grids. Suppose you go to all the effort of creating a 12th grade class in Second Life, including the necessary permissions for your instructors to be in the Teen Grid. What happens when one of your students hits his 18th birthday and gets ejected from the Teen Grid? At the university level, what do you do with your under-18 students (and there are a significant number of them) -- deny them admission to the class? Ultimately, I think there will need to be some special all-ages areas in Second Life... and they will have to be monitored carefully. Some technical solutions might help as well, such as blocking IMs across the age barrier to unknown people. You could have something analogous to a friends list of permitted cross-age contacts; these might include parents, teachers, and fellow students.

Finally, I agree that Second Life has a limited place in elementary education. One possible use might be for special needs students (the deaf, for example) who have difficulty participating in a regular classroom, but might thrive in an text chat environment.

besides practal usages for a 13+ year old teen grid with adults on it, or worse a 18+ year old grid with kids on it (btw how would you plan on making accounts) the hardware requirements isnt THAT horrible
just recently i priced el-cheapo SL workstations for 116 bucks a unit ...which could also be used in real education

bandwidth i know a person that plays on dialup, its not pretty when she is out clubbin but for all the biulding, scripting, classes, and media within SL it is actually, to my suprise, qute usable, i play on 6mb DSL and 56k didnt really bother me all that much ... just had to be alittle paitent

I worked part time in a private 6-12 school for a few years in the tech department where all the student had laptops. I can fully understand that any movement in this direction will come with great foot dragging, politics in schools can be very difficult to deal with (I left because I didn't like the politics). All the students having laptops presented a number of issues with a good deal of benefits (spell checking & in class research are just two benefits; library? who needs one?).

Building a caching proxy for SL wouldn't not be impossible, assuming the client isn't establishing a secure connection; it should be easy to just redirect connections (man in the middle) via the schools gateway.

If you are willing to wait a couple years libsl will eventually create their own sim software. Though I know that LL has setup a number of private girds.

Using the main SL grid is basically out of the question for a school. There are just too many concerns, specifically keeping the children safe. Likewise using the teen grid is unworkable as teachers would need to get inworld as well. The only real solution is a private grid. Or maybe a third new grid: SecondLife School. Where schools would own island groups, and at the schools discretion allow students to teleport in and out. Students with good grades could be rewarded with ingame stuff/credits/lindens.

ahhhh such a nice idea Strife; SecondLife School. And not only for 6 -12 but all the way down into the gradeschool level. My daughter is 10 years old and has been using the computer since she was 3. Already does great in Power Point and now SketchUp 5. But she longingly looks at the computer as I build and create on SL and she and I both know she could do as good or better. But at 10 years old she knows she is not allowed in SL and if I go anywhere besides my home or the sandbox I am given access to, then she knows she has to leave the room. Kind of hard to explain that there are guys walking around sometimes with their privates hanging out and asking every girl if they want to f***. Been lurking in libsl for a couple of months now silently urging them on. But also hoping that someday SL will realize just how much SecondLife Private would be worth. Easily $100 to $500 per pop, with no loss in main grid income. The uses for your own private grid are enormous, and 3D design is just the starting point.

Hopefully one or the other will become available sooner then later.

Yes, the live interactivity of SL is a large driving factor of what I'm thinking about in a K-12 environment. Not so much the building and construction aspect.

Imagine the Smithsonian developing to-scale replicas of their museums in Washington DC. Or a sim dedicated to visually demonstrating the principles of geometry, and another sim with the history of metalworking with to-scale mechanical devices that really work..

As a visitor to such a space, you don't need to "build" anything to experience the environment in a useful manner. You just need an easy to use navigation system for getting around and doing things.

Certainly the existing SL movement system would need some simplification for younger kids to be able to use it, but youngsters are already traversing 3D virtual worlds in educational computer games.



Right now SL is where computers were back in the late 1970's. People would think WOW A COMPUTER! Then they bought one and discovered it came with no software and no clearly defined purpose or function.

It was up to the buyer of an Altair or an Apple ][ to come up with something for the computer to do, and so in those naive early years it was thought that pretty much anyone who wants a computer will need to learn a programming language like BASIC in order to actually USE their computer.

Now of course the idea of people having to learn a programming language to do anything on a computer is a joke. Millions of software programs exist for this evolved hardware that has now been in use for a good 30 years.

But Second Life is brand-new. Nothing like it existed before, so all content that is in it must be hand-developed from scratch. So as with the Altair there is an expectation that anyone who wants to REALLY do anything in SL is going to have to build stuff.

Nonsense. It will take a few years but eventually the content of the environment will be developed sufficiently, so that a newcomer in even a horribly bland market such as education will have a nearly endless selection available to them.

With sufficiently developed spaces built with young students in mind, there is no reason at all to believe a 3rd grade student would have to build anything in SL in order to get a useful educational experience from being there.

dunno, theres been other online 3d enviroments for years now as far back as the early 1990's
when vrml first started being standardised

and how many years does SL need its been around since 1999, from first lights in linden world to 2006 is longer than the first generation of PC's and no software, the apple came out in 1977 (or 78 dont know right this second) the ][ series was in schools loaded with software within 5 years

Yes, other 3D environments have existed before, but how many of them allow the almost totally open-ended ability for people to design and build their own spaces? The 3D editor in SL right now is roughly equivelant to where BASIC was on the Apple ][. Though LSL is a touch more capable than BASIC ever was, the 16 kilobyte memory limit is quite familiar.. .

The few other 3D environments than SL that are available are usually closed and unchanging unless the company making it decides to make content -- soley by itself -- for the public to consume (WoW, EverQuest, Sims Online). This renders them equivelant to a "Speak 'n Spell" with very limited options for the end-user to do anything radically different with the platform.

The other 3D creative spaces currently available don't offer all the features and capabilities (ActiveWorlds - open-ended creation but no physics engine; There - physics engine but no open-ended creation). And don't wave Croquet at me.. that's still in the testing/vaporware stages.

I don't think you can make any comparison of VMRL to SL, since the controls are effectively limited to panning/zooming/rotating around simplistic static content, much like the overhyped but mostly useless QuickTime VR picture balls. These are the antique Hollerith card-punches of the newly forming virtual worlds.

SL is much more akin to an open-ended hardware platform that can "run" any 3D environment that you want to experience.

I can see the property access-list system eventually becoming a way of selling access to commercial software content.

It'd be a little different from the usual software-license purchase, because rather than buying the software CD and installing it on your computer, you would be buying a "content-access pass" to go onto their property and use their "3D/software environment" live and in-world.

Just like with a software license you don't own their environment, but the purchased content-access pass says you are permitted to experience it until (pick any/all):
- the content-access pass expires
- you've visited the content X number of times
- you stop paying the content-access subscription fees
- revoked if you break their EUCAA (End-User Content-Access Agreement)

This could effectively be equivelant to buying an entrance pass to Six Flags or Disneyland, with options for multiple tiers of access such as 3-day passes, frequent-user miles, usage-incentive programs, affiliate content access, and so on.

vrml is what you want it to be, its just a format .. but overall it is a industry standard format unlike SL which has debate over its internal workings and absolute lack of extensive documentation

just like SL happens to be simmilar in its scripting, 25 years later and apple ][e asm basic doesnt do me any good, nor does it hold much relevance to the real world

if you want to give students some wider computer experiance why not just try basic,or html, for the more advanced maby php and mysql, ive seen 3d editing software from the basic "heres a blob, now scuplt it" to ones that professionals use, either opensource or totally free

why be teaching students a propitary closed fad of a system when they could learn the real thing and grow up to design SL version 5 (now featuring havoc 2)

I remember when Macs were a proprietary, closed fad. Oh wait, they still are!


What are you doing, personally, to try and expand and explore what Second Life might be able to do in a school or college environment? I personally have a number of small exploratory projects underway to see how far it could go.

Anyone remember Number Munchers? I'm interested to see if SL can handle that as a full 3D-animated game, playable in world.

If you're not looking ahead to the potential of what Second Life might become, then I don't think you can really contribute anything to this discussion.

i have been, and noticed that SL has verry limited things it can do .. yea i could do number muchers but you probally would use a sims worth of power and still be really lag ridden

not to rain on your prade there but still it comes to the main reason SL hasnt attraced mass amounts of RL biz, its limited, closed,and nontransferable (if aol died you could use your pages on the web, whats SLs? web if they packed up tommarow)

SL is not any ezier to learn than a traditonal standardised package, if nothing else its more difficult becuase your userbase is so young and limited, i personally was understanding php with a 0 (besides apple and c64 asm basic) scripting knoledge in half the time of lsl, not becuase php is easier but becuase lsl / SL is sooo poorly documented

so what is SL ?

is it a super ez for average joe user experiance, by design i guess it was suposta be, but the fighting with the system automaticly ovverides that ... ie stick 0.50 + 0.50 = 1.13 in a childs mind, are you doing much good?

to me its more like buying the wrong computer in the 80's shure its neato, and it does more than anything before it, but becuase of its closed door nature, its worthless, unless LL opensources it, but by the very nature of SL's design thats pretty much out of the question (inventory)

and again if SL packed up tommarow what would you really learn, some basic theorys thats about it, becuase SL doesnt mimic anything close to todays systems

ps btw check this out, i find it quite amusing
http://www.simplej.org/

You still don't seem to understand what I'm getting at here. The fact that SL doesn't mimic anything else out there today is the whole point of this exercise.

This is exactly why the MacAuthur Foundation's New Media Consortium and various universities are buying islands and holding meetings inside Second Life, to find out what new ways this medium could be used.

Yes, SL might not be the most ideal place to build a 3D Number Munchers game, but even a failed attempt at trying to build something like that may lead to a new inspiration of something entirely new and innovative. It doesn't matter if the project ends up a failure because the experience of trying to build it may become a jumping-off point, for something nobody has ever thought of doing before.

Also at least for me this environment helps spur an interest in programming that I just don't get from my everyday life. Yes it is true, LSL isn't exactly like any other language but that is not the point. Learning program flow and efficient programming technique within LSL is widely applicable across many languages, and since it's C-like, it prepares you for doing "real" code in C if you ever want to try that.


Just this morning I was thinking it'd be interesting to try and build a MIDI music player in SL. It'd just need a collection of sound samples for each note of each instrument, and code to play each note/instrument according to the song data. It'd be very lightweight on the sim and on your network bandwidth since the notes can be cached once and reused over and over throughout the songs.

I may know nothing about MIDI data storage and file formats right now, but this would be an incentive to learn about that, in the process of making a basic music player.

Don't think about using the new media in old ways, think about using the new media in new way. We allready mentioned remote learning. It also would seem to be a good tool for deaf or mute students.
In a more traditional situation, this would be a great place for an art class. Students could create statues, keep them in their pockets, make a perfect copy for teacher.
Imagine a Litature class where no one has to raise their hands, everyone can just chime in with their opinion of why the main character acted that way. Speaking at the same time doesn't erase what anyone else has said. A shy student might be able to find his voice that otherwise kept quiet.

Hi. This is my first post in this bit of the forum, so hello.

Going back to the comments in the OP - well, Linden labs are not going to do development to cope with very low bandwidth and old machines, are they? They can hardly keep up with fire-fighting grey goo etc.

But some ppl have looked at the extent to which children learn in school, compared with at home, from friends and relatives. At the heart of this is that many kids at home have machines with good RAM and graphics, and a good bandwidth, lots of time and no petty restrictions on access - result is they get on and learn.

Limited education budgets (and other factors) consequently mean that formal schooling provision is falling way behind what is possible with current technology.

In the UK one company is offering on-line 1 to 1 tutoring by good graduate educators (in India) for less than 20 pounds sterling a week - cheaper than a private tutor a,d more convenient. This is quite affordable for many, an danother instance of alternative provision out-performing state education.