How can newcomers find mentors?

I am updating my notecard for newcomers. I want to include instructions on how to find mentors. Does anyone have suggestions about finding mentors? Is there a group that people could join to they could send IMs or find mentors online? There are several such groups for instructors and people wanting instruction.

We have a Hobo group that is currently providing unofficiial mentor services for its members. People ask for help by IM and usuall get it. We also pass around textures, scripts, sounds and the like. When people ask me for mentoring, I invite them into the Hobo group because I don't know of an official mentor group that is open to newcomers. I am going to mention that in the updated notecard.

As you can see, I dont know anything. So if you have more information, please post it here or send it to me inworld.

The notecard is included in a sign at Hobo Infohub. Both the notecard and the sign are for anybody's use. The sign should be free to copy. If it is not, tell me and I will send you a copy.
TM

Check out "The Shelter" and "NCI", both are player run groups to aid newbies.

I think the mentor program has lapsed into near obscurity.

The only way to find a mentor is to get a Linden to call for one. Only mentors can contact each other on the IM channel. Just about every Linden is also a mentor.

Sorry

Jen

I'm sorry to hear that some people think the Mentors have fallen into obscurity...I know quite a number who are still very active, including myself.

Most of the Welcome Areas have Mentors available at various times during the day...now not all of them may be tagged up, but if someone goes to a Welcome Area and says, "I'm looking for some help from a Mentor" and there is a Mentor present, they will get an IM at the very least.

I'm in world fairly often, and do most of my Mentoring on Help Island, but I can certainly be contacted if you have someone who needs specific help, so feel free to try an IM to me if you can't locate someone else.

Skye Galileo
Second Life Mentor
Lover of All Things Noob

It appears that the absence of mentors is a shared impression (even by people who say they are mentors).

One could contact a mentor by looking at the Second Life Mentor group's list of members, and sending an IM to someone in the group.

Shouldn't it be possible to create some kind of help request system, possibly using LSL by itself or LSL plus web based code that would allow people to post a request for help that would go onto a stack, with mentors that want to help able to pick questions off the stack?

Look at the Second Life Mentor list? Sounds reasonable. But let me be a newcomer and try that.. I go to seach and type in
Mentor
I get two groups
Mentor of Second Life (4 members)
Mentors and Whites (5 members)
If I thought SL could search like Google, I would suppose that these are all the mentors. But I persist, copying in
Second Life Mentor
from the instructions. I find a group by that name with 949 members. So I pick someone, say Ian, to send an IM to. I now haveto figure out how to look up Ian under people and send an IM. If Ian is online 4 hours a day, the odds are 7 to 1 that I will get a
message about user off line.

Neither the group list nor Ian's profile will tell me whether he is online. If Ian is online, he still may be too busy to answer questions. If he is not online, I don't know when I wiill get an answer. If I need an answer now, I can try more names. Out of, say 7, I will probably find one online.

I think I could take this description to a school of business and get them to use it as a case study in how to keep your custmers from bothering the customer service department.

Now this is not a matter of mentors not wanting to help. It is a system gap: a failure to connect people who need help with people who are are ready to gve help.

Compare this to the system for connecting people who want classes with people who want to offer classses. My card can tell people who want classes to join 2 groups, Sledu and eLuminata VIP. The groups are open to both newcomers and instructors. Classes are announced. People interested in a topic can send IM's asking when it will be offered.

Both of these groups (and others) act as informal help sources. That is, people post requests for help on the IM channel and other people respond. With that arragement, the request is broadcast. People who can help respond. I wonder why the mentors don't have such an arrangement.

The problem with the system is the inability to NOT see group IMs. As you noted there are 946 mentors plus 40 Linden officers. If any one of us sends an IM in that group, all 1000 of us will receive it, provided we are all online at the time. Sometimes the spam from other mentors can be very distracting.

To get you to IM us, you would have to join the Mentor group, which you couldn’t do. So, let’s make a separate group. Call it Mentor Help. We would automatically have 1000 mentors in this group. Now, Thinkerer has need for Mentor help. So, you join the group and group IM the request. We see it and answer. How quickly do you think there would be 10,000 or more members? Every time one of those 10,000 members asks a question the other 9,999 will see it. The spam will quickly make it impossible for anyone in the group to do anything else.

I am also an Instructor. Sometimes when I am teaching a class one of the many member groups, like Mentors, will start a run of spam. It makes it very hard to see a question from one of the class students or to focus on what I am doing. All I see is span chat running up my screen.

What is needed is something like the old Live Help, now called Help Request, but for mentors. Something that a mentor can choose to listen in on or not listen as the mentor chooses. In this way, if I am willing to help people, I can sign on to the channel. If I am off duty, I don’t sign on to the channel. I don’t know if this is possible today?

Jen

I am in eLuminata VIP (over 1000) and Instructors (about 800) and Second Life Hobos (about 500). I have not noticed any spam. There are often conversations of no interest to me. I do 2 things to keep the talk sorted. In Edit>Preferences>communication, I have unchecked the box that says "Include IM in chat history." If there is a lot of IM chatter, I open the history box and follow the chat there. In group meetings, I sometimes go to Preferences>Chat and set for chat bubbles. That, too, separates the chat from the IM.

It would be good to be able to filter the IMs to select messages you want. That will probably become available soon after the open source viewer becomes an option. At that point we will no longer be limited by what the Lindens want to offer.

But what shall we do while waiting. Aaaah. Some mentor who wants to make it easier for newcomers to find help could start a group. Mentor Help. There would not be !000 mentors because not all memtors would join. And there would not be 9,000 newcomers without a lot of recruiting effort. In the long run, of course, there might be several mentor help groups. They could be focused on specific areas of interest such as exploring or building.

Or maybe it would be easier to wait for Godot.

With the new volunteer communicator (ver 3.3) that is unlimited distance, a object can have a script in it to send a request to all the mentors who are on-duty. This object can be placed at Orientation and/or Help Island.

So where could mentors find the communicator?

Does this work only for mentors or will it work for instructors also?

I have the communicator but I haven't seen a single message.

Does it work only on Orientation and Help Islands, to which I no longer have access?

At the volunteer HQ, at
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tenera/195/106/70

It ought to be possible for people with questions to use the inworld snapshot postcard system to send their question to a volunteer help email address.

The postcard system already allows one to enter text in a paragraph.

A mail processing program could do something like: post the questions in a forum, where volunteers could answer, and or send an email to a scripted object similar to the volunteer communicator displaying the email question's subject, which volunteers could then answer.

What sue proposes is reality easy and makes since.

Usually , Mentors and lindens patrol the orientation/help islands to assist newbies and 'teach them the ways of secondlife' if you will. However if newbies require live servisce via Instant Message then they should usually contact Live Help or contact [email]support@secondlife.com[/email] via email.
I hope I was of some assistance

I have been playing a couple of weeks, and i must admit, i asked a few random people on help Island where i could find a mentor. I was told several times they didnt exist, so have been fumbling around on my own trying to work things out (think i am doing quite well so far!)

Still would like a mentor - could do with someone to bounce questions off, but not sure how involved is the mentor program here? In my last virtual world a mentor stayed with you quiet a while, but i wouldnt want to take up the time if someone else would benefit more than me...
so is it total total noobs only, or does it include slightly thick lesser noobs like me?

Are there supposed to be people on Help Island that are there to help?
Too often I find lots of people chatting but have seen my questions washed away by some endless dribble that has nothing to do with helping anyone. And if someone does try to help I have to either scroll back through the chat history or IM who every responded. That seems useless because there may be others who had the same question and now missed the answer. Its also seems that help Island is a popular place for griefers and social groups that refuse to respond when people ask about membership. I find the welcome areas completely overwhelming and full of down right nasty types. Where oh where is a girl to go for in world advice?

I found a place called "The Shelter" which seemed quiet helpfull also not as busy as Help islands (which I also found overwhelming)

There are mentors. I think they are overwhelmed by the recent large influxes of new people. Here are some alternatives:

New Citizens Plaza, like The Shelter, welcomes newcomers.

Torley Linden is posting a series of videos on YouTube with demonstarations for beginners.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-NhMedmnk
You can find Torley's channel on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Torley

I have listed a few intorductory web pages and videos here:
http://www.thinkerer.org/Lod/LodBuild.htm

If you join a group such as eluminata VIP, Sledu, or SecondLife Hobos, you can post your questions on the group IM and probably get help. These groups are free and have open enrollment. There are probably many other such groups.