A mechanism in the viewer could prevent teleporting to regions that aren’t specifically part of the education hypergrid. Though some regions on different grids may be “education-appropriate” and suitable to be hyperlinked to, other regions may not be. Anything not on the whitelist would not be accessible from the viewer. Kokua and Firestorm are two viewers being developed off this branch), it would access a server-maintained whitelist of regions appropriate for students. One solution to the problem of inappropriate content and the ability to provide a safe gateway to Second Life for students 16+ may be to build a custom viewer that uses whitelists. Regions such as the "Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters" Macbeth sim in Second Life could be added to an educator-maintained whitelist so the viewer knows it's student-appropriate If similar goals and objectives can be identified, pooling resources together may help alleviate the burden for all parties involved. We need to provide a venue for coordinating with educators and organizations who are considering investing actual time or money in the development of a sim.A publicly viewable calendar in the regions and on the web would let others know what time slots are open. The script would monitor anyone entering or currently in the region and kick out anyone not registered for the session. Teachers who wish to use a particular region (or group of regions) for learning but are worried about others coming in and disrupting the class can reserve a session, and either enter their students’ avatar names, or have the students sign up themselves. Those who wish to join the education hypergrid can be required to place a script inside each region which connects to a server and monitors participants. One solution could be to script a session monitor.We should avoid having to recreate the wheel each time. Whether this is on Second Life, OSGrid, or any other virtual world system, a significant strength of the virtual world is in its shared content.
While securing a sim for exclusive private access is well-intentioned, they miss out on the community-produced educational content. For educators, they don’t want inappropriate content to drift in, or outside trolls to visit the region and cause havoc while students are using it. I mentioned above how FireSabre and Kitely provide private regions. To address safety issues, different approaches have been taken.This way, others in the same state, province, or country can find relevant material, without having to wonder if it actually addresses the necessary learning content or is just another topical sim. This is rather obvious, but it would be useful if virtual world activities were tagged with the relevant standards and/or objectives they address. Activities should directly tie in with the curriculum.We should use the skills of the young tech-savvy generation, and develop constructionist class projects that appeal to our students. Many teachers already do this, since with their often beyond-full-time jobs they simply don’t have the time to both learn the skills needed for building in a virtual world, and actually construct the content alone. It is more productive to include students rather than solely use teachers to create content.
KOKUA VIEWER CANT MOVE SCRIPTS FROM ONE OBJECT TO ANOTHER HOW TO
But we need to think about how to make such a hypergrid suitable for students, especially K-12 since there’s often a litany of additional laws and policies governing online interactions and access for them. There should never be any reason for a teacher or student to log out of their viewer and log back into another grid with a whole new avatar. The common “education hypergrid” should blend the most relevant content for students and teachers into a singularly accessible virtual space. However, as hypergridding becomes more stable and common, this can be the vehicle to unite different grids into a single education-related hypergrid. And Kitely is starting to establish itself as the premiere third-party choice for educators, and provides the option for making user-created regions private. Last year, Firesabre launched its own Starlight Grid, which provides private hosting for educators. The Jokaydia and 3rd Rock Grids have been around for several years, and they are largely education-oriented. There are definitely some measures being taken to address educators’ needs.
0 kommentar(er)
