Module 1, Section 3, Activity 6
Building a travel guide, poster, book, HUD, bot tour, interstellar flight! [...] In this activity let’s practice our building and scripting skills by creating a collection of travel guides about the tools that teachers use to teach in Second Life!

This was a particularly challenging activity for various reasons.

First of all, my understanding of “content” was related to my experience as an educator in the humanities:for me, “content” in SL was what we, as teachers, can bring to SL in order to create a lesson. So I was thinking of texts, images, video and audio files, and so on: in other words, actual material to use as support for a class in SL.

Little did I know that in SL the term “content” was essentially related to building and configuring objects. Well, I learned a new thing, I guess. So my next step was literally trying to scout SL to learn more about free tools that could be useful to teachers in creating objects by manipulating prims’ textures, shapes, scripts, animations. It was tiring and time-consuming, but I learned a lot of things in my “quest”.

I went to visit a couple of very interesting sites in this first phase:

The Ivory Tower of Prims, the Particle Lab and the Texture Tutorials. They are all extremely well organized and rich places where one can learn a lot, see neat gadgets and also get some free stuff. Although they might not have much practical didactic use, I was mostly fascinated by particles, so much so that I had to insert them even in my virtual tree (Activity #8).

In the second phase, I went to look for the actual tools. Xstreets market was very helpful in this sense, even though I decided to get all my tools inworld and got none from the site. The fact that all tools had to be not only free, but transferable and copyable made things more difficult. There are a lot of nifty tools that, however, must be bought or that, even if free, cannot be copied and/or transferred to someone else.

I found several tools that I thought could have been helpful to build and enhance complex objects in SL, but unfortunately, once I began to test some of them, I discovered that there was a reason why they were free. Several of them did not work at all, or, when they did, they did something different from what I had expected. The texture aligner was one of such tools, very interesting in principle, but, no matter how I tried, I could not make it work at all. In the end, I just picked up a couple of very simple tools that were easy enough to use and I set them on the group platform.

Yes, this was a group work. When I signed up for it (and at that point I also signed up for a second topic: “individualization of learning path”, which I abandoned a couple of days later) nobody had signed up for “Creation of content” yet, but we ended up being a very large group made of six people with very different skills, interest, points of view, and backgrounds. This made things very interesting, but also challenging at times.

The main difficulty was deciding on a common format for the display. We met twice inworld to define this issue: not all of us were interested in the same things, and finding a common ground has required some negotiation. However, working together was also fun. Evelyn and I spent a few nights talking about the activity, perfecting notecards and testing each other’s tools. Yesterday (Dec 22), without planning, five of us (out of six) met on our platform to give the last touches to the exhibit. We worked together for hours and I really had a good time.

What I found very strange was that while I am usually quite shy, especially with strangers, with this activity I suddenly scheduled meetings, sent group emails and so on. Quite daring! I guess that it comes from teaching and from coordinating activities for different instructors (I am coordinator of intermediate and intermediate-advanced level language courses at my university). What puzzles me, though, is that I would never do this in RL (work-situations aside)!

I also learned a lot about SL in general from my team members, precisely because of our different backgrounds: in RL we would have never met (we are scattered across two continents) but in SL we did. It was interesting to see how different people approached the same task. For instance, both Alpha and Narci set up creating new tools (something that, at least at this point, is beyond me) instead of collecting tools that already exist inworld, which is what I did.

I also learned a lot about scripting: not that I have many more scripting skills now, I do not, but I begin to understand a bit more about it: for instance, its now much clearer to me how to modify script parameters – especially if someone suggests me what to do

Re-reading now the guidelines for this activity I notice that point #6 urges:

Design an experience-based, interactive and playful activity for discovering your chosen tools in Second Life. Try to go beyond the poster approach. Let your imagination fly and use a more diverse range of tools like a HUD or make an interactive book or even a bot automated tour with audio!

I am afraid that our exhibit might seem to follow a poster approach…. time was tight, one more week would have been nice. I played with an interactive book, but could not really make it work properly and a bot, actually a talking bot……………………..well, that is for next year

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MUVEnation/96/126/300

Giuliana Perco

Section 3, Activity 8 – Tree planting on MUVEnation island

Creating a “tree” for this section of the module has proved to be more difficult than I expected. We could choose from a long list of “trees” to build and, at first, I was very thrilled by the idea of building a “typographic tree”: coming from literature, I immediately thought of a tree made of words. But what words should I use? Initially, using words at random seemed more intriguing, but then I decided to use a real poem. I chose a medieval poem that I read many years ago for a course on German literature and that I liked a lot. My original idea was to create a tree with lines of poetry in place of the leaves, moreover, I wanted the lines to be both in German and in English.

I was so happy with my plan (I even had a pretty detailed image of this tree in my mind) that I didn’t realize immediately how hard it was to put it into practice. In fact, it was basically impossible for me to do it. I had to upload several different textures for the individual lines and then manipulate them. They had to be flexible and move in the wind as well, of course, otherwise, what kind of leaves would they be? The trunk represented a problem I could not really solve. In short, a big headache. A nice idea, but something I cannot really work on at the moment (I’m still working on a laptop with no mouse!)

I had to change my mind and I must thank Viki for the great inspiration she gave me for my new tree. After admiring the marvelous tree that Viki had already planted on MUVEnation and having talked a bit with her, I finally got a different idea: recycling! I decided to build a recycled tree, something that would also fit with my RL self, since I believe in recycling practically anything

Here is Viki’s tree!

The easiest thing to recycle was the rainbow wall I had built for the identity exhibition, so the panels became part of the tree branches and trunk. Indeed, a completely different tree from the one I had originally envisioned. Manipulating the rainbow panels was easy, the main challenge, though, was represented by the leaves. They had to be flexible to contrast the unnatural stiffness of the trunk and branches of the tree (ok, also in RL trunks are stiff, I know, but branches aren’t). I initially built one very nice, flexible and delicate leaf; I had to play around with its size, and eventually found out that leaves for my tree had to be bigger than normal real leaves would be. Also, I wanted my leaves to have different colors, to fit with the colorful branches of the tree, they moreover had to have different rotation parameters to look “natural”.

So, once I finally created what for me was the “perfect” template leaf, however, I also realized that probably it would take ages to build enough leaves to cover the tree branches in a realistic way. It did

But…..

Despite the many hours I dedicated to the project (or perhaps precisely because of them?), I am a bit proud of myself for the result and I am eager to be told where I can plant it on MUVEnation island!!!
In the meantime, here is a preview of my tree

UPDATE: As of Dec. 24th, my tree is growing on MUVEnation island: http://slurl.com/secondlife/MUVEnation/177/3/31/

Giuliana Perco