Iggy’s Syllabus: Bounding Over Technical Hurdles
Location: First Week's Virtual Office Hours, Richmond Island

first office hoursA constant frustration for educators using SL is how to make the client work in a particular campus I.T. setting.  Students own a mish-mash of personal computers and campus labs may be locked down or subject to Byzantine systems of administration that limit “gaming” or installing software.

Add to these concerns the inherently changeable nature of SL itself: client upgrades that strand older hardware, a database as likely as not to go down just before a big presentation to senior administrators, and the negative press that SL received after the media euphoria in 2006.

Challenging? Yes. Insurmountable? No.

So what can we do to get our students past the technical hurdles to actually use SL?

  • Assess the public labs. If your labs won't run SL, you will have to depend upon the technologies students have at home. PC systems, in particular, must have video cards that SL supports.
  • Possible work-around for very restricted labs: Find out if you can realistically run SL for Windows from a thumb drive (thanks, Penn State!).
  • Network with other SL educators. Take a moment to review what Jo Kay and Sean FitzGerald have done at their "Getting Started" wiki. Yours truly just discovered this gold mine; the resources page alone would have saved me hours when doing my own "Getting Started" guide. Sending Millennial-generation students in to "just look around" in SL makes the perfect formula for disaster. Instead, find out what sort of guided activities and decent lesson-plans already exist online. You'll also want to join groups such as the SLED blog or mailing list (try the latter if you don't mind a lot of e-mail or long daily digests).
  • Meet with IT staff well before you begin. When you have an idea as to what you want to do with students, talk to the people who can make it possible, technically. We used this same approach in The Epiphany Project in the mid-90s when "Flat Web" technologies were coming onto campus. These folks must be your partners, or you are already done. Many of them may be SL zealots or SL haters. Either way, faculty will need their help to make any pedagogical use of SL successful. I've found that gently educating SL-relucant I.T. types (not at my school, luckily!) whose information may be old, gets them to re-consider the platform. And whatever you do, resist the urge to evangelize them as if you drank a cup of Linden-Lab's magic Kool-Aid.
  • Find out what students have at home. I teach at a residential college with ample high-speed connections and ubiquitous high-speed wireless. Where will your students be using SL? Are their systems and connections fast enough? Should you encourage those without ample access to withdraw on that first day? Note: Three of my enrolled students dropped (of 18). I don't know their motivation: SL, my nutty-professor persona, or my rep as a hard-grader and workaholic. Others said that they stayed because the course offered something different and challenging.
  • Be ready for older computers to be orphaned mid-semester. Linden Lab updates frequently raise system requirements. An approach that works for me is to keep Mac and PC copies of the SL client around, so my students could download them it at any time. You might have to ask students to download the current client (or your older version) each time it's used in labs that will permit software installs but re-image hard-drives with each reboot.
  • Learn how to dumb down SL's client: I met with Kevin Galbraith, the avatar of our campus island's manager. He had bad news: SL would no longer run on the IBM/Lenovo PCs in our Language Lab. Would it also fail, then, in our Writing Lab which has similar machines? We sat down in real life to find out, and we discovered that by reducing the client's resolution to 800x600, lowering the graphics settings, and making a few other tweaks under the Edit-->Preferences settings, SL ran well. Granted, you and your classes won't get the stunning "Windlight-style" snapshots, but the client will run. That's more important.
  • Find a location with higher-end machines for advanced work: I'm outfitting the Macs in our Writing Center with the client (both LL and Onrez), extra RAM, and in-person help from me. I'm also checking with the manager of Richmond's Technology Learning Center where even faster Macs and PCs are found...so students will have options for making better use of SL for photography and machinima. Even a larger monitor with a dumbed-down version of the client can be a godsend for student-builders!
  • Identify a Plan B and be ready to use it: This is not news to any experienced teacher working with technology. The day of your virtual field trip, say, will be the day that LL takes down the database. Case in point: when pitching my idea for "In a Strange Land" to the Web team at the Richmond Times Dispatch, I found that their secure network would not permit me to open the SL client, even on my laptop. But I could show them a short film of SL I'd made on my hard drive, and I could also load Web pages on their and my machines to give them an idea of what I would do. I've been blogging for them ever since.

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