1 post tagged “museum”

One of my friends in Second Life calls me "the wandering Fergus" ("the wondering Fergus" might work, too). I'm sure she means it as a joke or as friendly teasing, but it's very close to accurate. I'd like to see everything that I possibly can, while still allowing myself time to socialize and have a good time. It's a tall order and most likely well nigh impossible as the content is growing faster than can be seen by any one person. But, hey! A fella's gotta have goals.

At any rate, while engaged in my wandering a couple of days ago, I stumbled onto a place called "Knowledge Park". You might think of it as being SL's equivalent of a small web portal with teleports to other places in SL that others might find interesting. They're pretty much grouped by interest area. For example, there is a section for sci-fi buffs and another one dealing with astronomy. Although Knowledge Park provides portals to other areas, there is no return teleport, so you'll definitely want to set a landmark so you can revisit. I took the portal to the SL Planetarium and was astounded by what I found at the other end.

The planetarium itself was nice, but a bit disappointing. It's a good start, but would take a great deal of scripting and texturing to bring it up to its full potential. Don't take that wrong. I'm not throwing stones at anyone's efforts. "Those who can, do" and all that. The surprise was in what was right next door to it: the International Spaceflight Museum. The ISM is worth every minute you can spend there, and you can easily spend a few hours. I highly recomment the rocket ride to Near Earth Orbit, just for the fun of it. If you'd rather not bother, there is a simple teleporter to take you there. I did not find a teleport back to the museum from Near Earth Orbit, so you may want to set a landmark before heading off.

Once there, you can explore the solar system, including the planets, their moons and exhibits on some of the major satellite missions to them. New exhibits are under construction and I spent a few minuts chatting with some universtity students who were working on a mock-up of one of the Apollo moon landings.

My first thought upon arrival was, "WOW!" But my second thought was that this would be a wonderful place to bring students for a virtual field trip. Then a couple of other thoughts hit and convinced me that this was not such a hot idea, after all.

First, I teach middle school. I can just imagine the problems with shepherding a group of rambunctious 13-year-olds through an environment where they are pretty much free to go where ever they would like and, let's face it, a major chunk of SL is definitely not for kids. It's possible that the ISM is mirrored in Teen Second Life, but I don't know for sure (minors aren't allowed in SL and adults aren't allowed in TSL - east is east and west is west and ne'er the twain shall meet). The second problem that occurred to me was that the SL client software needs to use a couple of TCP/IP ports that are probably blocked by any school district's firewall. Thirdly, SL itself is typically classified as "entertainment" by most web-filtering software, so you probably wouldn't be able to contact the SL servers even if the necessary ports were open, although it could probably be added to the a white list of approved sites (not likely considering the other content in SL). And lastly, SL is a bandwidth hog. Unless someone can come up with an SL caching proxy of some sort (all clients talk to the proxy - content is transferred over the WAN link once, and then redistributed over LAN links as needed), the sheer volume of data being sent to a 30-seat lab would choke an entire district's WAN lines in a heartbeat.

There are probably work-arounds for all of these problems. Some of them would depend upon the cooperativeness of the IT department, while the bandwidth issue woudl have to be resolved by the good folks at Linden Labs. At any rate, the potential use of this virtual world technology in an educational setting is phenominal. It's just not feasible in my present situation. Bummer.