LESSONS LEARNED IN DEVELOPING A SECOND LIFE

EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Lucia Rapanotti and Jon G. Hall

Computing Department, The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K.

Keywords:

Virtual worlds, Second life, Immersive learning environments, Distance education, Software development.

Abstract:

Virtual worlds are rapidly spreading beyond gaming and entertainment into education and the corporate world.

Should this trend continue, as forecast by the industry, then immersive applications will become more promi-

nent, with bespoke software developed in the metaverse affording both opportunities and challenges. This

paper reﬂects on the experience of developing a learning virtual space based on Second Life as part of an

innovation project at The Open University, UK. The paper focuses on the lessons learnt from the viewpoint of

managing the development of the learning environment, and could be of beneﬁt to educators and educational

technologists who are thinking to engage in this sort of development.

1 INTRODUCTION

Immersive technologies have known an unprece-

dented growth in recent years, due to faster, cheaper

computers and widespread broadband connections

(Castronova, 2006). Besides traditional gaming and

entertainment applications, some serious propositions

are starting to emerge for their use both in educa-

tion (ReLive, 2008; de Freitas, 2008; Otto et al.,

2006; Heldal et al., 2005; Daily et al., 2000) and

in the corporate world (Bartholomew, 2008; IBM,

2010; Nguyen et al., 2008), particularly to foster re-

mote collaboration within increasingly globally dis-

tributed institutions and industries. Industry forecasts

(Driver and Driver, 2009) predict that within the next

decade an immersive layer will be added to current

web technology, providing a high-degree of integra-

tion between immersive technology and the web, and

making virtual worlds a mainstream technology for

business and education.

Among existing technology, Second Life (SL,

2010) has proved particularly popular in recent years,

due to its distinctive combination of 3D simulation

with social networking concepts into an open-access

commercial grid offered by Linden Labs. While the

underlying server and simulation technology is under

the company’s control, access to the grid is free and

the data content is largely provided by the user com-

munity: users can acquire virtual land, on which to

develop their own content, from Linden Labs through

the payment of purchase and maintenance fees; alter-

natively they can rent or even buy some virtual space

from other virtual land owners, usually also for a fee.

Currently, Second Life is a grid of tens of thousands

of connected virtual worlds, often shaped as sunny is-

lands and moulded by their virtual land owners to of-

fer bespoke immersive experiences to visitors. The

embodiment of users as avatars affords a powerful

sense of presence in comparison to more traditional

2D web technology, and the high degree of customi-

sation, both of land and avatars appearance, is highly

appealing to users.

For the past 18 months, the ﬁrst author has driven

an innovation project (vMPhil, 2010) in the Comput-

ing Department at the Open University, part of which

has concerned the development of a Second Life en-

vironment for eResearch, a virtual campus for Com-

puting academics, their research students and collabo-

rators, called deep|think (deepthink, 2010) (A detailed

description of the campus and its pedagogical under-

pinning is outside the scope of this paper and can

be found in (Rapanotti et al., 2009) instead.) The

virtual environment is meant to support academics

and research students at a distance, this being the

default mode of operation of our institution. The

project complexity stemmed from the large number

of stake-holders involved, the relatively large-scale

of the virtual world development, and the strategic

signiﬁcance of such a development within the eRe-

search programme. The Problem Oriented Engineer-

ing (POE) framework (Hall and Rapanotti, 2009a;

Hall and Rapanotti, 2009b), developedby the authors,

Rapanotti L. and G. Hall J. (2010).

LESSONS LEARNED IN DEVELOPING A SECOND LIFE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 33-38

DOI: 10.5220/0002777200330038

 SciTePress

was adopted for project management, and to guide

the overall product design and stake-holder validation

throughout the project: an account of how it was ap-

plied can be found in (Rapanotti and Hall, 2009).

In this paper we focus on development issues

which pertain to the Second Life component of the

project, with a view to expose both barriers and en-

ablers which other practitioners wanting to engage in

similar enterprises may like to consider. After report-

ing some of the key issues we encountered, we reﬂect

on our experience and offer some practical advice.

2 ISSUES RAISED BY THE

PROJECT

In this section we report some of the issues which

emerged during the software development of the Sec-

ond Life environment and which are distinctive of the

technology we used. There were, of course, other

generic software issues, like accessibility, privacy or

access control, but these were not substantially differ-

ent from those one may encounter in any other soft-

ware development, hence are not addressed here.

By following the POE philosophy, project man-

agement decisions were guided by an assessment of

risk and validation activities involving project stake-

holders.

2.1 In-house vs Third-party

Development

Although the Second Life user community is large

and still growing, sculpting and scripting

expertise

still remains quite rare. At the start of the project,

such in-house expertise was very limited within the

authors’ institution, and the cost and time of develop-

ing it would have been disproportionate to the needs

and means of the project. Therefore the involvement

of third-party software developerswas deemed a more

cost-effective solution.

Two separate contractual agreements were set up.

One was with Linden Labs for the purchase of the

virtual land and its continuous maintenance; the sec-

ond was with a UK software development company

to shape the land and introduce ﬁxtures to our speci-

ﬁcation.

The third-partydevelopmenteffort was quite com-

pressed: it consisted of twenty-two development

days, spread out over two months in real time, with

Sculpting refers to the creation of 3D objects within

Second Life, while scripting is a form of software develop-

ment used to add interactive behaviour to those objects.

three software developers sharing the work on the

project. Development was punctuated by inworld

project reviews on a weekly basis in which both aca-

demics and software developers took part.

2.2 Fluidity of Design vs Contractual

Agreement

Currently, the provision of immersive solutions re-

mains very much in the realm of craft rather than

engineering (Driver and Driver, 2009). Each project

is unique, each solution radical, and partnership and

collaboration, rather than customer-provider relation-

ships are the norm. In our project, by commissioning

third party development, the need to establish a con-

tractual product speciﬁcation very early on had to be

measured against the need to accommodate the emer-

gence of innovative design, this being a desirable out-

come of working collaboratively.

A set of requirements were gathered based on

what the academic team envisioned the pedagogical

use of the space should be, but also informed by the

design of other Second Life educational locations in

existence at the time. As this happened very early in

the project life, such requirements were very generic

and open to interpretation. Nevertheless they were

used as the basis of the customer-provider contractual

agreement. Their inadequacy soon became obvious,

and while they were a necessary basis to start develop-

ment, they also led to time consuming re-negotiations

of deliverables. In particular, as the environment was

shaping up both limitations and new opportunities be-

came apparent, as well as mismatches in the way the

requirements had been interpreted by the two parties.

Although this is not unusual in software development,

even with more conventional types of software, the

peculiar nature of Second Life and an initial lack of

understanding by the academic team (the customer in

this project) of what such technology could actually

deliver were exacerbating factors, and led to some

frustration.

2.3 Skill Mix

The academic team on this project was made of Com-

puting academics, with prevalent expertise in Re-

quirements and Software Engineering, as well as the

preparation of distance higher education materials.

On the other hand, the third party developer team

came from a tradition of broadcasting and commu-

nication technology for business and education, these

representing the company’s core business. This is not

The immersive equivalent of ‘online’.

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

unusual in the current immersive landscape, where in-

novation has been driven from many directions, not

just software specialists. The effect on the project

was an interesting and unexpected mix of expertise

and culture, with the third party developers providing

some highly effective visual solutions, and the aca-

demic team driving both the pedagogical content and

the engineering process.

2.4 From On-site to Inworld

POE promotes assurance-driven design (Hall and Ra-

panotti, 2009a), which portrays validation from stake-

holders (customer, users, software architects, etc.) as

a main driver for design in software as well as in other

forms of engineering. A high level of stake-holder in-

volvement in software development is a recognised

key success factor (see e.g., (Agile, 2010; Beck,

1999)), as it allows for prompt validation of require-

ments and problem understanding, testing of the prod-

uct being developed, and for timely corrective actions

to take place. In other words, stake-holder validation

should be pervasive throughout development, rather

than a bolt-on activity towards the end of the software

lifecycle.

Immersive technology adds new dimensions to

this concept. In this project, the academic team (the

customer) was not just in regular contact with the de-

velopment; instead through the immersive technology

it became part of it. The academic avatars could wan-

der around the virtual world being created for them

and materially affect its design, appearance and be-

haviour. This was very effective during development

allowing the academic team to make some material

contribution to the end product. It was also invaluable

post-delivery: through such a process the academic

team gained such an intimate knowledge of the soft-

ware, to be able to alter and adapt it subsequently to

their changing needs. The added bonus was that all

this could be done with no travel involved: a broad-

band connection and the freely available Second Life

client software was all that was required for these pro-

cesses to take place. In fact, academic and devel-

opment teams remained physically distant throughout

the development and never met in real-life.

2.5 Change as a Way of Working

Virtual worlds, like Second Life, are rather different

from traditional software applications. First of all,

Second Life is a live open grid, which is updated on

a very regular basis, and with a high turnover of users

and simulations: in this respect, it is not so dissimi-

lar to the ever-changing Web, with the added compli-

cation that application developers are not in control

of the underlying server technology. Moreover, each

SIM

is very malleable: users with editing rights (e.g.

land owners, like the academic team on this project)

can, and do, keep changing the appearance and be-

haviour of their SIMs. This is due in great part to

users coming online and interacting with the land, re-

vealing any shortcomings in the design or prospecting

new opportunities. It is also partly due to human na-

ture: people like to affect their virtual world just like

they would their physical world, except that it is much

easier to do it in software. This phenomenonis partic-

ularly acute in Second Life, which has as part of their

business model to allow users to release their creativ-

ity through a thoroughly malleable medium. (This is

in contrast, for instance, to some internet gaming en-

vironments, like World of Warcraft, in which the vir-

tual environment is essentially ﬁxed).

The need to cater for a changeable world moti-

vated the academic team to employ a land manager on

a long term basis as well as instigating a programme

of monitoring, evaluation and continuous improve-

ment of the environment. The latter is particularly

critical to this project, which had the added require-

ment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the virtual

space to allow distributed research to ﬂourish. Note

that land management goes well beyond traditional

software maintenance: it is not just about ﬁxing bugs

or adding new features; instead it is about continuous

reshaping and repurposing.

2.6 Tracking Software Assets

A key activity in software development is the manage-

ment of software assets, and traditional software engi-

neering makes use of automatic systems and reposito-

ries for tracking and versioning control. This is not a

possibility when working within a live grid like Sec-

ond Life. Besides the basic landscape which comes

out of the box when a simulation is purchased, every-

thing is created inworld by generating and/or putting

together virtual objects, called prims

. The current

appearance and behaviour of a SIM is the result of

the prims which are currently rezzed

within the SIM

together with their associated scripts, and it is this

current state which is preserved and restored by the

underlying simulator. There is no tracking from one

SIM is short for simulation or simulator. Essentially

each island provided by Linden Lab is rendered graphically

as a 3D simulation. Users can purchase and link together

more than one SIM at a time.

Short for primitives.

Rezzing means to make prims appear within a virtual

world.

LESSONS LEARNED IN DEVELOPING A SECOND LIFE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

state to the next, hence no backtracking to restore any

previous state. However, when prims are created or

acquired by an avatar they can be stored in the avatar’s

inventory, a rather primitive repository of virtual as-

sets private to that avatar. In the context of third party

software development, such as in our project, it is re-

ally down to the developers to keep their avatars in-

ventory in good order and manually version control

their assets. Of course, manual control is not con-

ducive of large scale software development. More-

over, with more than one developer on a project, as

in our case, there was no obvious way to assemble all

assets in a single repository and maintain consistent

versioning. Overall, however, this did not turn out to

be a problem: possibly because of the participative

nature of the development, convergence towards a de-

sign satisfactory to all appeared to occur very quickly,

and only few small adjustments were necessary on a

weekly basis, which could be easily accommodated

by making use of the available rudimentary inventory.

2.7 Virtual Ownership

The concept of ownership is very strong within Sec-

ond Life, which to some extent tries to emulate own-

ership in the material world, albeit for virtual assets:

everything, from the virtual land to its tiniest prim,

has its owner, either an avatar or an avatar group.

Ownership relates to rights and to permissions; for

instance, owners may decide who can use their prims

and to which extent; they can choose to sell their

prims to other avatars for a revenue (there is a full

market economy based on this (Castronova, 2006)) or

simply donate them for free; while doing so they can

establish which rights the new owner may have, like

modifying, making copies or transferring ownership

subsequently. This creates a rather complex mecha-

nism of rights and permissions, when compared, for

instance, to traditional software assets within a di-

rectory structure on a conventional computer. More-

over, when prims with different permissions are put

together, the resulting combined permissions are not

often easy to disentangle. This fact, compounded by

the multi-repository issue discussed earlier, resulted

in a major technical headache for the project at hand-

over time, when the third party developers tried to

transfer assets from the developer avatars to the aca-

demic avatars (the contract required all assets to be

handed-overboth in executable and source forms): al-

though all of the assets were transferred, not all their

permissions were correctly assigned, and some edit-

ing rights were lost.

2.8 Tracking Ideas and Decisions

POE advocates that as well as tracking software arte-

facts, tracking ideas and design rationale is key to

risk management and decision making, and an in-

tegral part of stake-holder validation. When design

and development become participative, as in our case,

with many distributed players, a real issue is to keep

track of conversations, decisions and agreed actions.

This could not be easily done within Second Life it-

self, due to the limited support for recording infor-

mation whether textual or in other forms. In the ﬁrst

phase of development, alongside the inworld review

sessions, the project leaders at both ends— academia

and software company—corresponded primarily via

email, exchanging summaries, project plans, etc. This

created a certain amount of overhead to keep track

of messages and documents, as well as communicat-

ing essential facts and co-ordinating with the other

team members. In the second stage of development,

post-delivery, a private Ning (Ning, 2009) social net-

work was set up for communication between the aca-

demic team and the contracted land manager. This

remains in use to this day and has shown to be a supe-

rior solution for project communication and tracking.

Not only does it provide a common repository, but all

communication can be made transparent and all team

members can participate and contribute ideas.

3 LESSON LEARNED

In this section we provide some practical advice we

have derived from reﬂection on the reported issues.

Before embarking in a virtual world development

project, it is advisable to become familiar with the

technology and gain a good understanding of its affor-

dances and limitations. For Second Life, this is rela-

tively straightforward as the gird is openly accessible

and most common operating systems are supported.

Although a high spec computer is required for best

performance, any recent desktop or laptop computer

is likely to work well with the grid. From an educa-

tional perspective, it is worth visiting existing educa-

tional sites to see examples of how the technology is

being used.

Similarly to all software projects, it is well worth

thinking about one’s requirements in some detail be-

fore embarking on design and development activi-

ties. Many educational virtual worlds tend to be rather

generic, used mainly to allow people to meet up or for

advertising purposes. Understanding and envisioning

how teaching and learning can take place is a com-

pletely different matter.

CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Getting starting with sculpting and scripting in

an environment like Second Life is not too complex,

but achieving a professional look-and-feelwith usable

and reliable user interactions requires some degree of

sophistication. An audit of in-house skills may help

decide whether third-party developers should be em-

ployed. If the budget does not allow for a full devel-

opment to be contracted out, it is still possible to pur-

chase speciﬁc services from within the Second Life

market place, which includes a lively community of

skilled ‘scripters’. Some ﬁxtures can simply be pur-

chased and installed, so, it is worth doing some virtual

shopping.

A long term view of how the technology ﬁts

within a pedagogical program or institutional strat-

egy is also advisable as costs do not stop after the

initial software development. As well as the ongo-

ing maintenance fees to keep the virtual world sim-

ulations running, a serious amount of effort may be

required in order to reshape and repurpose the space

as new needs emerge, and to look after the virtual as-

sets. The ever changing underlying services and new

community trends are other factors to be taken into

account in long term planning. One also needs to con-

sider how to engage with users. It is highly likely for

user training and support to be needed, particularly for

adult users who may not have encountered this type

of technology before. Considerations of accessibility

are also paramount, as is the relation of this technol-

ogy with more traditional technologies which may be

available to users, and how such a relation may affect

the overall teaching and learning experience.

In setting up a virtual world development project,

it is worth choosing an appropriate development

method or philosophy which ﬁts the needs of your

project and team culture, and adhering to its design

principles. The choice of POE on this project was par-

ticularly fruitful, especially the guidance it provides

to handle risk, validation and traceability of artefacts

and decisions.

When the development team is distributed, some

consideration should be given to which practical tools

should be used to track artefacts and decisions, as well

as which decision processes should be followed, with

a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities. In

case of contractual work, IP issues should be explored

and a formal agreement reached.

Finally, a successful team will have a good mix

of skills, including understanding pedagogy, soft-

ware design, and user-centred design: virtual worlds

are very graphical and interactive, so a major effort

should go into envisaging the 3D rendering of any

learning or teaching experience one may like to in-

clude in the simulation.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The paper has reported on our experience of devel-

oping a virtual world for higher education using Sec-

ond Life. The context was an innovation project in

which virtual worlds are used as one of the key tech-

nologies to support an eResearch programme. The

project is noteworthy as a case study due to its rela-

tively large-scale and the strategic signiﬁcance of the

virtual worlds within the programme. By sharing our

experience on key development issues which we have

encountered, we hope to be of help to educators and

educational technologist wanting to embark in similar

enterprises.

From our personal perspective as Computer Sci-

entists, our experience has highlighted some chal-

lenges and opportunities arising from developing im-

mersive software, and has shown how some of the

basic assumptions and practices which characterise

more traditional forms of software development do

not always sit comfortably within this new paradigm,

while others are enhanced by it. Perhaps the most

striking effect of this paradigm on practice which we

have observed is the way it changes the nature of

the customer/user/developer relation, yielding more

participative forms of design and problem solving.

The effect is that customer and user validation be-

comes pervasive throughout the development pro-

cess, rather than a bolt-on activity towards the end

of the life-cycle. From our experience, it appears the

paradigm offers much potential for distributed collab-

orative problem solving and decision making, which

could be exploited within software engineering activ-

ities, particularly in the establishment and validation

of system requirements and early design. The project

has however also highlighted a number of shortcom-

ings, some that can be attributed to the immaturity of

the technology itself, e.g., the lack of proper repos-

itories, others which are intrinsic to the paradigm,

which is highly visual and does not afford any sophis-

ticated handling of, for instance, textual information.

The project, nevertheless, has illustrated how the use

of more traditional 2D social networking technology

could mitigate such shortcomings. Still an open ques-

tion remains as to the extent the two paradigms could

be blended and enhanced for best effect.

Also from a Computing perspective it was inter-

esting to notice how POE, a fully-ﬂedged engineer-

ing design framework with a track record in high-

assurance systems, could still be employed effectively

on this project, albeit in a distilled form. From what

we have observed, a light version of POE appears to

be highly suitable for socio-technical projects, such as

that reported here, particularly when a large number

LESSONS LEARNED IN DEVELOPING A SECOND LIFE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

of stake-holders are involved. Further work is planned

to test such an hypothesis.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks go to other academic members of the

Virtual MPhil team, namely Leonor Barroca and

Maria Vargas-Vera. We are also thankful to: Shai-

ley Minocha, for her Second Life input at the start of

the project; Darrel Ince, for championing the project

while Head of Department; to Non Scantlebury and

James McNulty, from the OU Library, who made sug-

gestions for the design of the inworld library services;

to Ahmad Reeves, who is helping with the Virtual

MPhil evaluation; and Graham Roberts, our Second

Life land manager. Finally, we would like to acknowl-

edge the development team at TwoFour Communica-

tions, UK, particularly Andrew Jinman, Sim Quayle

and James Abraham.

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