Making OpenSim safe for students – Hypergrid Business Skip to content Home VR & AR Metaverse What is OpenSim? Free land in OpenSim VR Headsets VR QR Codes Covering virtual reality, immersive worlds, and other emerging technologies Secondary Navigation Menu Menu Home About Us Contacts How to pitch a guest post Discussion Guidelines Privacy Policy Write for us Get a free ad on Hypergrid Business Promote your grid for free Sponsored post guidelines OpenSim & the Metaverse OpenSim News Freebie shopping destinations Gloebit shopping destinations Active OpenSim Grids Grids Renting Land Vendors Editor’s Picks Bargain Hosting Independent Hosting Consultants & Developers Designers & Builders OpenSim Resources What is OpenSim? How to hypergrid Hypergrid FAQ How to shop with Gloebits Getting Started Where to get content for OpenSim Scripts Metaverse communities Promote your grid for free Statistics Popular Hypergrid Worlds Historic Statistics How and why to set up a stats page VR, AR & XR VR, AR & XR News VR Resources How to set up your new mobile VR viewer VR Headset Reviews 10 best VR headsets under $100 VR Headset QR Codes AI Search Making OpenSim safe for students By: Justin Reeve On: March 20, 2012 Tagged: OSGrid With: 3 Comments OpenSim is making headway as a viable alternative to Second Life. About 98 percent of the functionality of Second Life is present in OpenSim. The remaining 2Â percentÂ primarily deals with vehicle physics. Although it is still considered â€œalphaâ€ software, OpenSim hosting is sold, and teachers, students, and businesses are taking advantage. The alpha status reflects more on the rapidly changing nature of the virtual world market, than the stability of the software itself. Microsoft and IBM have some backing in it. Intel operates itsÂ ScienceSimÂ experiments with OpenSim, and has made headway in providing models for ubiquitous shareable content and massive user connections. There are definitely some measures being taken to address educatorsâ€™ needs. TheÂ JokaydiaÂ andÂ 3rd Rock GridsÂ have been around for several years, and they are largely education-oriented. Last year,Â FiresabreÂ launched its own Starlight Grid, which provides private hosting for educators. AndÂ KitelyÂ is starting to establish itself as the premiere third-party choice for educators, and provides the option for making user-created regions private. However, as hypergriddingÂ becomes more stable and common, this can be the vehicle to unite different grids into a single education-related hypergrid. The common â€œeducation hypergridâ€ should blend the most relevant content for students and teachers into a singularly accessible virtual space. 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. But we need to think about how to make such a hypergrid suitable for students, especially K-12 since thereâ€™s often a litany of additional laws and policies governing online interactions and access for them. Make it engaging OpenSim has the potential to be an engaging, interactive way to deliver an educational experience to students. It is more productive to include students rather than solely use teachers to create content. Many teachers already do this, since with their often beyond-full-time jobs they simply donâ€™t have the time to both learn the skills needed for building in a virtual world, and actually construct the content alone. We should use the skills of the young tech-savvy generation, and develop constructionist class projects that appeal to our students. St. Peter's Basilica, created by a student at The Hewitt School, for a history class project. (Image courtesy Eric Nauman.) Furthermore, activities should directly tie in with the curriculum. This is rather obvious, but it would be useful if virtual world activities were tagged with the relevant standards or objectives they address. 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. Make it safe To address safety issues, different approaches are being taken. I mentioned above how FireSabre and Kitely provide private regions. Eucators donâ€™t want inappropriate content to drift in, or outside trolls to visit the region and cause havoc while students are using it. But while securing a sim for exclusive private access is well-intentioned, the result is that the teachers and students can miss out on community-produced educational content. Whether this is on Second Life,Â OSGrid, or any other virtual world system, a significant strength of the virtual world is in its shared content. We should avoid having to recreate the wheel each time. One solution could be to script a session monitor. 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. 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 studentsâ€™ avatar names, or have the students sign up themselves. The script would monitor anyone entering or currently in the region and kick out anyone not registered for the session. A publicly viewable calendar in the regions and on the web would let others know what time slots are open. One solution to the problem of inappropriate content and the ability to provide a safe gateway to Second Life for students 16 and over may be to build a custom viewer that uses whitelists. Ideally based on Viewer 2/3 — for example,Â KokuaÂ andÂ FirestormÂ are two viewers being developed off this branch — it would access a server-maintained whitelist of regions appropriate for students. Anything not on the whitelist would not be accessible from the viewer. This can cross over to OpenSim as well. Though some regions on different grids may be â€œeducation-appropriateâ€ and suitable to be hyperlinked to, other regions may not be. A mechanism in the viewer could prevent teleporting to regions that arenâ€™t specifically part of the education hypergrid. This doesnâ€™t prevent the usage of other viewers from bypassing these client security measures, but itâ€™s still one measure that could help, and may meet the security policies of many schools and districts. Another option is to implement a teleport-restricting module on the server side so it limits access to educational regions, but since OpenSim is still in alpha, requiring it be included in all upgrades may be inconducive, unless a separate fork of OpenSim is made. Make it cooperative 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. If similar goals and objectives can be identified, pooling resources together may help alleviate the burden for all parties involved. When appropriate, content should be Creative Commons-licensed. This isnâ€™t entirely necessary, and I believe there is tremendous value in reinforcing the commercial OpenSim goods market. Justin Reeve's Undersea Observatory is available as a free, Creative Commons-licensed OAR download. (Image courtesy Justin Reeve.) But any Creative CommonsÂ content could be provided as OARs and IARs — compressed archives of OpenSim content — so it can be installed on private servers. Direct links to OARs and IARs should be posted inside the regions themselves, when possible. We should also create an open, zero-cost — for the end user — conference region. This can be accessed from anywhere in the hypergrid, and can be reserved for school events or professional development as needed. Hopefully Iâ€™m not too far off base with some of these thoughts. I believe as we move forward it will become increasingly important to standardize how educational simulations are maintained so they can meet the policies and safety standards of most school systems. (Adapted with permission from theÂ Insights Into Educational Technology blog.) Author Recent Posts Justin Reeve Justin Reeve has been the web manager for the Weber School District in Utah since 2005. He is responsible for coming up with new web technology strategies for the district, and building the web sites to accommodate the district's parents, teachers, administrators, and students. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Weber State University, and a Masters in Educational Technology from Boise State University, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Online Teaching. Latest posts by Justin Reeve (see all) Making OpenSim safe for students - March 20, 2012 2012-03-20 Previous Post: Second Life, Facebook, and OpenSim Next Post: Second Life Enterprise was a costly mistake Now on Amazon OpenSim Ads Recent Comments Ilan Tochner - 9/22/2022 A default avatar could make you look like a copybotter Not all western judicial systems use juries, some like the US do, others like Israel don't. But that doesn't really matter, what matters is that different jurisdictions may treat the legality of using... mikelorrey - 9/21/2022 A default avatar could make you look like a copybotter Your argument against juries belies the fact that all western judicial systems use juries to resolve copyright disputes every day. AviTron Metaverse - 9/21/2022 OpenSim land area and active users up as grid actives decrease Land size doesn’t matter. Opensim makes it very easy to have any amounts of land we want. The hardest part of it is to have the people. That’s what matters to me. The people ! The masses!... AviTron Metaverse - 9/20/2022 OpenSim land area and active users up as grid actives decrease Will do. I get it. I mean even dormant regions are counted. So be it. Maria Korolov - 9/19/2022 OpenSim land area and active users up as grid actives decrease And, like I said, you can have both numbers on your stats page, if you want. 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