Submitted by Meredith Snookums on April 24, 2007 – 8:31am.
To accommodate the large number of students in attendance, each avatar represented about 3 students. The group was also spread out over 3 separate computer labs on campus, requiring additional support personnel. All of this required prior planning, account creation, and a means of running the SecondLife client on a number of computers. To meet this last need, SecondLife was loaded onto individual flash drives, and the client was run off the flash drive (the entire SL folder was transferred onto the drives, and run by opening the .exe file). Skype was also loaded onto flash drives in the event of a grid failure (see http://www.gruups.com/usbskype/ for directions).
The Ultimate Tips Of Future Planning
All-in-all the meeting went well, but there are some suggestions I’d recommend to anyone wanting to do something similar in the future:
- Allow your students several hours in SL prior to a meeting. They will need to get accustomed to the environment and likely want to modify their avatar. If they aren’t given sufficient time in advance of the meeting, these things might occur during it!
- Have more than enough facilitators available, if possible. Troubleshooting during a meeting can be extensive. Also, the leaders of the meeting should not be expected to pull double-duty in interacting and troubleshooting.
- Require students to purchase flash drives at the beginning of the semester. The flash drive method of running SL worked great (special thanks to Tom Edwards at South Central College for suggesting this method).
If anyone has any questions about this meeting or more tips on facilitating a large-scale meeting in SL, please feel free to IM me in-world (Meredith Snookums).