David Thompson spoke about 3D sustainability at the Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability conference in Christchurch last week. He got a mixed reception. Some hadn’t seen SecondLife before and were impressed. Others gave him quite a hard time. They picked up on his “gee, second life is cool, you should use it for sustainability” and probed for evidence which unfortunately wasn’t there.
Here’s the premise of the talk: the goals of sustainability education are to change minds, and to explore ideas. A persistent immersive simulated “world” such as SecondLife is well suited to addressing these goals. Withing the 3D world we can use and embody experiential learning, and safely model dangerous situations such as the social impact of sustainable living. David showed a couple of screenshots of Etopia Island where there is a focus on sustainable development. Users have, for example, “built” high performance sustainable homes.
Unfortunately he came unstuck on the questions (wasn’t me, I was busy typing).
Q: do you actually use SL for teaching?
A: We have a computer games in education course where we use SecondLife.
Q: But is that to teach something else or teach SecondLife?
A: Not actually using SL in teaching something else.
Q: Is it sensible to be trying to replicate traditional teaching in virtual world? This modelling could can build misconceptions. How accurate, how authentic?
A: It is not mature. Wanting to find out more about authenticity.
Q: Are there alternatives?
A: Yes, OpenSim but less mature.
Q: I can see that this might support problem based learning. How far are we from an environment to teach this, and I mean teaching environmental problem solving, not the “problem” of how to build something in SecondLife?
A: We use a murder mystery to teach discovery learning. There are some things on horizon. Drama management research underway. Problem solving and engagement a human task, might always have to be outside simulation.
Q: Could this give unrealistic models and hope?
A: Yes, easy to build etopia.
Q: It could make the disconnect between students and sustainable actions worse then?
A: Yes.
We clearly need to move beyond the gee whizz and look at tools with a air of science. Leigh is trying (SL and sustainability literature wiki), but as he points out, once you get past the footprint of the servers, the evidence is thin on the ground.
Computing for Sustainability 
daveb
October 7, 2008
>once you get past the footprint of the servers, the
> evidence is thin on the ground
yup – that’s how I feel with 90% of my courses. I’m all “Yes right lets do it” then after sitting down with a pen and blank paper “ummmm how does configuring Active Directory impact on sustainability” or “how does sustainability impact on protocol analysis, or security” (for e.g) … oh there’s a couple of things like server placement, but we’re back to the server footprint again. Maybe I just haven’t got my head in a sustainable place or maybe that’s all there is for some things.
leighblackall
October 8, 2008
I’m not sure if when ave mentions server placement he meant this. Essentially it was recognising that the heat that server give off (or the cooling they require) is a loss of energy – or waste. So using servers for heating, and other things.
leighblackall
October 8, 2008
*Dave
David Thompson
October 30, 2008
To be fair, I wasn’t trying angling for “Second Life is cool, let’s use that!” – the cool factor of Second Life wore off for me a long time ago. My apologies if I gave the impression that I thought it was the magic hammer that would solve all of our problems, because I know it very much isn’t.
I felt the questions afterwards were where the majority of the important stuff came in – I was trying to establish a basis and critically discuss from there, having no prior knowledge of how clued-in the attendees would be about the technology and existing efforts. It’s important to keep a balanced eye on how these things can be applied and whether they should be, rather than simply using them simply because they are there.
Samuel Mann
October 30, 2008
Thanks David. You’re right, the discussion was the interesting bit and informed our (Leigh’s) attempt to compile some deeper understandings of SL and sustainability.
David Thompson
October 30, 2008
Well if I’ve done even that, then it’s a step in the right direction. I’m glad to have contributed something.