As I’ve mentioned before, some of us are starting to look at using Second Life for teaching. One problem that we have is that it is not possible to install software on University Owned PCs, without creating NAL objects – which can take some time. Some staff can install locally, but not all can. This means that students would have to work at home in order to use it.
I originally used the method outlined by Tom Edwards on the SLED Mailing list – which worked fine for me. Infact, the PC that I use quite often in the ExPERT centre, which I don’t have admin rights to, is much higher specced than the one in my School of Computing office, so despite the fact it was running on a USB stick, it worked better!
Jonathan has also pointed me to a post on Penn State Virtual Worlds blog, which uses a .bat file to tidy up afterwards. I’ve just added that, and it still seems to work well.
Hey, thanks for the mention. I recently posted “Skype on a Flash Drive” as well, for those who want to use Skype but can’t install it on a local machine.
I have a question about PodPress that you use to publish the Podcasts on this site. How did you tie it to Speech Synthesis? It would be great if this were an automated system – write the blog post, push a button and insta-podcast. Please let me know. Thanks!
Yes, I saw the one about Skype; the problem that we have with that is that the University currently doesn’t allow the use of Skype; so it’s not an option at the moment for students.
I’ve tested running the Second Life Client from the networked datadrive that we all get, and that seems to work as well, though I guess we’d have to have an “installed” version of SL somewhere for students to copy. (I copied mine from the USB stick to my networked storage & that worked fine).
When you ask about Podpress, are you talking about the synthesised speech? That’s actually done through Talkr – which does all the automating. PodPress is something I installed for uploading “normal” podcasts – though I’ve only actually done it once! (But I am going on an Audio/ Podcasting training course next week, so maybe I’ll have another go in the future)