website tracking

Thursday 22 November 2007

Polling Second Life Style

I recently had the chance to run a live session in SL with a class of candidates. Up until this point I had either delivered walk through type presentations of the virtual world, so having people seated at machines and being able to give them some actual tasks and activates was something that I had been looking forward to. The event was a Continuing Professional Development session, and candidates were either completely new or newish to SL. One activity I was particular keen to tryout was my idea for a poll. Normally this would be a case of selecting some kind of option from a form, but as this was SL, and I wanted to cash in those particular aspects and unique social opportunities that the environment affords us. I carried out the exercise by first getting everyone to teleport up to a skybox, where I showed them a series of slides on one of my boards. Each of the slides would present a particular scenario on which that had to respond by indicating a level of agreement or confidence.


Now rather than clicking a panel or button of some kind, I had made a simple two prim scale from 1 to 10. To vote, each person simply stood next to the number they felt related to their measure i.e. 1 low confidence in the statement and 10 high confidence; there were five questions in all. When everyone was in place I took a screen shot, after which avatars made their way back to the board for another question.


I posted the results, by uploading the images onto a series of boards and used the llsettext to display each question. The exercise proved worthwhile I think. There was one moment of amusement and amusement though, when one new avatars keen to get in place ran to the high confidence end of the scale, failed to stop in time and plunged over the edge of the skybox 351 meters into the watery surroundings of Shimmer island.