This document discusses ways to document educational experiences in virtual worlds through machinima and object displays. It notes that vast amounts of data are generated during educational activities in virtual worlds, including student builds and revisions, project data, educational events, and avatar interactions. While it may not be feasible to preserve all this data, it is possible to document essential elements through machinima, photography, and displays of virtual objects to allow for recreation of experiences or development of similar courses. The document outlines challenges to documentation and provides examples of how builds, events, and displays can be captured and presented.

1. Documenting Educational
Experiences using
Machinima and Object
Displays
Marie Vans/amvans.Lapis
MLIS Student, San José State
University
May 20, 2014

2. This: and this:
•
Why Should we care?
Became This: And This:

3. What if we want to re-create
our builds or experiences?
Intricate Builds Modified over time
Similar Experiences & Events

4. Saving our work in Virtual Worlds
• Vast amounts of data may be generated
during the semester:
• Objects created in-world including revisions
• Project data used to create objects
• Educational events
• Avatar interactions
• Probably not feasible to preserve all data
for reuse in later courses
• It is possible to document essential data
for later development of similar courses.

5. Challenges for Documenting Virtual
Worlds
• Objects exist only in inventory or in the VW environment
if pulled out
• No other way to back up your work in-world
– Except maybe give copies to another avatar
• Other VW programs may let you import/export objects, but
generally not at this time in Second Life
• No way to do a complete snapshot of a multi-prim build
without linking everything
• Murphy’s Law states you will forget to link something.
• Collaborative builds are difficult due to permissions
structure of objects
• Can’t rely on access to a specific sim in the future
• Sims often disappear without warning

6. Capturing Spontaneous
Events
Palace in The Reign Renaissance Island
Meeting new friends Renaissance Fair

7. Document Builds
Inside Outside
DownstairsUpstairs

8. Creating Displays
Books about Cathedral Dome Book that can be thumbed through
Artifacts related to Renaissance Florence A Machinima documenting the Renaissance
Faire

9. Machinima, Photography, & Machinima of
Photography
• Take pictures & record video everywhere
possible and save them to hard drive.
• In-world events
• Field trips
• Own builds
• Other people’s builds
• Environment
• Machinima from video footage
• Machinima from sequence of photos

10. A Tale of Woe
• During the Renaissance Faire I shot ~6 hours of video
and took hundreds of pictures.
• After creating six machinima and uploading them to
YouTube, I “thought” I had moved the footage and
project elements to an external drive.
• I then erased the whole directory on my primary
computer.
• Somehow all that work was irretrievably lost.

11. Google to the Rescue (sort of)
• After surviving the heart attack, I realized all
was not lost:
• I had inexplicably uploaded many of the photos to
G+ before sending the originals to pixel heaven.
• I could download all my finished machinima from
YouTube
• A great deal of disk space was freed up by not
having all the footage I didn’t use lying around
taking up space.
• I learned a very valuable lesson

12. Final Remarks
• Videos and photos can be kept outside of the VW
environment
• YouTube, Vimeo, Picassa, Facebook, other Social
networks
• But… no guarantee your favorite social network will
still exist in 3-5 years
• So…keep copies of your photos and videos backed
up on your own computer &/or storage devices (2
copies if you are like me)
Don’t do
disk
cleanup
tasks while