Rebooting SecondLife: Machinima as a Teaching Tool for Health Law Regulation

We’ve all heard about SecondLife as a real-time collaborative virtual world, but what about using the video-building possibilities with SecondLife to bring fact patterns to life for your class?  

Machinima, which is computer animation created in real-time 3D graphic virtual worlds or games, offers endless creative and efficient options for video.  With today’s fast-paced, media-rich world,  Georgia State Law Adjunct Professor Randall Hughes wanted to use SecondLife machinima to engage his students during his Health Law Regulation course.

With avatar actors, virtual sets, and the improved lip-synch capabilities in SecondLife, GSU’s SecondLife developer/machinimists Paula Christopher and James Poulakos helped Professor Hughes create an animated educational tool to explore the potential legal issues surrounding Physician-Hospital Joint Ventures. 

Compared to other methods of presenting a role-playing scenario,  Second Life offers these advantages, saving money and time for your organization:

• No sets, studio or costumes were needed for our actors.
• Voice actors do not need to be present at the same time & place.
• Less time is spent creating the virtual sets and characters than would be spent if we used other animation options, because some of the basics already exist in Second Life. We can adjust pre-existing  "avatars" rather than creating new ones, and costumes can be had for free,  or very cheaply (on the order of dozens of dollars rather than  hundreds). We don't need to create the sky, the ground, or very much  lighting.
• Creating assets, such as costumes and sets, tends to be far easier in Second Life than in traditional 3D animation tools.

In this presentation, we will explain the design process, development, class use, and student reactions for this project.

Remote Presenters via Skype: 

• Randall Hughes – Adjunct Professor, GSU College of Law
• Paula Christopher – Instructional Designer/SecondLife Engineer, GSU Information Systems and Technology
• James Poulakos – Animator/SecondLife Machinimist, GSU Information Systems and Technology

On-site Presenter:

Christine Heaton – Educational Technology Specialist, GSU College of Law