Dear Christine,
I saw your SLED post, and was interested to go through your orientation experience. The orientation experience has been a very hot topiv on the mentor’s SLVOL (SL Volunteers List)
It is a very nice piece of work. The instructions are clear, and the design flows well.
I’m assuming your 7 stations are not intended to be a total course introducing SL. As a SL mentor, I spend most of my mentor time on the Orientation Islands where new persons first land. For the vast majority, getting their avatar to look the way they want it is the immediate and burning concern. But tackling that would take another 7 stations by itself.
The next is to answer the question “What can I do in SL?” They consider learning to move, communicate, use their inventory and search all just things to be done to get to that burning question. Naturally, many are quite impatient to get the tutorials out of the way. Your design is an improvement over the current hub and spoke orientation of Linden Labs. IBy indirectly answering pieces of the “What can I do?” question, you provide a motivation to move on in a clear and directed way.
Station 7 (dance) might be a little less clear for a new person. A little quibble on the overall design of this – you ask a new person to look up and click on the dance ball. That assumes they know how to move their camera properly. After your very careful tutorial on movement – that leap is a big one.
Specific terminology that might give a new person pause is “The instructions on the opposite side of the pavilion show how to use the pink and blue dance balls (left click on one and choose “Dance” or “Sit” whichever is displayed. Your avatar will be held in a dance- ready position until a partner clicks the adjacent dance ball” For a new person – “Why pink and blue – and which should I take?” and “What does “held in a dance-ready position” mean?”
Also – I believe the note card is in error here: “TTPS: When using the pink and blue dance balls, make sure you click the StandUp button on the bottom of the screen before you click on the dance ball. If you accidentally do this, you will need to close SL (File >Quit) and sign back on again to get rid of the problem.” It IS possible to stop animations on yourself without a relog, contrary to the note card’s
instructions. “WORLD/ Stop All Animations” does the trick.
Hope this helps
Edward Griffith (SL)
Ian Graham
Silly me – forgot to mention one other thing . . .
I also peeked at the slide show . . .
The layout and design on your slides is fine – no quibbles. SL gives you one big handicap though. Textures take forever to rez. That’s not your doing, but you might want to design for that can cut the information on each slide – and go with a 256 x 256 texture – and break things into more slides. In my subjective experience – cutting textures from 512 to 256 cuts loading time by a little less that 2/3.
Of course – Your mileage may vary.
My response to Ian:
Ian,
Thank you VERY much for your detailed review of KZ. I agree that avatar customization is a vital and immediate interest of most incoming residents. We felt that the scope of such an endeavor was too much for the assignment that we had in the BSU T&L course. However, I am currently designing a customization module for my final master’s project which I will post here when it is complete. In addition, we hope to develop a camera control module in the future which will be added to the beginning of the course since it is obviously one of the more important skills. I’m glad to see your review supports our own.
Your other suggestions are very astute as well. I am also concerned about rez time for the job aids (slideshow) and I will try to fix that using your suggestions. I was hoping to use a pre-rezzing slide show viewer but have been unable to locate one.
Thanks again!
Chris
(Silver Tomorrow)
