Technical Implementation of Second Life at Buffalo State College

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Technical Implementation of Second Life at
Buffalo State College

• By Roland Rachinger

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Background

• Manager, Enterprise Desktop Systems
• Received Bachelors degree from BSC in Computer
  Information Systems in 1999
  
• Currently seeking a Masters degree in Creative
  Studies from BSC
  
• Worked at the college for 7 years in IT

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Buffalo State computing

• Over 3,000 desktop computers on campus
• Half are in faculty/staff offices while the rest
  reside in labs and SmartClassrooms
  
• 180 labs and growing
• Students have user level access in labs
• This is done so they cannot modify or install
  software

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Second Life pilot

• Started pilot in Fashion Technology lab run by
  Elaine Polvinen
  
• Lab consists of 19 Dell computers approximately 1
  year old
  
• SL updates can only be run by an administrator on
  the computer
  
• Elaine was granted administrative rights
• Unable to automate update process

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Alternatives for updating

• Granting students read/write/modify permissions
  to the application folder
  
• The hope was to give students the capacity to run
  SL updates while restricting their ability to
  alter other programs
  
• Used additional application which grants
  administrative rights for one program only
  
• This program gives them full administrator rights
  to SL only
  
• Drawback is it requires a fair about of initial
  configuration

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In the future

• Successfully tested SL on older computer
  hardware
  
• Were required to update video card drivers on
  some of the older models
  
• Attempted to load SL onto a USB flash drive with
  mixed results
  
• Were able to run the application but were not
  able to run updates
  
• It may no longer be required to run all available
  updates to run SL