pheWork

Some friends and colleagues have finally convinced me to check out Second Life, so I finally spent some time last night exploring the system and getting used to it. Once I got through the training and made it off of the initial islands, I was able to explore a bit.

My first impression is that... for the interactions you get, etc... there is a LOT of technology overhead in terms of computer processing time, rendering, network lag, etc. I didn't bother optimizing anything because I wanted to get a sense of what it would look like from a base student perspective. That said, once you get in to it, it's not too terribly difficult to get to where you're going, explore, find people, and have some decent conversations.

I started digging around, and found a few areas that were educationally focused and met a few people that were very friendly and helpful. One person from UC-Davis showed me a YouTube video that they had created for a conference. The very cool thing about it was that - since Second Life allows you to create items and environments, the video was able to take someone in to a Van Gogh painting, and interact with different elements in the painting. This approach allowed for a lot more in the way of visual interpretations of the art - and I could see how a lot of cool learning materials could be produced this way. One thing that it's really missing is "non-player characters" or the computer-controlled people that you talk to in games and simulations. These are a major tool for learning the environment and learning about what's going on in simulations.

Second Life could provide a very low-threshold means for instructors to create (and share) interactive models, virtual tours of biological structures, and a wealth of different experiences that may not have been possible (or at least commonly approachable) before.

This may not be the environment (lots of detractions and distractions I won't go in to here), but at the very least it's a great "proof of concept" and definitely worth some more investigation. The snapshot above is my "avatar" in front of the New Media Consortium's virtual facilities.