One More View from Second Life

Just had to post one more example from Claudia Linden. This dragon is a sculpture, not an avatar, created by a teenage girl on teen Second Life. It's really complex and beautiful. Click on the image and look at it full size.

Discovery Webinar on SecondLife

Just got finished listening to and watching a webinar on SecondLife by Claudia Linden, aka Claudia L'Amoreaux who works with the teen grid in SL. Of course she is totally committed to 3Di as she called it, 3D Internet, as the mode of the future. She thinks we will be meeting, living and working in virtual environments in the future as many are starting to do now. Her motto - Learn from the teens!

One example was that some kids in one teen grid area, Global Kids, were giving a tour for some kids from Singapore who had never been in SL before, and someone said "We need a tour bus." So a kid went off, built a tour bus, and came back in about 5 minutes and everyone hopped on the bus. That's it in the screen capture above.


She mentioned that there are university courses that take place entirely in Second Life, and participants mentioned University of Maine and Harvard Law as places where this is happening. She believes that 3D worlds increase "emotional bandwidth," i.e. instead of emoticons :( or happy faces, now you can see the whole person virtually as you are talking to them, so it's possible to provide some body language. I guess, although of the avatars I've seen they aren't so expressive. Maybe it's a learned skill. People now have mixed reality, meaning you could be sitting in a presentation at a conference, with your laptop open and talking in Second Life with other people who are sitting in the presentation in both Real Life and Second Life. Could get kind of confusing, but sounds interesting.

She also took us on a tour of the new Linden Labs (creators of Second Life) offices, virtual offices of course! They have most of their meetings "in world" now, using the voice chat. So should OTAN be having staff meeting in Second Life? I'm thinking about it! I have to get a little more proficient myself, first.

But meanwhile, I recommend checking out the other Discovery Education Network Webinars.

SL Video by Kids

I was just starting to get discouraged about the usefulness of Second Life in adult education, but Barry Bakin posted about this video made by kids doing a project on child soldiers made me think again. It's tough subject matter, reflects some real research, and tells a story. I would like to know what the process of making it was like. Can you see your learners doing a project like this?


Barry found this video on a blog by Kevin Jarrett, who has taken a semester leave to investigate Second Life for education, and is blogging about his experiences.

Doonesbury on Second Life

Did you catch Doonesbury on Sunday? Funny contrast of the generation that is into Second Life, and online life in general, and the generation that doesn't really get it. It also reflects how unapparent it is to the naked eye how much life takes place online. I think about this when I have spent a whole day sitting at my computer. I stand up at the end of the day and stagger out of the office, feeling the intensity of having communicated with many people, research topics, written documents, edited photos and maybe even videos, organized events, attended events, learned about new technologies, participated in national discussions, on and on. But to the observor it looks like I didn't do anything but sit there. How odd is our productive life these days??

Wiki Scanner

There's been lots of press recently about this young German guy, Virgil Griffith, who created a program to figure out where anonymous wikipedia edits come from, Wiki Scanner. The results reveal many corporate and individual attempts to slant articles one way or another. For example, someone at Wal-Mart changed the line "Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20 percent less than at other retail stores" to "The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage."

Examples are listed from a Wired article linked off the Wiki Scanner page. There is also a link to a Stephen Colbert segment talking about Wiki Scanner, in which he calles Wikipedia "Second Life for corporations," i.e. corporations can create their fantasy of reality there.

Wouldn't this make a great lesson in critical thinking about wikipedia articles?!

Reading about Second Life

Recently someone asked me in an email about my activities in Second Life. I wish I did have time to hang out in SL and get used to the interface and explore all the educational things that are hatching there. But it's a time sink. I'm interested and curious, but it's hard to find the time to play with it.

I just read several blog posts by Sylvia Martinez about her experiences in Second Life. She was invited to join an educators group in SL, and went into it open but somewhat skeptical. She said she has been through many new interfaces that people think are going to revolutionize the way we think, including BBS's and Tapped In, and although some good things happen, there are still big limitations.

Her first post is considering what SL is in relation to education. Her second one related her first SL visit and the things she learned to do. The third reflects on the whole SL experience and why it isn't that revolutionary and doesn't allow learners to do much that they couldn't do in First Life, and since the interface is kind of clumsy, and fairly hard to learn, as she said it better be a really good learning project to justify spending the amount of time learners would have to spend just to learn to navigate around.

The counter-argument is that yes, SL is clumsy and bandwidth-intensive right now, but this is the direction the Internet is headed and pretty soon we will be doing everything via avatars and virtual environments. Well, she's right, it's going to have to be a much better and more intuitive interface than it is right now. But then, remember DOS?