Thursday, October 7, 2010
BP5_Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is a virtual environment that was created back in 2003 by Linden Labs to give users a place to go and create their own immersive virtual world, all built by the users themselves. In 2003, the Second Life world was a complete blank slate and since then, users have gone in, utilizing the tools that the creators of the virtual world created, and built up a thriving community of designers, creators and content makers all for the benefit of other residents in Second Life, who then go and buy or use the created content. Due to all this user generated content, a huge social network has developed and countless number of user groups have been formed within the Second Life environment. Quite a few colleges and universities have started to tap into this new virtual environment in hopes to enhance their student's social connectivity as well as giving them a place to expand their creativity and networking.
Second Life has made a huge presence as one of the most widely used, if not the top one, virtual environments for their users. Even the Second Life viewer, the interface to interact with the environment has been customized by users as they make their own interfaces like the Imprudence Viewer or the Phoenix viewer. Linden Labs has constantly encouraged users to expand the world as they liked and now when a new user logs in for the first time, they see the culmination of years of collaboration and user generated content all around them. One downside to Second Life, however, is that it does have a pretty steep learning curve on how to use the viewer as well as getting around in the virtual environment. It does take time to actually start doing the more complex content creation to learn the tools available, but there are many different websites and wikis out there written by other users giving helpful tips and tutorials to make learning the tools easier. In all, Second Life is one of the most comprehensive social networking and user content created virtual worlds in use today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The use of this virtual environment opens up some amazing potential for growth of curriculum outside of the normal conventions. Some basic instructions and your students can be off and running in different countries, try their hand at constructing items that you may have discussed in class, or even just meet for group work. I think the work you have done recently, not just on making the Full Sail campus – but now going back and really opening it up is outstanding. I’m very interested to see where you end up with this all in your AR.
ReplyDeletePeople really relate to their avatars in second life. In our group, if someone accidentally ended up at the bottom of the ocean, they responded emotionally as if this had really happened to them! I think this makes SL a powerful tool for providing simulations to help teach about a variety of things, including history. You are right about the learning curve, though. When using SL with students, you have to weigh the time invested in creating an avatar and just learning to basics with the actual learning you would want to take place. I think it is still more suitable for college students, or high school students in collaborative programs with colleges.
ReplyDelete