Second Life Update

After attending the Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) training/information session on Friday I am starting to see some uses of the program, but still not to sure about how useful it will be for college education. The island we have got is for over 18’s only so this cuts down on most of our students with them been 16-18 year olds. The plot we have is surrounded by other colleges participating in this pilot scheme and at the moment is just a barren patch of land for just our students and a central island which can be used and booked out, for a communal area.

The communal area has large screens that can have videos or presentations shown on them with a large amphitheatre seating area around the outside, so this could be used as an online lecture theatre. There are also possibilities of using the space and main building as an art gallery to display students work, or even booking out individual room for online meetings.

This is all very good but how will it work in practice, the online lecture theatre idea has potential but will students really log on and actively participate in this virtual online lesson? And how will it compare to just using the VLE to download the PowerPoint, and using the inbuilt chat function.

Using the buildings as an art exhibition also could have its uses but it would just be the current students that could access this to see the work, so they could go see the ‘real’ work in college.

Other proposed uses could be to model scenarios for example a reception in a hair dresses to help with client services.

I’m starting to warm to the idea of Second life and can see how it would be useful for long distance collaboration, but for use in a college where people can be brought together either in person or online using the VLE it may be overkill. There is no doubt that social networking is increasing and becoming more useful and there is a strong belief that this is how things are going to be in the future. My opinion is that the web started off all text based and simple then developed in to heavy picture based and flashes sites and has now gone back to the simple layout, indicating that users are more interested in the content rather than the snazzy layout. Is Second Life just a graphical front end to what’s already out there?
How are we going to use our plot of land remains under planning but I am researching how other institutes use theirs(http://secondlifegrid.net/about/how).

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