Do You Need a Second Life - A 4-part article
by Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.
- Part 1: Second Life: Do You Need One?
- Part 2: Where’s the Learning?
- Part 3: Virtual Bacon Talks Second Life
- Part 4: Second Life: Do You Need One?
What does a symposium in Second Life look like?
I’ve participating in the Symposium on Creativity in and about SL. Here’s one of many photos taken. (I’m not in this one :)). Click on the link to see and read more.
The surprising power of synthetic identity: Virtual Infidelity?
Is there such a thing as virtual infidelity?
Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? One man’s virtual marriage is taking a toll on his real one. Researchers are discovering the surprising power of synthetic identity.
An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about relationships and virtual worlds.
Here’s a graph showing the most popular online worlds.
Comments and discussion are encouraged!
New Words - New Ideas - 3D Web/Flat Web
I don’t know if these are going to hold, but the New Media Consortium, NMC tends to cut the edge so I’m going to go with them. 3D web verses the flat web. I like them. It’s easy to understand what we’re talking about. The terms Web 1.0 and 2.0 were only useful to those in the know.
Reflections from the Farm
In SLRL, the Second Life Research Listserv, I was happy to see an insightful conversation about the abundance of brick and mortar emulations of institutions (and their concepts) in an environment that has the potential to be more.
There were two distinct voices in this conversation. One pointed to the land grab mentality. Akin to the movement west as result of the Homestead Act of 1862, many “headed out” with no idea what they’d do, or what could be done, once they arrived. I completely agree with the author, and in particular with his point that this current trend suggests we’ve not yet begun with innovation in SL. This is precisely what the Farm is about and why it’s annexed to the SDSU brick and mortar campus. More on that shortly.
The other voice in this conversation pointed out tha new immigrants often attach themselves to pre-existing infrastructures as a way of anchoring themselves in their new lives. Many of us are new immigrants in SL, particularly those of us coming from academia. From a communities of practice standpoint, or from an instructional design standpoint, novices or noobs (SL language for Newbies) require the same infrastructures immigrants would. We annexed the farm to the SDSU campus because it provides such an infrastructure. The Farm, on the other hand, aims to break away from this model. For example, we have a Sky Meadow, 300 meters above the Farm where you initially arrive on. You can teleport to it. I think you can fly to it as well. Anyway…
A significant portion of my time over the next 6 months will be spent connecting with the communities pursuing innovations and hopefully developing some.At a basic conceptual and technological level, SL is a simulation. One of the questions we explore with simulations is: What would happen if ….?. This kind of question can be asked in any discipline and at many levels of expertise in a knowledge domain. Designing a complex sim is time intensive however. So part of my goal is to explore sims. Has anyone designed a sim where learners embody an avatar whose gender, ethnicity, race or age is different than in RL? Then in a instructor-designed scenario or perhaps out and about in SL, learners face tasks and activities in which they experience the viewpoint of the Other? SL has a server-side physics simulation, which means that objects fall, bounce and collide correctly. Using scripts, a designer can change how the built-in physics affect an object. How is this capability being used for learning sims?
Suzanne
SL Aurili Oh
This is Your Brain on Video Games
I’d like to preface this article by pointing out that Second Life is not a game. It doesn’t have a predetermined setting, storyline or plot. It has no built-in tasks, goals and rewards. In SL participants (residents) design what happens there. This distinction makes SL more educationally significant than a video game because it allows us to design learning.
Research on video games is relevant to SL. It helps us understand immersive, digital environments where users engage in socially-situated experiences, activities and tasks which are the key elements of designed learning in such environments.
Excerpts from the article
‘To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. More than 70 percent of video games contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk, and are popular because they challenge mental dexterity.”
“If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks.”
Read More
Penn State Faculty looking at SL
Penn State’s Educational Technology Services has five Faculty Engagement Initiatives in Virtual Worlds.
Read More about how five Penn State faculty thinking about using SL.
