Second Life – Opinion March 16, 2008
Posted by Ed 831 Ken in Uncategorized.trackback
I experienced a program called Second Life this week. There were a lot of people in our session. This added somewhat to the frustration of things not working so smoothly. I felt sorry for the instructor, Kirk Kezema, as more and more people started to enter the room.
This is a really neat application for distance education. I taught an online learning course called Cisco Networking. It had some multimedia parts to the course; however, it was quite dry in parts. The face to face part of the course balanced out the pure online component to make it more interesting. If we had a SL type of environment, the students would have been more motivated.
I’ve never been a gamer; however, those that are would be highly motivated by this type of application.
Second Life does have some neat features the more I explore it, but I think it needs a lot of time invested to experience much of it. I am not sure if it is for everyone, but at least you now can speak up about your initial reactions to the environment.
I remember in the early 90’s? at a SACE conference in Regina a presenter was talking about using avatars to teach a virtual course at a university in the U.S. The avatars were essentially dashes and dots in a virtual room.
He directed much of his message toward the gamers in the room. Out of the 20 people there, I was the only “gamer”.
I wish I could remember who that presenter was!
Ken…it was great having you along for the tour. I think you are on the right track with your comment, “this is a really neat application for distance education.” In time I believe 3D virtual environments will become a wonderful tool for distance education.