Second Life

It was weird.

It was very weird.

I kind of liked it.

The experience of wandering around a virtual world was surreal because you to think very heavily about what it was that you were doing.  Motor movements and gesturing, things we take for granted in our everyday life became frustrating as you were learning how to do it all over.  In saying that it was remarkable that you could be anything that you wanted to be.  Once you got the basics of walking and talking and changing clothes the potential to be anything got to be the focus.  It really is boundless and limited by your own creativity.  It was funny because it reminded me of an office episode where dwights second life avatar is just  the same as his everyday character.  He got that you could be anything that you wanted to be, he just wanted to be himself.

The potential for second life seems boundless.  It was an amazing experience because before having entered the world I had no idea of its existence.  It was like uncovering a parallel universe where people can do anything they want.  In terms of an application for learning i can see it becoming an excellent avenue for what we do in elluminate.  You could easily have tutorials in this environment and set it up so that people could investigate/explore their surroundings.  Breaking up into smaller cooperative groups would be easy and discussion would different because you are talking to someone as opposed to the phone conversation of elluminate.

I really like the idea of building an environment and allowing students to have an immersive experience.  The potential to explore all different worlds is fantastic as you can go to the bottom of the ocean or a different planet and “experience” what a different world would be like and bring that back to the classroom for discussion.

Imagine a world where textbooks are now enviroments and students explore them rather than flip the pages and do the exercises.