Educational CyberPlayGround ®

SECOND LIFE

Second life, MySpace, Flickr and all the other web 2.0 aren't places to go, but things to do, and a way to collaborate and express yourself. If you can get millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building it, you've got a web 2.0 biz you can sell for millions of dollars.

Intro to Second life.

Perhaps a bit boring to watch, really more meant as an explanation for people from the business world not as familiar with virtual worlds, or second life.

 

Where Second Life succeeds is in its virtual economy to do anything of consequence, you must pay the $10 monthly fee.
It's just like your real life. The amount of offensive material can be discomforting. There are areas on the world that are rated PG, but those areas seem to be more expensive to live in.

Tim Allen aka
Flipper Peregrine

Hi,

I'm one of the founders (along with my wife) of the yearly Second Life Community Convention, the largest yearly gathering of 3-D virtual world enthusiasts http://www.SLConvention.org

I hope these links help get you started:

Education Players

Educators are using it to teach foreign languages within Second Life. Right now in Second Life, even in its infancy people are actively:

  • training their employees in high risk activities.
    The CIA is doing biohazard containment training as well - families who have a child with Aspegers have a private area, so the child can learn social skills within the comfort of their own home
  • communities are forming around television shows.
  • People are learning real life skills: programming, Adobe Photoshop, 3-D Modeling
  • architects are using it for rapid promotyping - that doesn't even begin to get into the spaces of P.R. value for marketers, viral / emergent behavior, film-making, and some of the other new industries popping up - in beta now, voice communications are being activated, with twice the clarity of Skype.

Clark Aldrich leads SimuLearn's eLearning and simulation external consultancy, and his passion is in creating great intellectual property. For both enterprises and content producers, Mr. Aldrich does eLearning and simulation design, project management, and analysis, including short-term projects, such as audits, design reviews, brainstorming and planning session, writing, workshops, and strategy, and medium and long-term projects such as simulation research, design, and implementation.a consultant for an e-learning company,

10 things Aldrich sees missing from SL as an educational tool.

When people talk about it as a platform for Educational Simulations, I am less excited. In fact, here are my list of top ten missing features from Second Life:

SL Education Track

What does Second Life and other virtual worlds provide education that no other medium is able to provide?

  • Educational Simulations in Second Life
  • Using open source client to improve user engagement of Second Life
  • How to best provide orientation for new users in the academic environment
  • How to promote inter-institutional and international discussion and cooperation on educational projects
  • Ethics in research and working in Second Life

Second Life Educators community (SLED) is a place for educators new to virtuality to figure out how things are done. Teaming up to tear down a campus and redesign it is one possible use.

San Jose State Library Celebrates Opening in Virtual World

How business uses Second Life

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created an immersive, interactive 3D exhibit for avatars in a virtual world. Of course, there are humans behind those avatars who are learning from the exhibits, learning things like what it's like to fly through or around a hurricane in one of the NOAA's research planes or a weather balloon, and other things such as "the effects of global warming on large glaciers" and "what undersea caves and marine life looks like from a submarine," CNET reports (with a photo of what one of NOAA's demos looks like).

Child-p0rn trading alleged in Second Life
Virtual world Second Life Law enforcement in Halle, Germany, is looking for Second Life players "who are reportedly buying sex with other players posing as children, as well as offering child p(0)rn(0)graphy for sale," A German investigative reporter who's a member of Second Life told The Guardian "he had been 'shocked to see' the virtual child p(0)rn(0)graphy meetings to which he was invited for 500 Linden dollars - around 1.50 [$2.99]. He said the same group of people subsequently put him in touch with traders in real child p(0)rn(0)graphy." Second Life's parent, Linden Lab, in San Francisco, is working with police to find the offending players. Virtual child p(0)rn(0)graphy is not a crime in the US, but in Germany it's a crime "punishable by up to five years in prison,". According to just-released comScore research, 16% of Second Life users are German, making Germany "the largest country of origin in the 'game'" of some 16 million players (followed by the US).