Posts tagged networking

This is the second post in a three part series that focuses on three questions for which I offered an answer during a presentation at the League of Innovation in the Community College’s CIT Conference in Nashville. The first part focused on the question: Why Educational Institutions Should Engage Second Life. This post is targeted toward educators early in their exploration of Second Life and will focus on “What is Second Life, and what can it do for educational environments?” This Flickr slideshow includes the vast majority of the screenshots I captured within Second Life to include within or to supplement the presentation. This is a long one ;-)

What is Second Life?

For starters, Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company offers a short video answer to this question online at Blip.tv

An important distinction for many, particularly educators, first entering Second Life, focuses on what Second Life is not. It is NOT a game. Second Life is a MUVE – a multi-user virtual environment; that is in contrast to a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG). MUVE is used to describe unthemed, non-game virtual worlds. As noted by Wikipedia, rules, general challenge and purpose are key components of games which often have turns and goals for players. Second Life does not possess any of those features. There are games that have been created within Second Life, but SL itself is not a game.

Alex Krotoski at Social Sim offers several specific arguments that Second Life is a social networking site more than it is a game. Tateru Nino at the SecondLife Insider highlighted an audio interview, which others have also recommended, in which Don Heider of the University of Maryland and Kim Gregson of Ithaca College discuss what Second Life is and is not. In my opinion, a strength of Second Life is the manner in which it draws people and professionals closer; it makes finding and interacting with others of like mind and interest much easier than it has been in the past. One of my first experiences in Second Life was stumbling across and having a 25 minutes voice Skype conversation with another educational technologist; withou t Second Life, I likely would have never met that individual living in Vancouver, BC given that I live in Texas.

Create a salient, virtual identity

The ability to establish a unique, salient personal identity contributes to the social nature and social networking capabilities of Second Life. A quick search at Flickr for “SecondLife + Avatar” reveals the extent to which unique, virtual identities can be established by Second Life residents/users. A YouTube video by Torley demonstrates avatar customization features within Second Life that make the uniqueness possible. This level of specificity in creating personal identities adds a dimension of personality that potentially enhances distance learning experiences and environments.

To get started in Second Life, I recommend that educators create their account and enter Second Life via the New Media Consortium’s account creation page which drops new users at the NMC Orientation Island geared specifically to introduce educator newbies to the SL environment. If you’re already in Second Life, the NMC Orientation Island (slurl) may still prove useful, and at the very least, hanging out there creates the opportunity to meet and help educator newbies.

Interact with the World, Create, Build

The ability to build and create in Second Life presents unique opportunities. In my opinion, Second Life bridges the gap between many educators and the ability to create interactive, 3D environments and simulations. SL provides the foundation necessary – the physics of the virtual world, the user interface, communication tools – to get started; educators can now simply join SL and start building specific tools and resources rather than building a virtual environment from the ground up. There is a learning curve, of course, and it’s not so simple that it can be overlooked, but the learning curve to build meaningful resources in SL is MUCH less than what we’ve encountered in the past. An architecture on the double video provides at least one example of the building process in Second Life.

Interact with Others, Communicate

SL absolutely possesses features expected of a social networking tool: friends list, instant messaging, social groups, public text chat, person search, and detailed personal profiles. It also provides, as of early Fall 2007, integrated voice communications. As educators spend more time in Second Life, there’s an increasing number of interactive communication tools designed specifically to facilitate teaching and learning type communications within the SL world.

What can education do with Second Life?

Networking & Collaboration. Again, I think the networking and social capabilities of Second Life are critical. As example, the Second Life Best Practices in Education conference was held entirely within Second Life in May of 2007; sessions ran from 12:00am Friday to 12:00am Saturday with more than 1,000 unique avatars attending at various times throughout the day. Other physical world conferences have simulcast into Second Life – making it possible for many more to attend and network with one another: TED Conference on TED Island
and the MIT5 Conference was held on the NMC Campus. Also, many educationally relevant groups exist in SL, with number of members listed with t

• 3200 – New Media Consortium
• 2174 – Real Life Educators in Second Life
• 453 – EDTECH Community
• 105 – PhD Research Community
• 23 – Association of SL Academic Research
• 709 – Educational Podcasting
• 1970 – ISTE
• 230 – Literature Alive
• 960 – Science Center
• 105 – AECT

Music. I’ve written about how live music works in Second Life, and it still amazes and impresses me. Suzanne Vega performed in Second Life which can be seen in this YouTube video. The music capabilities of SL make possible authentic learning environments to explore music performance along with the business management, promotion, venue management and new and mixed media aspects of music education. There’s already been research regarding the diversity of music represented in SL.

Political Science. Back in January, I attended the grand opening of the SL Capitol Hill location at which they streamed the audio/video of the CSPAN feed of Nancy Pelosi’s swearing in as Speaker of the House. Watching the event wasn’t the key, it was the opportunity to attend it in a crowd of politicos and press present in Second Life – a unique opportunity I’d never come close to in my physical world. Also, there have been protests and opportunities for political participation at that virtual Capitol Hill (slurl) along with political rallys and campaigns (slurl). In September 2007, Seton Hall University offered, in celebration of Constitution Day, a program focused on interrogation held at the Virtual Guantanomo Bay.

History. History-related resources in Second Life include virtual recreations of historical locations: Rome (slurl), Tudor England (slurl), and the Sistene Chapel by Vassar College (slurl), for example. Also, role play within those environments and others, makes history education more authentic. One example of that is the virtualization of WebQuests; San Diego State (slurl) offers one such environment focused on the experience of American settlers and immigrants. More recently, the Land of Lincoln initiative began planning meetings that are ongoing and supported by a Google discussion group as well.

Health Sciences. The possibilities within the Health Sciences are incredibly exciting. Most recently, the NESIM simulator by John Miller and colleagues provides outstanding opportunity for virtual learning. Similarly, additional clinical simulations in a slightly different format are possible, and simulations already exist to demonstrate and educate regarding heart murmurs (slurl) and respiratory ailments (slurl).

Literature & Language. In addition to historical recreations, like that of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater (slurl), the Literature Alive! project (slurl) by Desideria Stockton (SL name) has sought to engage learners by creating virtual representations of literary works like Dante’s Inferno. Sarah Robbins (SL: Intellagirl Tully) formerly of Ball State University and currently of MediaSauce created a rhetoric board which engages learners in a collaborative writing activity. Finally, with residents worldwide, Second Life provides opportunities for immersive language learning in Spanish, English, French “villages” in which specific languages are spoken and written by native speakers and language learners (more on earlier posts).

Science. The science-related resources already seem nearly endless – even at this still relatively immature stage of development of Second Life. From Spaceport Alpha to Genome Island to Virtual Ecosystem, Second Life is brimming with science resources. Inside Higher Education offered a write up on a project by the University of Denver to develop a virtual nuclear reactor in Second Life to facilitate a master’s degree program. I recently received a note card in Second Life that listed a tremendous number of science-related resources; that note card is available.

Other Disciplines. The earlier building video demonstrates how clearly relevant SL is to architecture and design. SL residents have developed performance venues and performed full length plays and ballets. Behavioral sciences are represented by a well-known hallucination simulation developed by University California Davis. The Teen Grid has hosted a College Fair for recruiting purposes. Broadcast journalism could explore participation via CNN’s i-Reports or the SL News Network. Generally, distance learning can engage SL directly via LMS integration like Sloodle – a mashup of SL with the Moodle LMS.

The challenge in all of it is to use Second Life for quality learning experiences and not just experiences for the sake of delivering instruction via Second Life.