Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier of Worldbridges have been kind enough to set up a tour of Second Life for us newbies who are feeling really clueless about the whole virtual environment thing. (That means me.) So, if you’re free tomorrow at 11 EST, head on over to Webcast Academy in the chat room and meetup for a introductory Skypecast. In an e-mail, Dave says:
BEFORE YOU START
Please go to secondlife.com before we start and sign up. You will be asked
for you credit card, or your paypal id. This is to be expected, as there
is a realy economy inside and they don’t want people signing up at random.
You will not be required to pay anything.But you might. After you see how cool it is. That’s what happened to me.
But for the purposes of looking around, you don’t need to pay.Try signing in once before we start to make sure you have the appropriate
graphic drivers…
Maybe we’ll “see” you there.
Hi Will, I am glad to see that you are getting involved with Second Life. I am also a member of Second Life and am enjoying the many thoughts and ideas cropping up in my mind on ways to use this space as I fly, walk, fall, smile and wander around. Its fun for now and who knows what it will become. By the way, thanks for the encouragement on the Worldbridges show the other night. I am the CompTech8 teacher who keeps on trying to set up blogs, online content and other 2.0 tools in my classroom regardless of a seemingly constant barrage of imposing filters! Now after three changes, I am up and running with Moodle, Elgg, and Skype. We will build from there.
You know! It’s like trying new foods. I’m not going to do it, because I have enough foods that I love to eat. 😉
Is that 11:00 am your time? So that means it will be, er, … if I can work out the time difference, and I’m not taking the dogs to stay at my mothers for the weekend (and I suspect I will be) I’d love to be there.
Will, Second Life seems to me, from the dabbling I’ve been doing inside, to have a lot of potential as a virtual meeting of the minds in education. I have visited the Second Life Library 2.0 a couple of times and met with some real life (RL) library media specialists working a help desk! It’s a little weird at first, but as with any good technology it grows on you. I hope to make it this morning at 11 EST (that’s correct?)
Second life is intriguing as a potential educational space, and so much more immediate than a text-based MOOV. As a newbie to SL, I liked the idea of a guided tour. My experience was not entirely successful… in addition to some technical difficulties experienced by many of the participants, I stumbled over not knowing how a skypecast works, not being familiar with Webcast Academy’s chat environment, and having no clue how to work the controls and views in SL. The tour process turned out to be too byzantine for me, and I dropped out about 20 minutes along.
The idea itself is excellent; this newbie, for one, could use more assistance along the way. I do appreciate the efforts of those who made this happen — early versions of everything have rough spots.
If you are interested in 3D environments, take a look at the ActiveWorlds Educational Universe: http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/index.asp . Similar to SecondLife, it has its own 3d browser that does not require the latest graphics capabilities of SecondLife. Last year, 4th graders from Vermont, Great Britain, and Singapore collabrated in this enviroment and produced a 10 chapter original fair tale. The project culminated with a virtual celebration in the Fairy Tale World. It was a great experience for all involved!