Steve Spengler :: Blog :: Second Life

So was anyone able to get out to the Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference on Friday, May 25, 2007? It's a conference that promotes the use of innovative practices in education utilizing...you guessed it...Second Life!

I wasn't able to get to it but I did manage to view a few of the presentations at the Second Life Cable Network site. I highly recommend viewing the Kathy Dryburgh presentation. If you haven't figured it out yet...it's Kathy Schrock's Second Life persona. Her presentation does an excellent job at describing this awesome tool (and yes it's a tool...not just some virtual toy!) and how can promote a paradigm shift in K12 education.

I have to tell you that I've always thought of virtual reality from the angle that we can bring together people across distances and collaborate...something we strive to get our kids to do, right? In one of the grad classes that I teach, I always talk about the evolutionary future of the Web. Right now we navigate it but do we really navigate it? Users click a few links...maybe even a picture and we move around through the content. Ok but this isn't truly navigating...it is what it is...clicking on things that bring up other content. The example that I always use is that of the ActiveWorlds Educational environment. There are people collaborating for educational purposes...whether it's building the pyramids in Egypt or playing a virtual game of chess. Then came Second Life and the educational community (more higher ed but we're getting there in K12) began to see this as a truly navigatable Web. Think about how you, as users, now interact with and traverse around a 3 dimensional Web...now that's navigating! Sure Second Life is a little different because it's where we can gather to meet, socialize, build things, learn, attend, shop, everything that you can do in the "real" world, you can now do in the Second Life. People reinvent themselves...this is what the world is afraid of. I say challenge ourselves to think of creative ways to use Second Life. It's nothing more than an evolution of the modern day Web site. Yes. It is better to interact with people face to face but that is getting increasingly more difficult as our world becomes so much more flat. We have to begin to embrace these technologies that bring us closer together...even though the world is flat, it still takes REALLY REALLY long to get to the other side of it.

Steve