Reflections on Second Life

If a University CTO is going to have a Blog then sooner or later there should probably be a post about Second Life, SL, or Multiuser Virtual Environments, MUVE. This Post time has come. Second Life is too good to ignore. We have been dabbling in SL for over a year with a fair amount of success. We have land that has been heavily developed below, at and above the surface. We have EdTech folks that have definitely made their mark in this virtual community. We have taught courses in SL that have proven to be effective. We can confirm all of the educationally positive feedback. But we also confirm that SL is a complicated and intimidating place where one needs extra hours to stumble around just to get to a level where these positives start to prove out.

So how will SL fit into Higher Education? First, lets remember that academia has always craved this environment. Already it is all that we dreamed it could be and it is almost free. It will probably only be used by a small percent of technologically adventurous faculty and researchers who will introduce it to willing students. But I believe that it will heavily influence Educational Technology over the next decade. Universities will have their own virtual worlds serving as 3D portals to their collaborative services. Our Learning Management Systems will probably find the most natural migration to this space, Sloodle, being a path for us. SL has proven to eliminate multimedia format barriers and is not a bad option for WebEx style conferencing.

A positive or negative observation is that we see these MUVE’s reintroducing class participation (virtual) to a net generation of students that have been shifting away from human interaction. We may agree that this should not be happening, but if so, we can’t overlook this solution.