Second Life Conferencing

I attended the Stepping into Literature conference in Second Life, organised by Learning Times. This was an all day event designed to investigate the effectiveness of immersive environments as teaching and learning tools. Do 3D sims have affordances for disinterested students? How ‘sticky’ is Second Life?

conference in second life

The JISC report Learning in Immersive worlds prepared by Sara de Freitas suggests that the game and simulation based learning has the potential to transform the way teaching and learning is developed. After the Stepping conference I felt I had ‘learned’ on so many different levels. What ever your discipline; student, teacher, technologist, designer, librarian – I think it would be hard to deny that virtual immersion can be a powerful tool in the learning process.

Second Life

second life logo

My intention was to blog my return to the virtual world of Second Life but apart from checking it will run on a new laptop I’ve haven’t logged back in yet. Which supports the notion that unless you have a need you are unlikely to take the action. This applies to the majority of the tools in the Web 2.0 toolbox. They have to have an affordance otherwise they can’t stick.

Until I return to Second Life, I’ve added these links which demonstrate how some universities are developing their virtual identity in an alternative world.

(All links open in a separate window. Close the window to return to this page).