Education and the virtually real: Second Life
From the same posting by David Weinberger that I just mentioned comes this:
Nikolaj Nyholm talks about how Imity.com uses Second Life to prototype user interactions.
Matt Bidulph has been doing Second Life mashups. You can use http, he says, to pipe out info from SecondLife, including what people are saying. Cory Ondrejka, Second Life CTO, says that there's been an explosion of interest and development since they put in http requests. (Someday, he says, they'll make every object a Web server.) He says that there are 100 classes a week inside Second Life in how to use the API and scripting language. He looks forward to the day when there is a Second Life renderer inside a Web browser.
Now, I don't (yet) use Second Life but I am interested in ways of prototyping things (there's more than one feed-in here to using similar ideas in education). Up until recently, I was prepared for things like this:
Video scenarios present people interacting with fictional technology by faking the actual functionality through the use of film techniques. … the idea of making little movies that demonstrate interaction ideas is really liberating. Orange Cone
That's exciting, but now I'm suddenly aware of Second Life being used by designers and businesses in similar, or near similar, ways — see here for two examples: W Hotels ('opening a virtual hotel in Second Life to test out "virtual architecture" for ALOFT, a new hotel idea') and American Apparel ('opened a virtual store … people can outfit their avatars. That gives American Apparel an inside look at what they want in the real world'). Amazon seems to be going SL-wards, according to Business Week online, and Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web Services Evangelist, reports he has been working on 'a prototype for a developer relations “outpost” in Second Life' — see the images he's posted there.
There's going to be a lot of this and very soon we'll be using Second Life (etc) in teaching, too. Some have got there already. Here's an example from NMC Campus Observer, focusing on the work of 'Lorenzo Stork (a.k.a Larry Miller, from University of Tennessee)', interviewed (of course) in SL itself:
Lorenzo/Larry went on to talk about his first in world project, a Continuing Medical Education class … in cooperation with the University of Illinois, Chicago Medical College Library. … Doctors will get a small dose of content, but they will then have to address a patient scenario related to hypertension and diabetes. In the scenario, they will be required to use some of the Second Life library resources accessed via Info Island, then return at the end for some in world discussion. Participants will be practicing doctors working on their CME credits, and it is Lorenzo/Larry’s hope that the doctors build some of their experience in Second Life before the workshop.
NMC Campus Observer is one site to watch closely. This from their About page:
The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.
Ultimately, Second Life was chosen, and working with an advisory board drawn from its membership, the NMC began designing a space within Second Life expressly to support collaboration, learning, insightful interaction, and experimentation — and to encourage exploration of the potential of virtual environments. (See the Concept document for the NMC Campus for additional background.)
Other SL-centred developments I've noticed recently include the communal writeboard facility in Second Life and (going back to the opening idea of mashups) the ability to listen to Last.fm stations within SL.
Mitch Kapor is reported recently as saying (this via his own blog):
Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”
