Second life -- RMIT launches an "island"
Educators are exploring the educational possibilites of sites such
as "Second Life".
This week RMIT has launched an "island" on Second Life, featuring
work by students in its School of Architecture and Design. Each
student was assigned their own piece of land and given a limited
number of objects and materials to work with. More information is
in an article in RMIT's magazine Openline
Edna (Education Network Australia) produces a
podcast called Elearning Insights. Its current
issue is entitled Second
Life as an Educational Tool and is freely available to listen
to, or to access via a feedreader.
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Comments
The architecture idea sounds pretty cool - although I shudder to think what it would have cost RMIT to get that space from Linden Labs! And what about the poor students getting their internet bills at the end of the semester - expensive downloads!
Barriers to using second life are the requirements for high bandwidth and a decent graphics card. As a non-gamer, I have never spent extra money getting a real graphics card and it is hard for an institution to justify this expense. (I'm sure you've all experienced the disappointment of running second-life on a standard UQL machine).
I also worry that second life is controlled by a corporation (Linden Labs) rather than being an open standards kind of thing like the internet. Having said that, The amount of innovation happening on second life is inspiring and may pave the way for a more open platform (and hopefully one that isn't so ugly)
Hear hear! I agree completely with Matt - maybe we should get to work!