Before 2nd Life there was Active Worlds, including some set aside for education. Friends and I built a virtual world and held conferences there. Bonnie de Varco built a virtual high school. We sent in our avatars at appointed times, looked around and talked.
You'll find a screen shot here, plus links that still work, even after a decade: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/lsystems.html (no avatars shown -- a point of view shot, facing north. Bonnie and I overlapped when she was chief archivist for the Buckminster Fuller Institute. A lot of our content was related to polyhedra, which made a virtual world in some ways ideal, as we could move amidst the very subject matter we were yakking about. Gerald de Jong was developing his Elastic Interval Geometry and we'd meet about that as well (meeting in person was more satisfying though -- for all its bells and whistles, 2nd Life etc. are no more than a multi-user doll houses). Having attended a Howard Rheingold lecture recently (he's made studying Cyberia (i.e. 2nd world i.e. cyberspace) a lifetime focus, starting with The Well) I am sensitive to the fact that many people just stumble around in Second Life and find it far from intuitive. I think one needs to provide a strong use case up front, to recruit willing participants. My example, of wanting to make Polyhedra a focus, or L-systems, or other art, and of wanting to pioneer the shared doll house experience with a virtual worlds anthropologist (Bonnie), might serve as a basis for future meetups along these lines. Kirby Citations / annotations: http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/portfolio.htm (mentions Virtual High School) http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-mobs.html (see 3rd from last paragraph) On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 9:58 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't know if this educational topic is allowed on this but here goes... > > I do online math classes with video conferencing and a shared whiteboard. > > I'm trying to find out if doing virtual classes in Second Life with avatars > offers any benefits. I've read up on this topic and the reports vary. > > Anyone have any experience going to a "class" in Second Life? > > cs > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
