With e-Learning on the rise, the search is still very much on for the most effective way of delivering online courses, and encouraging interaction between participants at a distance. Second Life (www.secondlife.com), is the newest, hottest thing in the online teaching world suggests David Wortley, Director, Serious Games Institute, Coventry University (pictured) and presenter at Knowledge Oasis Muscat's (KOM) annual eGames Conference (31 March – 1 April, Muscat Hall, KOM). Wortley will deliver two presentations at the eGames Conference that will consider the opportunities offered by Second Life to education, tourism, heritage and culture.
”Harvard University are running classes on Second Life, and so are Trinity College Dublin. All accessible from the comfort of your own home. But it’s not just educators that are leveraging the power of Second Life you also have large corporations like Coca-Cola, Vodafone, IBM, Toyota, Sony and Adidas taking space in this virtual world,” comments Wortley.
”In simple terms,” says the Coventry University Director “Second Life is a three-dimensional online synchronous environment, known in Technorati circles as a Multi-User Virtual Environment, or MUVE. Think of a video game, where you can take on a 3-dimensional character (or avatar) and visit an entire world, populated by real people, who are accessing Second Life from their own computers. You can chat, both via text or audio chat, exchange ‘objects’, even buy and sell land. “Second Life may not be new – MUVEs have been around since the late 1970s - but it is most definitely cutting edge, to the point where it’s being covered on Britain’s BBC TV and radio, and in publications such as The Financial Times and Business Week.”
Founded by the Real Networks CTO Philip Rosedale in 2003, Second Life is a privately owned virtual world, which currently has approximately 12 million registered users worldwide. “In Second Life you sign up for free, design a 3D representation of yourself and move around a rich online world, in which the residents interact, build houses, design clothes, make gadgets, dance at virtual clubs and, yes, attend Harvard courses,” remarks Wortley.
But is Second Life all just fun and games? There are plenty of people who refuse to refer to Second Life as an online game, and rightly so. Whilst there is plenty of gaming occurring ‘in-world’, there is also a burgeoning collection of more serious projects, from courses in cyber law taught under the auspices of Harvard Law School (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/), to awareness-raising projects for young people (http://www.holymeatballs.org), and even a group dedicated to discussing and exploring the potential for education in such environments (www.simteach.com).
From a tourism perspective - and an issue Wortley will tackle at the eGames Conference - Tourism Ireland will spend RO19 million in the first six months of 2008 on promoting Dublin on Second Life. Tourism Ireland’s marketing objective is to encourage those who visit this virtual world to come and visit the real Ireland during 2008. Second Life is one of the largest virtual worlds in existence and 60 per cent of Second Life’s users come from Ireland’s four biggest tourist markets: Great Britain, the US, Germany and France. Half of those users are aged over 30 – a key demographic market for Ireland’s tourism sector. “With this kind of activity going on, it seems only sensible for those working in Oman’s tourism sector to consider how Second Life could help them reach their overseas markets,” argues Wortley.
© 2008 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
