I stayed up till 1am to attend the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 at Cybrary City in Second Life and saw Stephen Downes presenting “Virtual Worlds in Context” in real life and streamed into Second Life.

Unfortunately, as fantastic as some of Stephen’s observations are on other topics, I was disappointed. Maybe if he engaged in Second Life with a more open-mind and developed some understanding of the various projects that are being undertaken by the community, his presentation would have been more interesting.

The thing is…. I agree with many of the limitations that Stephen has identified. Most of us who are experimenting in Second Life are well-aware of the many issues that it does present. Free and open-source would be better, there are problems with the grid and scalability, economic issues, the lack of democracy etc. Believe me – I have cursed the Lindens on more than one occasion! Arrgh… LAG!

However, having acknowledged those limitations, I believe that some of the projects happening in Second Life are educationally and socially valuable, innovative, engaging and fun! The potentials of Second Life are definitely not worth disregarding simply because the ideas are not entirely new, or that some of the educational ideas being explored in Second Life have previously been explored in MUDs and MOOs or Active Worlds.

3D virtual worlds offer unique opportunities for shared experience, for creating immersive environments and interactive objects, for role-playing and communicating. Second Life can be clunky and frustrating to use at times- but it gives us a glimpse of where some of these possibilities are headed in the future.

There is work to be done to better illustrate the educational uses, to address the technical restraints and to find ways to draw attention to the really amazing things that you can do inside a virtual world. We need to develop facilitation skills, we need better tools for information sharing… and yes, the best scenario would be a completely free and open source virtual world.

But I’m not going back to MUDs and MOOs, nor SimCity….. Second Life takes it so much further! The educational potentials of immersive, experiential learning are so exciting, and the work being done in Second Life to explore the uses of virtual worlds will heavily influence the virtual worlds we engage with in the future – both for educational and social purposes.

And I don’t care what Stephen says… it’s not a game and it’s not “like Star Trek… with casinos”!

posted by jokay Wollongong on Cybrary City using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]