The Lab

Second Life

And How It Can Help

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a tricky thing to define, but when you boil it down to the simplest idea: Second Life is an enormous online virtual world. This virtual world is 'always on' and users can access it 24/7. Second Life was not created specifically for educational purposes, but just like our real world, users have, and will continue to, create, collaborate, and construct what they see as valuable.

It's important to remember the handful of unique aspects Second Life offers in order to understand it's potential significance within the educational realm. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world where users can create a representational avatar of themselves. This avatar serves as a medium between the user, the environment, and other users within the world. Many people will perceive Second Life as a game, but it is not. Games have set objectives or manufactured conflicts for the user to resolve or conquer. Second Life fails to embody this definition. It is a completely open-ended platform where avatars do exactly what a real-life counterpart does: buy or sell materials, listen or create music, travel the world, gamble, or in our case- learn.

Consider the following video about the various educational uses of Second Life:

In addition to it's ability to potentially replace online courses, Second Life should be seen as a supplement to learning. More interestingly, however, is it's ability to harbour cross-cultural learning experiences with people, places, or things from all around the world. For example, you may be teaching a Social Studies lesson on geology, rock formations and types of rocks- Second Life would allow users to digitally explore the Grand Canyon as a means of consolidating this content. Perhaps you are a guidance councillor educating your students on the potential universities they are considering after their senior year - Second Life affords the opportunity to digitally visit those campuses, interact with the environment there, and for a user with the motivation and comfort level, could literally speak to current students or professors at that school, all within a digital world.

Our design project is essentially encouraging readers to immerse themselves in a particular Second Life community in order to critique and analyze the design aspects required for them on an individual level in order to determine the effectiveness of VR in their pedagogies.

The Lab

What is Second Life?

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Our design project is essentially encouraging readers to immerse themselves in a particular Second Life community in order to critique and analyze the design aspects required for them on an individual level in order to determine the effectiveness of VR in their pedagogies.