Second Life

At first I thought I would not be very interested in Second Life, and I think that's still true for me personally. I took the tutorial the Univ of Md put together for creating an account, an avatar, going through the basic moves, and so on, because the link to the tutorial in Learning 2.0 required signing into a You Tube account. I still wasn't interested for myself, but this nine-minute tutorial ended with showing students how to show their power point presentations in Second Life. How cool! Escriber Island--where this takes place--is a place in SL that is used for teaching and a lot of schools use it.

In checking out a few of the library links, I found that the Cleveland Public Library--motto: The Peoples' University--has established three islands (which is property you can design and own in SL), the latest showcasing their collection of chess sets, where you can play life-size chess with your avatar. They also have concerts and other events your avatar can attend and participate in on their islands. I did tag and bookmark their site in our NCL2 account in del.icio.us. For the feint of heart, you can just click here.

It's all fun, but unless you can build a constituency in SL, it's probably time not very well spent by your IT people. I can see how teachers can use it to engage their students in a skill building activity they would perhaps not do with such gusto in real life. A little more difficult for libraries. Many a mini-survey to see how many SL'ers are out there in our community? Probably more than we think. (Thing #22)