INF 506 - Second Life and Virtual Reality

I signed up for Second Life last night, but haven't really looked around yet.  I asked my son if he had heard of it - he's 16, and plays a lot of those first person games, and does a lot of map building.  He creates beautiful, seamless maps, that other players can use, I'm actually amazed at what he can do.  But he doesn't like Second Life.  Pressing him, he said he didn't like the interface, the building tools he deemed inadequate, and knowing the somewhat nefarious uses some inhabitants of the metaverse put it to, he refuses to consider it.  His objections are both technical and moral.  He is an interesting 16 year old.

Reading the articles for module two about Second Life, I felt a growing sense of anxiety, that in ten or fifteen years, people my age will be obsolete in the classroom, and concern that I should have left this subject till I was further through my library studies, simply because I am worried that things will realign to be something different before I am finished studying, and I will need to relearn something new.  I am an overthinker.

I was interested in the idea that virtual learning environments are so effective at engagement and achievement.  I have heard so many people say (nurses, teachers, doctors, lawyers and so on) that they learned more in their first year on the job than they did in all the time they spent in university lectures.  My mother is a nurse, and did her training when it was still a hospital based system, and I remember her concern when it switched to university training, that new nurses would have a lot of head knowledge that wasn't necessarily practical.  Virtual learning could be the answer that we need.  Giving people "real" experience, but in an environment that provides a safety net in case of error.

As far as Second Life goes, while I admit it looks interesting, I feel a degree of ambivalence about the time required to "learn" the world, and master the experience.  Four hours is the time it apparently takes to orient oneself to the world, and four hours at the end of term four in a busy household seems like a big time commitment.  And then one of the readings insisted that four hours will orient you, but four weeks is more realistic as a time frame for becoming comfortable.  Four weeks!!  Convince me it's worth it.