Second Life: My Way of Life

Second Life has become a way of life for me over the past week as my enrolling in the ETEC 648D course has collided with full speed with a current work project so Second Life has consumed a good portion of my waking hours for the past week.

Over the past several months we've been engaged in the formative stages of writing a formal grant proposal to acquire space and personnel to develop a Second Life presence in-world for our campus. This week culminated a milestone in our endeavors as we did a formal demonstration and presentation of Second Life to a select group of faculty and students in our AutoCAD program for their feedback on the viability of using Second Life to teach some AutoCAD curriculum.

A good portion of my week was actually spent in-world preparing for this presentation with some co-workers developing resources and a walking tour. This actually coincided well with the projects we did for ETEC 648D as many of the resources and studies I have found for the SL Resources and SL Research project will be/were used for both our demonstration and as part of our literature review which will go into the grant proposal.

For myself, it's been over a year and a half since I've been fully immersed in SL culture and I'm very glad to being back to being a regular Resident here in SL.

As for our demo...it went very well! The students seemed genuinely fascinated and the faculty curious (as opposed to rolling their eyes and dismissing it). We did do a brief survey past demo and most students shared they'd be comfortable in learning in a virtual environment. When questioned of whether they'd "prefer" learning in a virtual environment versus a traditional environment the results were split down the middle: 48% stated a preference for a traditional environment, half were indifferent and 2% preferred a virtual environment.

Till next week...