My colleagues at Dubai Women’s College have developed an island for the students which I’ll tell you about in more detail in my next blog post. I decided to go and investigate the Dubai Second Life Campus. The first issue I faced was that it was impossible to run SL at work, the band width needed isn’t available - an immediate critical success factor for using SL in college. At home I tried again and got into SL successfully with my SL alias and nasty SL starter clothes. My initial feelings were that the whole place was eerie, full of scantily-clad weirdos and with horrible graphics. The flatness of images and the way things appeared out of nowhere in 2D actually made me feel quite nauseous. Some punky elf girls told me how to get new clothes and how to teleport and I gradually gained confidence. The gateway area to the DWC campus was interesting, with a sitting area, small mosque and information boards:
Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet been granted permission to enter the area itself which is strictly secure to ensure the students’ safety. So I hung around in the gateway area for a while then, attracted by a mosque picture, decided to go and investigate virtual Morocco. A very nice touch in Morocco was the ‘info fez’ which you wear and as you pass things of interest the info fez pops up writing on the screen to give background details.
There were no other people in Morocco and I started to feel lonely so decided to teleport to Hong Kong. Where I was sent was a place called Windchime Gardens which is dedicated to meditation. I loved it and struck up a conversation with the designer who was there at the same time; she showed me how to click onto a floating sphere that made my character start doing Tai Chi and it was very relaxing – I felt relaxed because my online character was doing Tai Chi! Here we are doing Tai Chi:
With prudence, I can see a lot of potential for SL as a learning tool. However, at the moment we can't teleport students directly into safe areas without the risk of them being accosted by strangers. With that in mind, there's no way that I'd use it with my students who have very clear social interaction rules in their culture. In its current form I wouldn't be able to justify its use as a teaching tool for my students. Also band width is a big issue. However, I really like SL, will be hanging out there a lot and would love to use it in future with a different set of students. Also, going to use it to teach myself some new meditation techniques. See you in Windchime Gardens!
