Second Life

Last night we had our meeting in Second Life.  I must say I left the experience underwhelmed.

First, Second Life is not every intuitive.  It requires a lot of time to get things set up.  We met on Catamount Island, which included a short tutorial.  After that meeting I explored some other islands, all of which had their own tutorials.  This was after I played through the short tutorial when I signed up (which was not available ever other time I tried to access it). Is the game so difficult that most places assume you could use a tutorial?

There are also many idiosyncrasies that I had trouble with.  Why is hair style considered an article of clothing? In addition, I have a fairly beefy computer and one of the fastest DSL connections available (short of business class), but I had to crank down the view distance and resolution to avoid game-breaking choppiness.  And we were unable to get voice chat to work yesterday so we had to type everything out.  I couldn't imagine that working with 20+ people in a  group.

We explored a lot on  the island.  There was a nice display on the Cherokee that included two of their myths and their alphabet.  It was very interesting to look at.  We stepped into a classroom that auto-played a YouTube video as we entered.  Jason informed us that second life could also play PowerPoint presentations.  My initial reaction was "That's it?"  I was even more dumbfounded when he told us WCU pays about $4k a year to "own" that island.  That doesn't seem to be a great return on investment.

After my 3 hours of playing around with Second Life, I'm not sure how well it would work in educational settings.  Paying $4,000 to play YouTube videos and PowerPoints, which YouTube already does for free, seems counter-intuitive.   We'll see how I feel after attending a SLED event.