Second Life Session

Here is the class exploring NCTT Island.
I am sitting in a session with Scott St. Onge of NCTT and Keith Morneau from Capella University who are providing a session on Second Life.

So, I am taking some notes:

The presentation will talk about history of virtual environments and a theoretical framework for Second Life in the classroom. They are defining Second Life as "A 3D virtual world created by its inhabitants."

Things you can do: Shopping, having classes, having meetings in world, trade and sell items, create spaces and making real money in the system by making objects that "don't really exist." Scott summed it up by saying it is a "thriving virtual economy tied to real money exchange system."

He discussed the companies in Second Life including: Dell, BMW, IBM, Toyota, Circuit Ciy and others.

He mentioned that Virtual Reality simulators can be found going back to 1968 with Ivan Sutherland's VR device. The problem was that they had bulky headsets for sensory stimulation.

He also mentioned that Maze War ws the first 3D multi-user First Person Shooter and played on Arpanet in the early 1970's. Credit for the first online virtual world usually goes to Habitat, developed in 1987 by LucasFilm Games for the Commodore 64 computer and running on the Quantum Link service (now AOL).

VRML-Virtual Reality Modeling Language, term coined by Dave Ragget in 1994, VRML97 (VRML 2.0) became ISO standard in 1997 and is still used today as X3D.

Active worlds started as WebWorlds by Ron Britvich in 1995 and launched a 1.0 public version in 1997...still ongoing today.

Scott then spent some time explaining many of the terms of Second Life from Rezzing to Prims.

Also, I just want to point to a few entries I had posted in the past that are related to Second Life.

Tear Down the Walls

Study Abroad...Virtually

Summer 2008: Learning in 3D Class

Second Life for Health

Creating Learning Spaces in Second Life

Problem-Based Learning in 3D Environment

Second Life Webinar-Today

The Learning Webvolution.(article written with Tony O'Driscoll.)

Learning Archetypes (for 3D Worlds)

Here is a video produced by some of my students in last summer's Learning in 3D class that has been viewed over 28,000 time.


Here is another one that has been viewed 2,000 times.

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