Memo 9: Second Life: A Twisted Tale or a Learning Forum?

This blog accounts my experience with Second Life, an immersive and upcoming virtual world that is completely based in cyber space. It is supposed to be an open source community that functions very much like how modern society does in reality, with money, jobs, status, property and educational opportunities.

There are however, several inherent flaws with this, primarily stemming again from the fact that it is an open-source based operation. After many unsuccessful executions of the Second-life environment, some network problems, and some unforeseen sexual advances, I finally managed to understand how the game works, including its interface, the places to go and the types of interactions that one can have in the “game”, if we were to call it that.

My first experience was to attempt something educational, so I searched all the educational events that were to transpire and decided to join an “Advanced Building and Texture Management” class. I guess, it was a fairly tricky class, as it had a prerequisite of the basic building classes that you needed to take before it, but I managed to learn a fair bit about object creation and manipulation. They mentioned things to do with the code level, but that seemed intangible for most people as they would question each other on how it all related. With regards, to how easy it is an environment to learn, I would believe it is a question of perception, I like it and could see it being a good learning environment, but would not condemn others if they say it as too virtual an environment to be conducive for learning. At the end of the day I guess I learnt what I went into learn, and that is how to play around with some of the advanced building options so I feel I got the essence of Second Life.

My second learning experience was attending a session on how to make money in Second Life, this was a much easier topic to comprehend and the environment was a lot more sociable, very similar to how real life is, as with the mood in a class depending on if it was Advanced Stochastic Theory or the Telecom Seminar class, where people are more relaxed and required to participate. So I believe Second Life caters to a wide variety of tastes in terms of topic etc.. I would be very interested to see how far reaching the benefits of this online community would extend to.

I mean forecasting this into the future, on the basis that most learning is done by younger people, is it possible to regulate some amount of “content security” so that I can be a less disturbing environment when there are people walking around nude? Food for thought: Is it really “nudity”?