From Silicon Republic
03.03.2008 UCD takes first steps as Second Life university
University College Dublin made history today as the first Irish university ever to hold a lecture in the online virtual world Second Life, with Professor Mary Burke from the school of information and library studies who lectured to students from the virtual James Joyce library. …
Blog Editor's question - an advantage of using IT is that you can avoid doing some of the physical activities required to normally access information (eg. walk to the library). Why would you then go to the trouble of trying to virtually replicate these experiences? Comments below welcome.
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4 comments:
I'm a bit surprised that this is a first. Weren't TCD doing some work on second life?
Maybe they only did modelling of the campus:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/dublin/147/104/25/
Brian wrote: >> Why would you then go to the trouble of trying to virtually replicate these experiences?
Good point. Seems more obviously useful for case-based stuff, enacting business scenarios etc.
Yes, a second life event was organised in Trinity (SL) last year and I think some people from DCU may have been involved also. Fair play to those that organised it, and I learned a lot from it, but I found it difficult to access and also more difficult to interact with other participants than in a regular PC based VC with breakout rooms (which our's does not have).
It's suggested that the reason people duplicate real life in SL is to make people feel they are in "familiar" surrounds but I don't know if it is necessary to go the whole hog. Besides, one might argue that the whole concept of using SL in education should be based on a different model than the classroom one anyway.
We are doing some work in DIT on same, early days but you keep an eye on it here:http://ditsecondlife.blogspot.com/
Maybe UCD and/or DIT might submit to practitioner stream at EdTech2008 and tell us a bit more about what is happening. - www.ilta.net
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