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Commentary: Second life

2009; Wiley; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bmb.20285

1539-3429

Graham R. Parslow,

Second life (SL) is a virtual world that meshes so closely with the real life (RL) that it has become a host for many work and play activities that people normally engage in. To visit SL go to secondlife.com You will find that the home page is minimalist about the activities and facilities of SL and this obliges you to click on join now. You must have administrator rights to your computer to create an account because application files must execute after downloading to install a viewer. You need to pick a first name and then choose from a list of last names. You must pick a representation of yourself (an avatar) from a limited range, although once in SL you can alter your avatar to your taste. My motivation to join SL was to participate in the new frontier of educational resources that are on offer. Relatively, early adopters for education included Stanford University [1]. Stanford was prompted to enter SL by what they saw as an explosion of use in academia for studies in design, computer science, sociology, psychology, and education. Currently, most major universities have a shop front offering links to RL course enrollments and some have primary teaching material exploiting the three-dimensional world of SL. My exploration of the SL showcase on education led to a link [2] describing how the University of Cincinnati would commemorate Darwin's voyage on the Beagle by recreating the Galapagos Islands so that avatars can retrace Darwin's steps. Students from Cincinnati will make two field trips to the Galapagos in 2009 to bring back images and video for the SL tour. Additionally, audio and video clips will be available in Cincinnati's Darwin Celebration Theater and Gallery. An undergraduate communications and technology class is creating the information kiosks. This example shows the possibilities for comparable projects illustrating the history and principles of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. SL was launched by the Linden Lab Company of San Francisco in June 2003 [3]. The SL viewer (free to download) enables users (residents) to interact with each other and travel around the SL world (the grid). At present there are two separate grids divided by age (under and over 18 yr). Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool that allows a resident to build virtual objects. This can be used with the Linden Scripting Language to add functionality to objects. The relative ease with which new characters and environments can be generated in SL was affirmed in a conference talk which I attended [4], accompanied by the demonstration of a virtual interview room that had been well tested with students. This interview scenario was created in SL by professional multimedia authors because it was the easiest way that the project team could do it. SL provides avatars that need little programming to become an interview panel. The act of animating such a set of characters is referred to as creating machinimas (a contraction of machine cinemas). It is advantageous for educational applications that SL authors retain the copyright for the content they create. The presenters [4] said that SL worked well with the students who entered their virtual room to take part in an interview and I had no reason to doubt this because, as I watched the demonstration, I wanted to enter that world myself. This role playing seemed more real than any role playing I have encountered in RL teaching. I have never been motivated to use role playing in my teaching because the scenarios I observed seemed unconvincingly contrived, such as a glucose being chased by a hexokinase or a student trying to act out paranoid schizophrenia. In SL the suspension of disbelief was much easier and I was highly impressed by the demonstration of an interview scenario in the SL format. I confess that when I first entered SL as a resident I was hopelessly lost and navigated ineptly around landscapes that had little relevance to me. This prompted me to phone for assistance from Tom Petrovic, a colleague in my university Biomedical Multimedia Unit. Tom related to me that he had attended two conferences with sessions on SL and was of the view that SL was not the immediate answer to all educational needs because it was not intuitive yet for users to login, get where they wanted to and guide the actions of their avatar. The exception to this initial difficulty was for people accustomed to interactive games, like Warcraft, because SL uses similar keyboard and mouse conventions to control character actions. By watching a demonstration operated by an expert navigator I had been given a false sense of how easy it was, but not a false sense of the potential. Tom commended me to a local multimedia person with SL experience (Andrew Bonollo) who took me to visit the virtual island which my university had rented within SL. Renting is a lower cost way to explore the possibilities of SL because the purchase of an island for a university costs thousands of dollars. Andrew was of the opinion that SL was not currently the best way for multimedia professionals to create virtual realities and as an author he was annoyed that every object created in SL cost money. I did not locate any established portals specifically teaching biochemistry, but there is unlimited virtual space within SL to set up teaching centers. To start a journey into the enormous amount of literature online you might join SLED, the community of Second Life Educators who have a wiki at www.simteach.com/wiki (follow the link from the home page to the SL education wiki). Second Life is an excellent answer to niche teaching scenarios such as simulated interviews and virtual tours, but limitations in authoring and navigating mean that it is not an all-encompassing multimedia tool for the present.