Including one of the Lab’s star PR showcases from 11 months ago, the University of Texas.
I’m not sure if education is actually the largest clearly identifiable sector in Second Life, but there sure are a heck of a lot of them.
“Right now we’re just trying to figure out what we’re going to do as a group,” he said. “One benefit of using a virtual world is collaborating with other people and meeting other people. If we all go together, it might be a richer community.” – Mario Guerra Jr, University of Texas at Austin’s Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has more.
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Tags: Education, Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, Mario Guerra Jr, Second Life, The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Texas, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds
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We can, of course, continue to meet in SL to chat and share our work, as we do at RL conferences.
Several educators who left a while back continue to come in-world for meetings and conferences.
Linden Lab makes little money from that sort of activity. Good.
To me the answer to this should seem relatively simple.
Lets quickly examine the higher ed environment.
1. Not a lot of money
2. Lots of talented people working for little or nothing (read in grad student here).
3. Usually availability to a fair amount of hardware albeit a little aged at times
Hmmm. OpenSim = free Tech support = free or at least low cost Second Life = far from free.
Seems like a ten second quandary.
Granted all bets are off for the k-12 folks. Not a surplus of grad students there.
One would think the freedom to call the shots and set up a “world” the way you want it would be a very strong enticement. If one wanted to protect the intellectual property of one’s own students or faculty (at least from the rest of the world) one could easily do that as well.
The huge disadvantage of cloud computing is that some one else holds the keys to your “world” they can turn it off quite simply and leave you high and dry with little room for arbitration or appeal (ala Woodbury).
Frankly, I am surprised the univerisities haven’t left sooner.
We can, of course, continue to meet in SL to chat and share our work, as we do at RL conferences.
Several educators who left a while back continue to come in-world for meetings and conferences.
Linden Lab makes little money from that sort of activity. Good.