Second Life Virtual World

A virtual world (VW) delivers instinctive opportunities for people to reinvent themselves in familiar environments.  Most of the information delivered in a VW is presented with images which is the most powerful iconic symbols for human perception (TED, 2007).  To me, Second Life (SL) is a more realistic social network that transcends other social networking sites with realistic avatar’s created by the users.  The participants and developers call their personal avatar’s resident’s which infers they believe, in some way, they actually are living in the cyber environment.  In a weird and wonderful way, participants get a chance to reinvent themselves as they feel they would like to be and put themselves in the past, present, and future environments that were never possible to be a part of before.  This certainly seems to be attractive for people who have exhausted themselves on other online social environments or who are just fed up with their own realities.  Furthermore, Second Life makes essential and tangible socialization with others within the environment possible unlike other social networking sites.  The clip below is an example of how SL transcends an event that happened 100 years ago.  It is quite moving for it is almost like I was there and at that time.

A disruptive technology has been described as a technology that functions much like an existing one, but rather it functions more efficiently and can eventually make the mature technology obsolete (Laureate, 2009a).  Second Life can be considered a disruptive technology even though it initially did not take off as expected.  For residents, SL has expanded conference calling technology to multimedia.  Though still used, it would seem that conference calling takes a big hit in the capacity of users since SL has become mainstream.  The dynamics of the SL environments are, at least initially, quite stimulating and interesting as compared to prior static networks like conference calling.  Ironically, SL has lost some of its overall popularity since it peaked a few years back.  I do feel that SL does have substantial life left at least until the future of Web tools (3.0) hits critical mass.  In terms of years, the newest evolution of the Web has been predicted to hit critical mass sometime around the year 2015.  It is then that I feel SL will officially start to lose its luster.  The social benefits of the current SL environments are numerous, yet can be much improved upon.  It gives everyone interested an opportunity to not only reinvent themselves, but it gives everyone a primitive look in the direction of the future of interactive social media. 

For public K-12 students and teachers, SL has yet to really make any significant impact at least in my neck of the woods (Michigan).  In the SL environments, inhabitants certainly want to be there (laureate, 2009b) and I am sure what replaces it will have the same attractiveness as far as socialization.  Whatever innovation it is that replaces SL, I look for it to be much improved as far as objectives beyond socialization.  In order to be an acceptable forum for K-12 learning, the focus of the environment needs distinguish itself as a purposeful leaning environment rather than just a place to gather like at the in-office the water cooler.  I am optimistic for the future though for the future of immersive technologies looks to be bright and at least headed in the right direction.  Am I currently sold on VWs?  Not quite.  Do I predict my current perceptions to change with the introduction and usability of the technology that will replace SL?  Most certainly.

I responded to Brandi Renfro's and Keith Klein's blog.       

References

Laureate Education, Inc., (Executive Producer). (2009a). Disruptive technologies [Video webcast]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_963448_1%26url%3D

Laureate Education, Inc., (Executive Producer). (2009b). Virtual worlds for multimedia learning [Video webcast]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_963448_1%26url%3D

TED. (Producer). (2007). Philip Rosedale on Second Life [Video webcast]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/the_inspiration_of_second_life.html