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August 15, 2007
FYI -
Second Life: Reaching into the Virtual World for Real-World Learning | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
This EDUCAUSE publication should be available to all of us at UM, since it is a member organization. I haven't looked at it yet, but in general I've been pleased with the quality and usefulness of their publications.
Posted by janeblum at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2007
Science and Machinima in Second Life
You've probably heard that the Medical School purchased an island in Second Life earlier this year. Second Life is an immersive virtural world, also known as a MultiUser Virtual Environment or MUVE. It is of interest on campus in part because it has become increasingly prominent in education and commerce.
Lots of folks around campus have been having very interesting conversations about what is happening in Second Life (SL) and what could happen. Along these lines and to aid in these discussions both locally and more widely, the School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries partnered on creating a video of science education and research in SL.
What I would like to point out to readers of this blog is how easy it was for us to do this, compared with making a video normally. For this project, we had three people. The video editor was the only person with any experience having made videos before, and he did not have an account in Second Life. The other two had accounts in SL, but no experience making videos and no knowledge of how to record video from the Second Life application. We decided to make the video at 1pm on Tuesday of this week, and gave a copy to the dean at 3pm on Thursday. In that span of time, our team of 3 learned how to make video in SL (machinima, also known as machine cinema), took lots of video clips, organized them coherently, made an outline of talking points, recorded the voiceover, smoothed transitions, edited pieces into a whole, made several versions to reduce time and help make it more engaging.
Now, if we could do this, as rank newbies, and having only been in Second Life for a couple months each, just imagine what you could do! There is a statistic I've heard (but can't verify) that on the Web about 10% of the people using it also create new content, while in Second Life that ratio is more like 60%. I don't know where that nubmer came from, but the ease of creating new content in this video says something to me about how powerful engagement with Second Life can be.
Without further ado, take a look at what we did, and see what you think. Not bad for newbies, eh?
YouTube: Science Learning Opportunities in Second Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc
Posted by pfa at 11:44 AM | Comments (1)