Michael Brown (Portland State University) and Donna Cohen (Information Management Consultant) led the group through a tour of SecondLife, particularly focusing on an area called Information Island. Information Island is an "archipelago" of dozens of "islands" (aka interest areas). Some of the resources they pointed us to for learning more about SecondLife were:
- A tour of the Library in Second Life on YouTube
- Second Life's Education Site
- Second Life Education Wiki
- An Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Online Resources.
I can see a lot of applications for SecondLife and InfoIsland in the K-12 realm - can you just imagine a teacher guiding students through a unit where they all have their avatars work together to build an Egyptian pyramid or the Great Wall of China? In this way, I can see this environment greatly enhancing the learning process. Similar projects, such as University of Virginia's virtual recreation of ancient Rome, officially titled Rome Reborn 1.0, show the possibilities when technology embraces the rich content in the humanities.
So, clearly virtual worlds have a strong educational benefit (not to mention total coolness factor!), but what about how virtual worlds could be applied to non-K-12 or liberal arts environments? Aside from being able to serve as a more multi-dimensional "webinar" (i.e. where everyone's avatars gather in a central place for a lecture and through SecondLife have a more interactive experience) what purpose could such an environment serve for an academic health sciences library? One of the islands in the "Info Island" archipelago, Health Info Island, may have some answers. Health Info Island, states as one of its goals to "Experiment and develop new ways of interaction between users and libraries" and to do more outreach in consumer health. It will be interesting to see how such a virtual environment could be used as a reference and learning tool for health information as this "Info Island" develops.
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