It looks as if the train is moving in the right direction. I just discovered that the project OpenSim is moving right along in its development of an Open Source implementation of Second Life. I think this is critical to ultimately utilizing virtual worlds as an instructional delivery platform and educational tool. A school could host its own server providing sim space for some educational purpose. The ultimate direction would be to provide some interconnection between private sims and even the public sim. Pretty cool. Maybe our regional consortium should think about hosting a server. Or maybe this could be the development platform I was looking for for the development of a Second Life-esque cyber charter school.

There was a nifty little segment on ABC News this evening. It was the first of a series entitled The Future of the Workplace in which they discussed trend toward virtual workspaces - where the workers don’t necessarily report to an office per se. What was interesting about this (because telecummiting, while certainly becoming more prevailant, has been around for a while) was that they featured the applicaiton of Second Life as a platform to support the virtual workplace. I recorded the small segment and hope to pull some piece of it to use in the Blendedschools presentation I’m giving in October.

My buddy North Lamar (Joe Sanchez from University of Texas Austin in real life) from the Educator’s Coop in Second Life showed me the first of a series of videos he is putting together on Exploring Virtual Worlds. Take a look…

My throngs of fans are apparently requesting more posts. And I certainly want to appease the masses…

I have been spending a lot (maybe too much?) time exploring (playing?) Second Life over the last few weeks. And I am enthralled (cultishly mesmerized?) with the potential of this type of tool on the future of education. Now let me very clear up front and say that I am by no means absolutely sold on Second Life as the be all end all and in fact i deeply suspect that Second Life will not be the medium of choice, but I do feel that some derivation of highly interactive virtual environments will play a major role in the future of education.

I see two core areas of application - one being as a platform for instructional delivery (a learning environment) and the other being as a mechanism to establish and grow professional (personal) learning communities (a collaboration environment). Right now I am focusing on the latter as I work to fully hurdle over the masive learning curves involved in Second Life. So far I’m very pleased with the results. I have been able to establish many connections with other interesting and energetic educators from all over the world. The interactions have been engaging and have continued to shape what had been becoming a very stagnant professional existence into one of continuous growth and questioning and investigation and research and wonder and creativity.

Second Life has been perfect for me professionally as a compliment to the reading and participation in various blogs as well as jumping back into my formal education. I am starting to notice the batteries recharging. I’m looking forward to a great year.

I just recieved today a notice informing me that a conference session proposal that I submitted to the BlendedSchools fall conference was accepted. Its entitled “We Better Get MUVEing” and you guessed it - its all about Second Life type stuff and its potential implications in distance education. This is going to be a great opportunity to do some focused research on the subject. I’ll post more on this soon.

And I had been sooo good about posting regularly, then I go and take a couple weeks off…

Been a busy couple of weeks. First off, got the Lasik surgery and I’ve got to say if I had known what was involved and what the results would be I would have saved some money and done this ten years ago (of course, the technology has got to be vastly improved since then). Absolutely AWESOME. That’s the only way I can describe it. The technology involved in the procedure alone is fascinating. The whole thing is done with lasers now. One (called the IntraLase laser) is used to cut a flap on your cornea and create a thin layer that is easily peeled back by the doctor before placing the eye under the eximer laser to reshape the layers underneath, thereby correcting your vision. The eximer even locks on to your eye and makes adjustments for any tiny little eye movements during the procedure. The whole process literally takes less than five minutes - a total of maybe 30 seconds of laser per eye between both lasers. AWESOME. I was able to sit up after the procedure and see perfectly. No pain. No discomfort. The biggest annoyance of the whole process is the loads of drops you have to use gumming up your vision. Eyes are periodically mildly itchy for a couple two three days, but since the fourth day I have had no dryness or itchyness or any irritation of any kind. And my sight is perfect. Better than perfect. No more contacts, no more glasses. AWESOME. In case you were interested, I had my procedure done by Dr. Tom Boland at the Northeast Eye Institute in Scranton. Not cheap, but these guys are the best.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on what I will hesitantly describe as ‘research’ on the applicaiton of the virtual environment of Second Life. Second Life is a MUVE (Muli-User Virtual Environment). It is massively popular - nearly 40,000 people within the virtual world of SL at any particular time and millions of registered users woldwide. I think it might have enormous potential in education, but I’m not sure. The question is beginning to absolutely facsinate me and I am spending entirely too much time in this world of make believe trying to answer it. My charater’s (or avatar as it is correctly called) name is Zipplestich Bing. I have joined a group of researchers from the University of Texas that have created a region within SL called the Educators Coop. This has provided me with access to some personal ‘land’ where I can create a sort of ‘home-base’ within SL, and the goal of the Coop is to bring together a diverse group of educators that are focused on exploring the application of these virtual envoronments in the future of education. The focus seems to favor higher education applicaiton, but there are a few members of the coop that are K-12 so I am looking forward to developing more collaborate relationships and riding the leading (or bleeding) edge of the future of instructional delivery mechanisms.

What I find most interesting and educationally applicable with SL is the fact that the entire ‘world’ is interactive and manipulable. Objects can be created or edited using a robust but simple pallate of tools. It has its own scripting language so scripts can be created and applied to objects. There is an entire in-world economy (similar to the economies that have developed within other online games like World of Warcraft) that literally translate into a real exchange rate between game money and real money. Objects can be created, bought, sold, borrowed, traded. Real estate is a large focus as well - land can be sold or purchased, terraformed, built upon, improved, speculated upon. I see it the entire SL world as a really giant set of legos. And I loved legos. Haven’t had the opportunity to play with legos in a long time, but I’m making up for it now. This really fits in well with what Mitchel Resnick and his research group at the MIT Media Lab would describe as Lifelong Kindergarten.

I will definately be posting more on my experiences in SL. It has captured by interest and attention. Can it do the same for our students?