Second Life's Hype Cycle

This picture shows the Gartner Hype Cycle graph for 2008. I wanted to point out the position Second Life (and other public virtual worlds) is at in the cycle. This was the most recent depiction that I found with virtual worlds. It shows VWs (Virtual Worlds- not Volkswagens) past the Peak and heading into the Trough of Disillusionment. The basic idea is that VWs are at the make-or-break point right now. The near future will tell whether or not Second Life and other VWs will find their niche in the public sector. I'm curious to see what Linden and other VW companies will do to market their products as effective tools in order to be productive technologies/applications of technology.

Sony Playstation Home

This week I was given the privilege of beta testing Home for Sony Playstation 3. It is very similar to Second life, the characters are customizable and the overall feel of the community is the same.

The MAJOR differences are the PS3 has HIGH QUALITY graphics and SECURITY that comes with Home existing on a protected game platform.

I have not used either platform enough to say who the winner will be. I think that this could be a more protected environment that schools could take advantage of in the future.

http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Home

Instructional Design in Second Life

Hijack Alert!

My post today contains a link to another blog called "knowledgework." While I am posting to a specific post in that blog (here), the blog itself is also a valuable resource--for the same reason ours is! The postings there are often very similar to ours in content and type. There is a lot on elearning there.

This specific link is to a post about instructional design in virtual worlds. I found this while looking for some last-minute wiki info. Basically, the blogger found the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) location in Second Life to have some effective instructional design techniques built into their SL space. Anyone with a SL account may want to search the ASTD space and give it a look.

Second Life and IBM

Recently, IBM announced that it will be teaming with Linden Labs (creator of Second Life) to develop "enterprise solutions for security-rich, custom virtual world creation and collaboration" using the Second Life Grid platform.


This new solution will allow businesses and organizations to create private or public virtual environments. Basically, businesses can benefit from Second Life's virtual environment platform without the unwanted exposure that public 3D worlds present. Businesses can use this new platform to train employees, collaborate with partners and consumers, hold corporate meetings/events, compose product simulations, and much more.

Second Life Grid provides the corporate world with an alternative to Protosphere in the 3D marketplace. Businesses will be able to create custom environments, as in Second Life. Second Life Grid will allow businesses the freedom of creation and use that Protosphere limits for its users in the corporate environment.

Second Life Brain Control?

I have heard of second life before this class, but after talking about it my curiosity got to me and I looked around on some of my favorite gadget blogs. This comes from a gizmodo article last year and I thought it may be of some interest to the group. This looks like a basic brain control device made by a university in Japan. It allows the use to just think of walking and translates it to keyboard strokes to move a second life avatar.

Eploring the World (of Warcraft)

First, apolologies for the South Park reference in the title.

Following the hyperlink I included will land you at a brief news story on the Chronicle of Higher Education website concerning a grant in the amount of $100,000 awarded to a prof. at the University of California at Irvine in order to study users of the online game World of Warcraft.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3320&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

While this may or may not fascinate you, please read on to where us academics decide that we must comment on said article. Predictably, there are many people who are willing to view this as beneficial, and many who see this as a complete waste. I'll hold my own opinions in check for the moment, but if the comments begin here, I will most certainly weigh in with my own...

Though the grant is primarily written with ethnographic study and social interaction study in mind, in the context of Online Education, this also lands solidly in a discussion of virtual environments. And by the way, ethnographic and social interaction studies are important in education, too.

So I didn't do a great job of holding my opinions in check. Oops.