We've been discussing the virtual reality and virtual worlds and their uses in distance education recently in my (surprise, surprise) Distance Education class that I am taking this semester. On Sunday, The Chronicle of Higher Education filed the following story, After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds, under it's Technology category.
This interested me since just a few months ago I was posting about the University of Texas's major investment in Second Life as reported by the Chronicle. In this new article the Chronicle does not completely toss Second Life to the side but instead raises some of the issues campuses and faculty are finding with the virtual world. The number one complaint is that Second Life is hard to navigate and that a lot of non-academic activity taking place in SL, not to mention the online graffiti.
While I feel that these complaints are typical of new users who are still getting their "virtual" legs under them as many of the problems can be solved quickly with proper permissions controls. I was interested to read about Duke University's Open Cobalt project, which is a education-friendly virtual world. The vision of the project is that it will operate with data stored on people's computers rather than rely on centralized servers which is a major departure from shift to cloud computing we are currently seeing in higher education.
The final piece of the article discusses OpenSimulator, which as Young puts it "is essentially a free knockoff of Second Life". I haven't had a chance to play with it but I might have to find a spare server and give it a shot.
Those of you who have worked with either Second Life or OpenSimulator, what have been your experiences? Passing fad or here to stay?
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