Austin Tate, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh, doesn’t email me very often, but when he does, I can guarantee that it’s worth paying attention to. Here’s something he sent me the other day, amalgamated (with his permission) from a few emails that he’s been sending out on this topic to his own department and colleagues. It’s a got a handful of very useful URLs, so simplest for me to quote and re-post as quoted below.

(note: the image on the right is reposted from one of the newsletters linked to in Austin’s email, the NMC Campus Observer, “New Audio Art Installation in Spohrer Center”.)

Here’s what Austin wrote:

…have you been watching what is happening with Second Life? NASA, BBC, Google and 50 Universities are using it I understand – along with quite a large socializing community worldwide.

Take a look at an example Educational group on 2L… http://nmc.org/sl/

These are some of the Educational groups involved in that one… http://www.nmc.org/membership/index.shtml

If you already have second Life installed use the SLurl… http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Campus/139/225/42/

If not, you might want to try it on a machine that can cope with
reasonably powerful graphics.. it runs on Windows and Mac and a Linux
version is in alpha..

You can sign up for free to explore and try things out… though a
few in-sim currency units will prove useful… a referral URL from my
avatar in Second Life is http://secondlife.com/ss/?u=623bbf757494bc89161997fa238fd0ec

I can see many parallels here with when I first saw the web… its got LOTs of potential.. and is simply an example of many near-term and future massively on-line multi-person environments in which communities and relationships are being built.

I would also add that I think that collaboration methods such as limited “seat” streamed lectures, classrooms, questions and feedback will all be possible in these sorts of environments – and they have much in common with some of the systems you have showed us experimentally at the OU.

As a (former) early adopter of Asheron’s Call and other massively multiplayer gaming environments, and researcher/collaborator with Yanna Vogiazou on the augmented-reality urban multiplayer game CitiTag, not to mention the numerous in-house environments of ours that Austin mentions above, I thought I’d better check this out. [Yes, I know I am VERY late to the table with this one... it's already very old news to many... ]

I never like MOOs and MUDs as learning environments in the ‘olden’ days, and don’t care for VR-based virtual classrooms (I’ll have to explain why in a subsequent posting). But I’m signing up for this, and will give it a whirl. Stay tuned…

Technorati Tags: second+life, vr, elearning, virtual+classrooms

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