Edina Digital Age Learning

This session focused on different Virtual 3-D environments that may impact education. Second Life Everything created in Second Life is the property of Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life. MNSCU Island is MNSCU's presence in SL. Sun-Project Wonderland MPK20 Sun's Virtual Workspace Sun is using this for collaborative, business interaction which allows people to interact in a business environment. This mimics the real world more than Second Life does, but you can also include live video interaction combining the real with the virtual. Currently, Wonderland is a bit rough. In fact, Sun still uses Second Life for their virtual conferences. Wonderland is free, open source and Java based. Croquet Julie Sykes, a Spanish instructor at the U of M and Liz Wendlund, developed Croquet, which allows you to pull in open source content for 3-D simulation. The simulations are task based, meaning they are monitored and assessed as you move through the simulation. The next step is to have st...

Saturday I had the opportunity to attend a Second Life workshop at TIES titled, "Get a Second Life!" For 6 hours, 8 other educators and myself explored the virtual world of Second Life , a multi-player 3-D Virtual world, and had the opportunity to look at resources that may have an application in the classroom. Second Life requires separate software downloaded on your computer, and a fairly robust computer to keep things running smoothly . Given the fact that iMax movies and other simulations make me nauseous , by the end of the day I was feeling a bit woozy!! Here's the avatar I created. I stopped by the ISTE Island and got the free t-shirt I'm wearing! Several organizations provide freebies when you visit their sites on the grid. I tried to make my avatar appear as close to the real thing as possible. Hard to get patchy grey hair to work very well, but pretty easy to lose a few pounds!! After getting an orientation on how to move talk, gesture, fly and teleport...