Response to the Conference

I attended a presentation right before ours on Second Life. Before I went to the presentation, I knew that Second Life was a virtual world built by the members who essentially created a virtual identity through the program, but I didn’t know much else. Listening to the presentation, I learned that Second Life allows members to attend online conferences, lectures, and plays by means of their avatar, a virtual representation of themselves. They are also able to access media such as the radio and television through streaming. While avatars are at these functions, they are able to communicate with each other through typed language like chat rooms and instant messaging. However, there are applications that allow members to use their voice to speak through their avatar. These applications, like real life spoken communication, require avatars to be close to each other and make voices softer or louder depending on how far apart the avatars are.

Second Life can be used for many purposes like social network, making it like a much more elaborate Facebook or Myspace, as well as for educational purposes. Right now, it can be difficult for educators to use Second Life because there is a Teen Second Life and Adult Second Life and teachers need to get security clearance before they can accompany their students on field trips or other educational experiences in Teen Second Life.

Although, Second Life is a beautiful virtual place, I can not see myself ever taking part in it. While I can see how it could be a useful teaching or social networking tool, I can’t quite get past the fact that it is a virtual place that many people use to substitute for real human interactions. The presenter mentioned that one of Second Life’s assets is that it allows for shared real time experiences like teleporting your avatar to meet friends to watch a movie or attend a party. However, while this is a form of social interaction, I can’t get past the fact that while these interactions can be real and allow humans to interact, each human involved is only able to interact with others through their computer which I feel take away from the shared real time experience the presenter thought was so great.

As far as our presentation, I thought it went well. It was fun to see everyone’s finished products and visit with our audience about the projects. While we all had very different projects and used different methods to create them, it was interesting to see how many of us experienced the same problems such as finding a host for our projects and facing obstacles when the software didn’t want to do what we wanted it to.