Second Life

Draft

Definition

“Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 2,938,247 people from around the globe.” ([1], 17:22, 26 January 2007 (MET)).

See also: Active Worlds

In education

• See also the 3D interactive environment article.

• In "Second Life", there are educational events and even some learning activities (to be documented).

• Sloodle is an attempt to integrate this with an LMS.

How to

To experience second life you should have a computer with a 3D graphics card (e.g. nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4 MX or better). Clients exist for Win/Mac and Linux (alpha as of dec 2007)

Installation

• Easy on Windows ...

For Linux (procedure shown for root install)

Daniel K. Schneider tested SL on Ubuntu 8.04 with a Dell Precision 380 desktop with a Quadro FX 3450 card. Seems to work perfectly well...

The little installation note applies to the version you can see below (aug 2008).

• Open a terminal and become root (type 'su').
• Download from here and save to some directory
• Uncompress, e.g. type: bunzip2 SecondLife_XXXX.bz2. This will give you a tar archive
• Untar the thing to some place, e.g. put it in /usr/local

tar xf SecondLife_i686_1_20_15_92456.tar -C /usr/local

• You may want to change permission to your normal user name

chown -R xxx:yyy SecondLife_i686_1_20_15_92456/

• Then you may make the directory name more general (change it next time)

ln -s SecondLife_i686_1_20_15_92456/ sl

• Finally read README-Linux.txt file that sits in the top directory

To use it, open a terminal and type something like:

/usr/local/sl/secondlife &

Finding things

A good way to find things is to use SLURLs that provide direct teleport links to locations.

Syntax:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/<region>/<x-coordinate>/<y-coordinate>/<z-coordinate>/

You also may add a picture, e.g. http://slurl.com/secondlife/<region><x/y/z>?img=http://yourdomain/pict.jpg&title=Your title&msg=Your message

Links

Official or closely related to SL/Linden

• Second Life Home Page

• Linden Lab (Makers of Second Life)

• Second Life Blog (official news)

• Location-based linking in Second Life

Of interest to education

• Second Life Education Wiki

• Secondlife Grid - Education page

Mailing lists

• SL Educators Mailing list

• Second Life Researchers List

Manuals

• LSL Portal community wiki to provide accurate documentation for the scripting language of Second Life (LSL)

• There is also a manual that you can find from the second life client. (lsl_guide.html)

Extensions

• Teaching and Presentation Tools for Second Life, e.g. a voting tool.

• http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pinastri/118/169/23 (SecondPresentation Display Panel)

Other

• Second Life Education Wiki

• Wikipedia Second Life entry

• Beth's Second Life, blog entry.

• Second Life Travels: EduNation, blog entry

• SimTeach Second Life Wiki

• Second Life in Education wiki

• Second Life: hype or business model? (Rent a Tutor).

• Bildung in Second Life (Wiki, in German).

• Grad School Colony

Example educational sites

Search "slurl education" or something like this in google.

• Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life (SimTeach Wiki)

• Campus region

• A german high school (See Wir sind im Second Life! Kommen Sie zu uns!)

References

• Gregory M. Lamb, Real learning in a virtual world, Christian Science Monitor, October 05, 2006 edition. HTML

• Davis, Vicki A. (2007). The frontier of education: Web 3D, Blog Entry. HTML, retrieved 20:03, 25 April 2007 (MEST). (This is the best blog article on SL Daniel K. Schneider has seen so far).

• Antonacci, David M. and Nellie Modaress (2005). The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW). EDUCAUSE HTML