Second Life

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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

  • 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)

Tested on Ubuntu 8.04 with a Dell Precision 380 desktop with a Quadro FX 3450 card. 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

Of interest to education
Mailing lists

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


Other

Example educational sites

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

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