Second Life: 美世

I've managed to avoid Second Life for more than four years, but it appears my run has come to an end. I was exposed to the program (experience? virtual world?) while studying Art Education at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, but never explored it on my own. This past spring, in my first course with the MPS program from Penn State, I thought I might be required to create an account. I finished the course without ever going to www.secondlife.com, which I considered a success. The program was also referenced in the FRONTLINE documentary digital_nation, which we watched and discussed around the same time as part of the professional development program at my school. Francoise LeGoues was interviewed for the documentary. As a vice president and chief technology officer for sales and distribution at IBM, she is one of more than 10,000 IBM employees to conduct business activities in the virtual world. But now, for AED 814, I joined the site.

I'm a panda. Because it's funny. It relates to China. And digital people freak me out. Still, I wish I could have a real panda body type. Fat and all. In the teachers' lounge, I showed a few coworkers my avatar. I'd told them I was a panda, but their reaction to my panda's "tight butt" freaked me out and sent me searching around to figure out how to add layers of insulation to my panda's frame. I've only had minimal success with this body transformation.

Thus far, I have found the world difficult to navigate. Though I consider myself a digital native, my inexperience with video games handicaps my "virtual motor skills." I have a hard time staying on the track in Mario Cart on Wii. Now I need to control my movements with keys and clicking.


I expect that Second Life will be involved in more activities in this course, perhaps involving meeting together as a class. I hope to see some advantages to using the program because currently, I don't understand the purpose of the program. When I go to the website, their intro plays, hoping to entice me, but only evokes negative feelings.

          Who will you meet in Second Life?
          Where will you explore?
          Who will you be?
          What will you discover?
          Anything is possible in Second Life.
          Fasten your seatbelts.
          Expect the unexpected.
          A whole new world is waiting.
          Escape to the internet’s largest user-created 3d virtual world community.

I meet interesting people in real life every day. On a daily basis, I interact with people with passports from a variety of countries, who have lived around the world, and have an array of life experiences.

I am exploring China daily, and traveling other places in real life.

I am daily growing in who I am and discovering the unique things this world has to offer. There's so much of real world that I have left to explore, so I have no desire to "escape" into a virtual world. It's the escape-factor that I find particularly disturbing.

While some people might use Second Life in the educational sphere, I would be cautious to use it with minors. Most of my students are 3 years old through 5th grade, so it doesn't seem like an appropriate program. Even with my high school students, I would want to be in a contained world, like IBM uses for meetings. Still, once students have been required to create an avatar, I have opened up a new world to them, with all the positive and negative implications. I can see parents blaming teachers for choices students make in Second Life during non-school related play because teachers required them to join the world. I wonder what the legal stipulations are with minors using the program and its use within K-12 schooling. Lastly, despite our 1 to 1 laptop program at our high school, our geographic location limits our ability to access internet options. Perhaps Second Life will come under the same scrutiny that has made it inconvenient to use many sites like Facebook, Blogger, and Youtube.


Assignment: Speculate on the role Second Life will/might/could play in 814 and in your own teaching.