Teaching and Learning Using Second Life®
Resources for the VIU Virtual Worlds Community of Practice
Hundreds of educators from universities and colleges around the world are using the 3-D virtual world Second Life® for teaching classes, doing research, holding virtual office hours and other meetings, and running student projects.
The VIU Teaching and Learning Centre has sponsored a project to investigate and evaluate the potential of using Second Life® for teaching, learning, and collaboration. This page contains resources collected and created as part of that project for use by those who are interested in learning more and (we hope) joining our VIU Virtual Worlds Community of Practice. For more information please contact Barbara Thomas.
How-Tos, Tutorials and other material for getting started in Second Life®
An introductory guide to the Second Life 3-D virtual world. The very basic things you need to know: walking, flying, communicating etc. (Note: This manual is in the process of being completely updated for the new Second Life interface).
SecondLife.com The official Second Life website. Go here to register for Second Life and download the software (all free!)
Second Life system requirements The software requires a relatively good graphics card, but will still run just below system requirements.
Second Life Quickstart Guide (Linden Lab) Resources for beginners produced by the makers of Second Life.
Second Life for Educators (Linden Lab) The official Second Life resource page for educators.
Resources relating to the educational uses of virtual worlds
Things to read and watch
A growing collection of online resources (articles, videos, papers, blogs etc) related to the educational use of virtual worlds (mainly Second Life) has been put together and made available from delicious.com, the online bookingmarking site.The resources are being tagged, so that you can better find things that are of particular interest.
Explore them at VW4VIU at delicious.com.
Places to visit in Second Life®
If you go to the VW4VIU at delicious.com. site and select the tag slurl, you will see a set of hyperlinks that will take you (via slurl.com) directly into the specific location in Second Life. Additional locations will be added during the summer. You can use tag combinations with the slurl tag to identify (for example) Second Life locations related to science.
A video sampling of places in Second Life® - a demonstration of some of the current uses in education
The following presentation (machinima) was developed by Barbara Thomas from the Faculty of Management.
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