It's Second Life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Renya from Second Life arriving in the transporter room

For Assignment 3, thought I’d investigate Second Life.

It’s definitely life, Jim, but not quite as one knows it.  Thought I’d keep a log of some of my experiences and see how they stack up with literature and other people's blogs.

Day one, 29  September… just doing the intro to SL and already I can see that distraction is going to be an issue!

Choosing a name… googled second life names.  Learn not to choose anything too basic.  Also apparently using numbers in names isn’t Quaite the Thing, dearies! (Although once on SL saw plenty of people using numbers.)  Settle on JuliaMt, as Julia was taken and I'm not feeling fancy.

Now - downloading, installing, and getting into the program.  Great excitement!  Some excitement.  Go on to YouTube while waiting, when I get bored and watch Lego version of "Cake or Death?" sketch in meantime.  Wow, Second Life took a long time just to get going!  Apparently my computer isn’t up to snuff either, as the friendly pop-up box lets me know. 

Never mind.  On I go, into the initial room that shows me how to use basic functions such as walking, chatting and some of the features I might meet in SL.  I also meet someone, and discover that the chat function works OK, but I watch this person leave for fresh pastures as my destination tab doesn’t give me any options.  Oh well…

Reload.

Destination tab works now.  Go for a walkaround in a different location, run across a few people, some who don't speak English, some who can only speak in Tourette's.  So far, so unimpressed.  More importantly, I check my data allowance with Slingshot.  Yikes!  It’s already ratchetting up there!  Second Life appears to be a bit of a data hog, but this could be due to downloading a few large programs lately.  I’ll check again tomorrow.

3 hours after getting into Second Life, I’m logging off.  And what did I achieve?  A couple of hellos, some confusion, got told off for going into one area where I should have been 10 days old before entering (new form of netiquette to master), and (ironically) the dispiriting reminder that my faithful Ye Olde Acer is at the venerable age of 5 or 6 getting a bit long in the tooth for this newfangled digital world, and I managed to walk around as a fox.  No – the animal kind, not the sex kitten sexy mamma variety.

On the plus side, I did manage to fly and get down again safely.  There was a slight problem with bumping the fox’s head on the ceiling, but avatars are resilient beasties.  On a more sinister note, I'm keen on getting back into it tomorrow to see if I can find myself some clothes.  The rot of SL addiction may already be setting in! 
  

So much for Day One.  What did I learn for potential use in education?  Primarily that unless the learner is a digital native or particularly exploratory in the internet, the tutor is going to have to take great care in setting up the exercise by orienting students into the particular area of Second Life the lessons are scheduled to take part.  A set of exercises to help a learner get past some of the initial frustrations and find specified goals would help. 

In the meantime, check out the flying fox!