Taking second looks at Second Life

It seems the luster of Second Life's newness has worn off.

Now that the hype over Linden Labs's virtual world is fading into the sunset, business and journalists are starting to take a more serious and objective look at Second Life and what it means for the average user.

Wired has published an article that discusses the disappointing results from advertisers that have set up spaces in SL - the spaces are fairly deserted and Wired does an estimate of the actual number of regular SL users that indicates many people only have time to live their First Life. Wired's editor has also written a piece explaining why he gave up on Second Life. The LA Times has also published an article on how disappointing SL is to business.

Some faculty are finding interesting and appropriate uses of Second Life that have pertinent learning goals for students. (A blogger at New Scientist discusses one faculty member at Elon that has a virtual telescope in SL to prepare his students to use the real thing, for example.) However, the Chronicle of Higher Ed continues to be a rather uncritical cheerleader for Second Life and many leaders in IT still tout "virtual worlds" as the "next big thing" in education.

SL development is expensive and time consuming - I'm thinking that a more cautious and realistic approach might be more beneficial to faculty and students in the long term.

Your email is buggy

There's been a great deal of work lately on visualizing information in unusual ways, in part due to new tools for programmers that have made this work easier.

The latest is an MFA thesis that includes a Flash program; it allows the user to visualize their email as living organisms. The software checks your email folders and shows representations of new versus old messages, unread messages, and other information.

blog post at Wired.com

The buzz on Buzzword

We already have web-based word processors from Zoho, Google and others. One new entry in the race to replace Microsoft Word is discussed in a blog post at Wired.

Buzzword was built using Flex, a technology that is an offshoot of Flash, and is generating interest because of it's advanced, clean interface. It was created by a small start-up company and is in an "invite only" Beta right now, with an open Beta scheduled for the Fall.

blog post at Wired.com

Karaokee social networking

If MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life aren't giving you enough social networking in your life, now you can share your budding vocal talents with web users everywhere through SingShot, a website devoted to creating, sharing, and commenting on other people's renditions of "Yesterday" by the Beatles or "Crazy" by Patsy Cline.

A site like this could be quite useful in education - vocal students, instrumentals or actors and performers could post their work and invite critiques and suggestions from other users. However, it would run into problems with student privacy laws if done in connection with an institution or course.

A commentator at Slate comments on using SingShot.

I started belting out songs—"Heartbreaker," "Independent Women"—that I would've never dared to perform in front of a live audience. I stayed up nights recording take after take, track after track. But to my chagrin, the bleats that came out of my throat sounded feeble. My voice cracked on high notes; I had trouble with rhythm. The main advantage of a karaoke Web site, I learned, is that I could humiliate myself 24 hours a day.

Edugames are no edufun

Slate has a little opinion piece that deflates the idea of using video games in teaching. The author compares trying to teach using video games to "putting Velveeta on broccoli" - the results aren't necessary fun and are more like a chore than anything else.

One of the bigger profile projects in higher ed the past few months, besides the sudden fetish among educators for "Second Life", has been UNCG's Econ 201, an entire course that's taught through the video game medium. I saw a demo of the thing and, quite honestly, thought it was rather silly - the whole world of cartoony aliens with silly names invented for the game look like something your "hip" dad would develop that he thinks the kids would find "cool".

The whole look of the game seemed outdated even before the ink was dry on the programming code - visually, it takes inspiration from SciFi channel movies of the week and second tier PlayStation video games.

article at Slate

MySpace and Facebook differences

Researcher danah boyd has produced a new study of Facebook and MySpace users, finding that the differences between the two have more to do with class than age or other factors. Facebook is attracting more affluent, middle class young people who have a focus on college and careers; MySpace seems to be attracting more minorities.

Faculty interested in looking at social networking as part of class activities might want to examine both sites closely; the different audiences for them could make for interesting class activities or student research.

Participation in Web 2.0 sites

A new study concludes that participatory Web 2.0 sites have less participation that initially believed. Less than 1% of users at Flickr and YouTube actually upload videos; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had the most participation (about 4%) of the sites examined in the survey.

article at News.com