In following up with the last post, in which NPR talks briefly about Second Life:
I have to say at this point, I'm still up in the air about use of Second Life in the library beyond very, very limited and experimental instructional purposes. I think this kind of technology definitely has usefulness and vast potential, but who knows if Second Life will be the lasting platform to deliver it? I would be hesitant to spend any significant amounts of money or time developing content there if it is going to go the way of VHS or MySpace. It's a really cool toy at present for those of us who are geeks at heart, but I haven't seen many uses of it that go much beyond presenting 2-D info in a 3-D environment (example: embedding a power point in a virtual world - I can't think of a dumber use of this technology!)
Does Second Life use standard programming, such as some sort of xml-like language (please excuse my ignorance of this since I have no knowledge of the Second Life back end) for content so that it might in the future be easily ported over to a different system? For example, if I created a detailed, modular, immersive instructional experience, for example, covering various aspects of information literacy and understanding and using library resources, and then Second Life went out of business, could I easily move that experience over to the next virtual platform?
If not, is such a standard for virtual content possible? If not, that to me would be huge stumbling block to widely adopting such kinds of virtual technologies and platforms given their ever changing nature.
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I'm dragging my feed on using second life in the library. It would involve a huge amount of time for me to become proficient and I think I could spend that time more wisely in other ways.
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