A reply from me to a post about someone who said they were addicted to SL...

LOL!

I left here at 520 am when the grid went down- and we were just about to put up my first building!!

And after class today spent 3 more hours on it... Too damn much to learn, and WAYY to much time - but I agree that it's addicting. I now have in my inventory 55 buildings, 20 scripts, 40 plants, etc.. Etc...
And am still like a baby trying to move prims around on my new (as of
3am) aquired 512 acres...

My greatest wish is that by getting educators TOGETHER here we could actually NOT reinvent the wheel all over - so that we must think about collaborating and sharing work, in the same way that 1 linden dollar bought me 17 buildings. Just think if I coul dgo get 5 html tutorials, or a phlebotomy simulation - so please everybody think about this.

It's all fine and dandy for me to have my cool space, and avatar and (waittaminute, somebody made me a woman.... Damn... Wonder if I left that "remember me" box... Not a good default to have in school labs) - anyway, try and keep plugging how we can really use this!

D.i.

Ps- I'm giving my intro to internet class extra credit for this, and they've slowly been getting accounts- today one students in back started laughing out loud and couldn't stop, and it turns out she and her neighbor had launched SL and she had pushed somebody into a lake, and couldn't get over it (I think because it was accidental) - so this is powerful stuff... Now if we can just make it more useful than keeping me and my students from our work...

It all started a month or so ago when i read an article in popular science about Second Life. Then I found an article in MIT's technology review from 2005 that mentioned the economics of second life. I thought it might be interesting to play with in my emerging tech class, and set the articles aside for review.

A student tried it out and was excited about it, and i mentioned it to a dean or two, and about the same time a few more articles started popping up, and i did some basic research.

Which culminated in my boss' boss asking me to figure out how to make it happen, and to make it happen, with pretty rapid deadlines.

So first steps:
-create account, verified with my card
-muck with my avatar- too complicated, walk around with white and blue shirt coat using flag texture for first week until someone gave me some regular clothes
-spent way too long a week into trying to make my face look like my real face, but then giving my ears pointed tips, and making my hair silver-gray
-requested education island space- waiting to hear back
-learned about first land, and got some
-built my first primitives (prims) as big flat boards to put on my property
-and so on.

So this is a place for me to start putting this al together, though I'm wondering if a wiki wouldn' tmake more sense...

the impetus? The SLED list had this link, and i needed a place to put it:
http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/virtualworlds/