Between the Chapters #14 getting a Second Life & Virtual World living with @janesaid6 & @grantpotter

25 Years of Ed Tech

In this episode of Between the Chapters of @YearsEd, Laura talks to Sarah Frick and Grant Potter about Second Life, Virtual Words, role-playing and more! In reflecting back to 2007 in Chapter 14, we talk about how these virtual spaces impacted our working, teaching, learning, and personal lives. This chapter pokes at ways we can play, create, and experiment to share teaching and learning practices in these virtual worlds, games, and more! We can learn so much from digital online environments and think more about virtual communities online today.

• Second Life
• Science Friday NPR & their Sci Fri SL Island
• Sloodle: Simulation Linked Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment
• Penn State World Campus Second Life
• TheSims
• Animal Crossing
• Accessibility in Second Life
• Second Life Is Dead, Long Live Second Life? Via EDUCAUSE
• What Ever Happened to Second Life? The Chronicle
• Second Life Marketplace
• Linden Dollar Conversion Rate
• Pirate Bay
• Roblox
• Examples of how artists & musicians are doing this in these virtual spaces and games: concert by Lil Nas in Roblox; Travis Scott Concert in Fortnite & U2 Concert and the like back in the day in Second Life.
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Mozilla Hubs
• Speaking of open, free, and low threshold, Mozilla Hubs is cross-platform and browser-based and you can get in a space to invite students with 2 clicks (My department at Miami University ETBD used this for our Virtual Commencement this last Spring). Its Spoke maker tools are still a bit advanced, but do-able by someone with zero code skills
• Blender is Sara’s go-to for open and free 3D object and animation creation.
• Virtual Reality (VR) 101
• Oculus Quest 2
• More about play and our ludic tools, here is a podcast episode with a lot of great quotes and reflections from the recently released "Virtual Existentialism" (Gualeni, 2020) that also touches back on the "Researching Virtual Worlds" (Plesner, 2016).
• Accessibility in Virtual Worlds: Lessons from Second Life with Donna Davis
• Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching (Warburton, 2009)
• Second Life: Privacy in Virtual Worlds
• Related to the ethical and privacy concerns, here is a curated overview of what is happening in the Oculus and Facebook saga- curated by Kent Bye, who has done a lot around privacy issues in VR
• What is Augmented Reality (AR)?
• Gamified learning in higher education: A systematic review of the literature (Subhash & Cudney, 2018)
• Grant’s “Chat on Cube”
• How to Conference Call with Red Dead Redemption
• 20 Best Virtual Icebreakers For Your Zoom Meetings
• How to Run a Great Virtual Meeting via HBR
• A few simple tips for better online meetings (COVID-19 edition)
• Player Versus Environment (PvE)
• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
• Discord
• 1st Generation of iPhone invented in 2007
• MineCraft Education Edition
• Pokémon Go
• Scripting with LSL
• Rick and Morty
• SL Avatars: Grant & Jane Zwizzle
• A SecondLife event of legend … 2008 NMC Fall Virtual Symposium "Rock The Academy” where Tom Woodward and Jim Groom immolate conference participants while stunting with NPC zombies

Questions asked for the ed tech community:

• What’s the point of the virtual world, if we’re just going to replicate the same thing digitally? How can we do better?
• What is the disconnect between higher ed & industry, with regards to gaming or ed tech software development for teaching & learning?
• Where did we lose the “play” in teaching and learning?
• Were you in Second Life or in another virtual world? What was your name & experience?

Connect and learn more about the guests on this episode at:

• Sarah Frick http://edheaded.com/
• Grant Potter https://networkeffects.ca/

Do you want to share your thoughts about a virtual world, game community, or SL? Do you have comments or questions about this podcast? Send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is lic...