Holding Class in Second Life

After attending a class session in Second Life I admit that my overall tune to the utility of Second Life has changed.

First, the challenges:

Specific Second Life challenges that I faced while attending class

• I needed to stay rather focused on the ongoing discussion text and read the text very quickly, as it would disappear after a few seconds, as I did not know if there was a history option.
• If the text message from another user was really long, it would be blocked by the other Second Life floating windows that I had open. I corrected this problem by closing these windows, but, then I lost my place in the dialogue.

Next, the changes:

I found that during the class session, I began to tune out the real world, and slowly slipped completely into Second Life. By the end of the class session, I felt myself almost completely immersed within Second Life and felt that Second Life was in fact, real life. Naturally, I completely lost track of time too.

As this transition was occurring, I began to subconsciously portray my real life physical feelings into Second Life gestures. I specifically, remember translating the mental feeling, "I'm stiff and need to stretch", into a "/stretch" gesture. (Unfortunately, for me, it came out as a "board" sound!) Laughing out loud was another emotion that I quickly began to translate into Second Life gestures. Finally, when class ended, I was happy, and expressed my feelings by "dancing" in Second Life, and felt completely at ease with this style of emotional expression.

During the transition I also noticed that I over came the challenges with staying on top of the ensuring dialogue. In fact, when there was a pause in the dialogue, I felt myself becoming board and wishing for it to pick up and/or tried to think of what to say to keep the dialogue flowing. Additionally, the time I took between thinking about something to say and actually going through the motion of typing the comment also became much shorter.

Finally, the lessons learned:

While I faced some initial challenges, I think holding a class in Second Life gave me a "safe" environment to more deeply explore and experience one possible set of Second Life user experience. I now have a better appreciation for what Second Life can offer and can better understand the appeal and allure of Second Life.