I got a press release the other day from Queen's University about a new initiative their faculty of education is undertaking on the uber-popular online world of Second Life.
Turns out the faculty has purchased a virtual "island" and filled it with replicas of their real-life Queen's campus buildings.
(For those of you who aren't familiar with Second Life, it's a sort of virtual world where "residents" can pretty much do whatever they want. There are about 13-million such residents).
The folks at Queen's believe that virtual worlds such as Second Life are the future of education. The idea is that teachers can use these tools to recreate, say, a chunk of ancient Greece, or have their students virtually sit through a Shakespeare play during the Globe theatre's heyday.
(This of course brings to mind the scene in a Simpsons episode where Lisa dreams of a virtual reality teaching tool that transports her to the days of Genghis Khan, who tells her, "You’ll go where I go! Defile what I defile! Eat who I eat!").
Queen's isn't the only school "virtualizing" some of their educational resources. Nor is education the only sector where this kind of thing is happening. Sneaker companies have used Second Life to pre-market new shoes. Bands have staged online concerts with varying degrees of success. Reuters even launched an ill-fated Second Life Bureau that, for a while, reported on the daily happenings inside the massive virtual world.
One of the more interesting things Queen's is planning to do with its Second Life property is launching virtual campus tours. If the plan works, students can save tons of time and money by touring virtual recreation of the faculty of education, rather than traveling to see the real thing.
Of course, if it's not done well, the risk is that students might get the impression that the faculty is housed in a pixilated, gravity-defying mess...
