The Story of My “Second Life”

First read about this on Will’s blog a while back, have had it in my del.icio.us links for a while, and have been meaning to blog it. As we start getting our feet wet with our Teen Second Life project (gotta stop calling it a club) I’m hearing from more and more people who want to get started with their own classrooms. We were fortunate to find the Schome Park Project (kudos to Dr. Ferguson) and get involved; we also looked at Westley Field’s wonderful Skoolaborate project. Ordinarily one has to spend some money and jump through a few legal hoops to create a safe, secure space for their kids to explore the M.U.V.E. that is Second Life.

Until now.

OpenSim (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page) is a very early stage product that allows you to create your own, private virtual world server and create whatever you want in it. You have total control. Getting this bad bog up and running isn’t for the faint-of-heart, there’s no install CD or simple downloaded executable … you’ll need to channel your inner geek or get serious help. But it is up and running and is viable and its development looks very promising.

The good news is that what you create here is totally yours, totally private. The bad news is that what you create here is totally yours, totally private. Everything is up to you! At Schome Park, we’ve been able to join a vibrant community of students and researchers who have already created a fabulous creative space that we can explore, examine and learn from. This is going to greatly assist our teens with learning all there is to know about Second Life. If we were running an OpenSim, everything would be up to us; there is no network, no connections to other worlds (yet), only the people we would invite in. Therein lies the rub; you’re not getting the socially-networked part of the “real” Second Life, the true multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural experience that only comes from connections with others.

That said, I believe there is terrific value in learning the basics of Second Life in a closed environment, prior to accessing a more public learning space. Imagine being able to train users in a private space to increase their comfort level prior to their first “real” in-world experience? This would help a great deal. Imagine being able to create without restriction (beyond your server’s limits). Imagine not having to deal with the prospect of griefers, or with the oft-criticized Linden Lab infrastructure (that is in place, incidentally, to hold the entire metaverse together, thankyouverymuch.) OpenSim makes this possible, and it’s worth exploring if you’ve got the server space and spare geek horsepower needed to crank it up.

-kj-