The Story of My “Second Life”

Have about 30 minutes to spare and a fresh cup of coffee? Spend some quality time with this 11-page masterpiece by Wade Roush (that’s his place in SL), Contributing Editor at MIT’s Technology Review magazine (free registration is required). It begins, boldly enough, with this quote:

“The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3-D visual environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping applications such as Google Earth. What happens when the virtual and real worlds collide?”

Argue the timelines all you want, but it seems that the pace at which this vision is becoming reality seems to accelerate with each passing day. Non-announcements from Google notwithstanding, I’ll always remember the look on the Google Engineer’s face (at the Google Teacher Academy in NYC this past March) when I asked him about Sketchup and Second Life spoke louder than words. (Can you say “the cat ate the canary?”) Google won’t be on the virtual sidelines for very long, and when they get in the game, they are going to bring the entire mashed-up real web 2.0 world we know and love to a sim near you. And when that happens, watch out…

I bring this up because I’m getting ready to spend time tomorrow afternoon on a Flashmeeting conference call with our colleagues in the U.K. behind Schome Park. Our kids are “in”- but now what? How do we design activities that stoke their creative and intellectual horsepower? As I suspected, several of our kids are already building – with no formal instruction – and they show no signs of slowing down.

Faz, a 14 year old developer and Schome Park resident, is a good example of someone well-positioned to take advantage of this coming onslaught. He’s responsible for a large number of Schome Park builds and is constantly creating. By the time he’s 16, how much will he have learned? With, by then, his real-world resume with virtual-world skills may well just enable him to do the 21st-century digital equivalent of “turning pro” – heading directly into professional life years before his peers.

This captures the essence of what I personally hope to achieve with our club … to awaken the underlying mathematical, architectural, artistic and sociological genius cleverly hidden in these containers called middle school students and unleash their fury unto the world. Another Mike Denneny. Several, actually. How cool would that be?

What are the impediments? Ourselves … all we need is some curriculum and to get out of the way.  We’re working on that, but for now,  I’m sitting back watching the kids learn, explore, interact, and create. It’s amazing. So much fun. And if we hold up our end of the bargain, it will be supremely relevant.

I’ll close with this quote from Roush’s article:

This, then, is how the Metaverse will take shape: through the imaginations of the programmers, merchants, artists, activists, and networkers who are already moving there. If these part-time émigrés from reality want embellishments like running water or six sunsets a day, they’ll code their universes that way. The rest of us may smile at their whimsy–but we will take up, and come to depend upon, the serious tools that underlie their play. And if the world we create together is less lonely and less unpredictable than the one we have now, we’ll have made a good start.

A good start, indeed. All from the comfort of their own homes, using free software, an Internet connection, and a community of learners from halfway across the globe.

Pretty neat for an after school club, don’t you think?

-kj-