Real Life, Second Life - Potentials for Real Learning in Virtual Worlds

I've finally been given a golden ticket and granted the privilege to a facility as wondrous as anything Willy Wonka could come up with: the University of Florida's Digital Worlds Institute labs. In the lab, I've seen demonstrations of the virtual worlds that are being built at UF and been granted access to the Digital Worlds Island in Second Life. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Second Life is a virtual world where users can build their own islands, trade in virtual commodities for Linden dollars which can be exchanged for U.S. dollars, and interact with others through the use of virtual personae, or avatars. While my past experience in SL has been primarily aimless wandering around *you can FLY* and the odd webinar or panel discussion on ISTE Island. While SL is a bit too virtual for me, personally, and feels video game-ish, I can see the potential for it as a means for people to connect with those that they never would have the opportunity to in RL, or real life. This is especially true in terms of learning foreign languages, visiting virtual museums and virtual replicas of landmarks and historical sites, and holding virtual meetings to collaborate in learning and work product. While not Second Life itself, this concept was an impetus for my current research track; I saw the trend of corporate meetings moving increasingly to online webinars and netmeetings and the increase in K-12 courses offered online. It seemed to me that online learning and virtual schooling (whether in a virtual world or not) is the wave of the present and holds the potential to bring educational opportunities to millions who would not otherwise have access to them as well as the potential for distance and online education to serve as a powerful tool for international development. So...while SL does feel like an overgrown video game, it does, in actuality, have the potential to be a powerful learning tool to impact people in their real lives.

As an aside, I searched and could find no SL islands related to deafness or sign language even though Vcom3D was working on signing avatars that could translate text to ASL as far back as 1997. Since then, the signing avatars have been refined and their linguistic accuracy improved but they still haven't really caught on other than in a few schools around the country that use them in a limited capacity in literacy classrooms. It seems that while they were working on these elaborate avatars as a potential communication aid, cellphone technology surpassed it and simple text messaging capabilities have made the Sidekick and Blackberry the choice of hundreds of thousands of otherwise visual communicators.