Second Life :: Can I resist? February 22, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 3 commentsNow I cannot resist anymore. I have to post some of my thoughts about Second Life. Everyone else is writing about it. A lot of people whose weblogs I am following are taking up the issue and even the regular print newspaper that I am reading has recently published a big article on it.
Some people from our iCamp consortium from the UPM in Madrid – I think it was Joaquín Salvachua, who told me about it – are even planing to give some lectures in Second Life.
So it seems that you HAVE to be there. However when I once decided to have a look at it and explored for myself I was bored very quickly. I suppose that I spent around 20 minutes or so in registering and creating my own avatar and then I started to walk around a bit and that was it. Maybe I did not stay there long enough to establish some social contacts or maybe it is because I am generally not much attracted by games.
What should not have come as a surprise (but somehow still did make me wonder) is the fact that the biggest business is again sex. It sells. Just like in real life and on the Internet. But why would I want to see avatars when I can have the same offers for the same money on dedicated websites involving real people?
Ok, I will not go into further details here. I just think that for me the same applies when it comes to social networking for other reasons, such as work related topics, sports, etc. For sharing my thoughts and establishing relationships over the Internet I would still prefer to get a real image of the person, read his/her weblog and have the chance for a real f2f meeting one day.
So for the moment I can resist, but I am interested in following this development and I am curious to find out more about the fascination of it.
However, if Second Life is not enough, there are some people already talking about Third Life (not to be confused with Third Age 
). A longer post on it e.g. can be found at Bryan Alexander’s weblog: http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/02/towards_third_l.html
MobilED initiative February 9, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentMobile learning is still one of the big topics that frequently come up when talking about the future of Technology Enhanced Learning. In the European Network of Excellence PROLEARN e.g. we do have a group of researchers look at possible advancements in this area.
One very interesting initative that I recently came across is the MobilED initiative
It seems to be a well balanced cooperation and shows different scenarios to those that we get just too often when we focus only on our “small worlds” of knowledge workers.