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What is it with the Australian media? Why are they focused on slandering Second Life as a failure? I have recently discussed my research findings of commercial activity within Second Life with several journalists, where only minimal quotes have been used out of their original context; in order it seems, to support an obvious negative bias.

This is extremely disappointing as it is not an accurate reflection of the important invaluable opportunity that Second Life has provided pioneering commercial exploration of VR capabilities.

Vital 3D avatar immersion lessons have been learnt, modeling and building skills developed, use of digital agents, telepresence, interactive, navigational and communication applications explored, and platform and cultural limitations realised. This is all invaluable experience for commercial frontrunners preparing to invest in a virtual future.

Virtual 3-D Healthcare Learning Environments

The author provides a critical overview of three-dimensional (3-D) virtual worlds and “serious gaming” that are currently being developed and used in healthcare professional education and medicine.

Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations Theory

poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I'd created to engage here - I was participating in an "anxiety support group" in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

No wonder analysts at Gartner, a leading technology research company, predict that three years from now 8 in 10 Internet users will work or play in virtual spaces.

On finding support groups in Second Life: The SLHealthy wiki (slhealthy.wetpaint.com) is probably your best and most comprehensive resource for Second Life health support groups, organizations and locations.

On "official" Second Life health support groups like those operated by the American Cancer Society versus groups begun by individuals who have suffered from a particular ailment: We have not reviewed the information provided by groups, though in several instances, we've decided not to list information about a group because it's clearly unethical. One example is a pro-ana (or pro-anorexia) group, and another was a for-profit "organization."

If you're thinking about joining a group, I suggest you use the same radar you might in the real world: Do you feel comfortable? You should feel perfectly OK about asking questions you have.

Second what? Second Life is a virtual 3-D world on the Internet. Think of it as the marriage of online video game technology and social networking tools, like MySpace and Facebook, with e-commerce potential. It is not really a game and isn’t intended for children.

Public accounting’s presence in Second Life is called CPA Island. CPA Island may be a way to attract the next generation of young professionals to careers in public accounting.

Videos more easily capture the look and feel of Second Life. YouTube (www.youtube.com) has a good introductory overview video of Second Life (search “Second Life Text100”) as well as a video that illustrates its communication, education and collaboration possibilities (search “Second Life Ohio University”).

SL Projects Ideas for RL Students

International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) Location: Spaceport Alpha (sim name) Contact: Troy McLuhan (SL name) Project Ideas: Take publicity photos for the ISM Make a press packet for the ISM Design a temporary exhibition on "Spaceflight in fiction" Plan and publicize an event, like a debate on whether the US should abandon the ISS Design an exhibit on how orbits work Make an exhibit about spacewalks (EVAs) Create an exhibit about how technologies developed for spaceflight have come into everyday use Design and implement a game, like "Dock the spacecraft without breaking it" Build an exhibit about the local galaxies, where they are, and how they are moving Create a memorial to tragedies that have occured with spaceflight Write a glossary of terms used in space exploration Build an astronaut/cosmonaut/taikonaut "Hall of Fame"

Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.

gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making

repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming.

Now fully operational, the NMC Campus has been carefully constructed to provide researchers and students dozens of prebuilt settings for experiments in social interaction in 3-D space. Expressly designed to encourage explorations both formal and informal, traditional and nontraditional, real and surreal, and serious and playlike, the spaces are flexible and will lend themselves to additional uses, yet to be defined. The campus has a variety of places for these interactions, from the serious to the fanciful, each designed to support an optimal group size; these range from 2 to more than 75. The campus also supports a wide variety of traditional media, including posters, PowerPoint slides, photographs, charts/graphs, videos, and weblinks, and these resources continue to be added on a regular basis as a core component of the project. All of these resources are available to NMC members who may wish to bring classes to the campus for a visit, as part of a research project, or for a full term. Complete details on using the campus are available on the NMC Campus wiki. Also available is the complete Second Life toolset of sophisticated building tools and the LSL scripting language, with which all of the NMC Campus and Second Life has been created. These allow the creation of virtually any simulated situation, process, or environment, and the incorporation of sophisticated interactivity. For the latest information on the project, see the main pages in this blog,

My contention is simple - when we're in Second Life to work, we can use the same techniques we use in first life to focus on the task at hand rather than that gorgeous avatar. If we want, later, to consensually jump that avatar's virtual bones (to be deliberately somewhat crude) and they are interested too, then just like flirting in the office, we can run off together and do this. However, if we're in a space that forbids this - Lively I'm remembering you here, but not only you - there is that allure of the forbidden, the censored, the naughty. People can, and will, work around the limitations in some quite amazingly inventive ways. Knowing it's not forbidden lets us (as a group) apply that energy and creativity to the task at hand when we're working, and apply it to the avatar at hand when we're not - in much the same way we learn how to do as adults.

The obvious corollary to this: if we ban sex from Second Life (which isn't the same as the current proposals about the adult continent) we switch back to a situation more like Lively where the allure of the forbidden becomes stronger. Creativity, learning and the like go down, and how long would it be until Second Life follows Lively into closure?

There are a range of other things too. The sex market in Second Life contains a huge amount of innovation - if people want to do sex, people will find ways to let them and support them. Whilst not every tool to support avatar sex turns into a tool to support education or business in Second Life, quite a lot (not all, but quite a lot) of the tools that you find used in education and business settings in Second Life, have their origins in the sex industry. Even when they're duplicating tools that are used in RL education/business settings, the code in Second Life is often explored and refined in the sex industry in Second Life first.