Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

The Subject Centre  where I work gets some linkage from the 17th’s post Engineering in Virtual Worlds, a round up of  Second Life/virtual world things:

There have been recent reports of the failure of Second Life to live up to the hype, but the potential of virtual worlds – multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) – is still being explored in education. It is perhaps Second Life’s potential as a First Life marketplace that has failed to live up to the hype.

Worth a read.

Good that the hype has died down. The idea and the potential still remain long after the “Second Life ate my Hampster” copywriters have moved on. Its good we got a mention and a citation – all good for business – if people are now asking “so what is it all about?” we are in a slightly better than the average position to say, which is our job!

My long standing gripe with the whole SL thing is that the very people who have never even tried SL are the ones slagging it off – incredible! It was easier to persuade those same people about the commercial Internet 15 years ago than it was with SL. I’m generalising wildly, but I think the reason for that is its a generational thing. The Internet was new for everybody of all ages. But the virtual world, or indeed, virtuality generally, is harder to grasp for older people.