Last week i spent an entire day in Trento (Italy): we had to set up two real-life lab for two schools* using Second Life for educational purposes. The bright, new idea is to connect these two schools together in a virtual environment to experiment new ways of doing e-learning, Second Life (teen grid) in fact may help with the use of 3d scripted-dynamical objects that may stimulate students creativity increasing their learning orientation, organizing them in groups with determined tasks and make interact them with other groups.

Now my impressions : Students seems really fascinated with computer graphics, colors and shapes, they already play video-games so they haven’t got too many troubles with the avatar command keys, despite that some technical aspects of Second Life must be well considered, first of all real-life/second-life converged organization: the virtual lab based on a grid SIM must be settled up with varius operative controls such as no flying permissions; the building/scripting realization is influent too, if you create a heavy virtual lab with thousand of primitives the server will slow down as your SL client, and the most important problem of a similar event is to avoid mess at all costs. In real-life if it’s a group of SL clients using the same internet connection, their maximum bandwidth should be limitated to avoid lag, and watch out on windows-based SL viewers cause the Voice System requires administrative permission, so keep the administrator in touch. These are my suggestions about some technical aspects of real-life/second-life event management based on my last experience, beyond this the experiment with two schools worked fine, students interacted with virtual reality and with their other school mates, i look forward to see new developments about this project promoted by two innovative teachers of these schools.

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*Liceo Russell di Cles