The Straad Players

My thinking on this was affected by two bits of experimentation.

a) I showed Second Life to a group of folk singers using a projector and screen.
b) I took my 6 year old granddaughter on a visit to an island where’re I’m a community member.

I’ve been following with interest various approaches to using SL in education and it seems that it always involves the participants all having avatars “in-world”. The examples I’ve quoted involved none of the participants in acquiring accounts, usernames, passwords and avatars but they became kind of virtual tourists.

In the case of my granddaughter I engaged the services of an online friend who teleported in as a dragon and then became various furry animals. He then became a spider and chased me and my granddaughter around the island and even found us when we “hid” in my house. My granddaughter loved the experience and fully engaged with the dragon.

The space we were in “Cedar Island” is a place where we’d be unlikely to encounter bad stuff so it was a safe environment. I got to thinking that a teacher could take his/her class to such a place and arrange that another colleague or some other person appears to speak to the children (the new voice/audio would be useful tool here)