Doodle of a Massively Multiplayer Online University

Posted by Danny on Friday, March 20, 2009 at 2:51 am

I haven’t tried it, but Second Life sounds a great deal like the forsoothing and *emoting* experience of my Ultima Online role-playing crowd from years and years ago, except without the opportunity to be virtually sodomised by roving bands of semi-literates wielding cheerfully rendered implements of medieval can-opening and firey death. It’s probable that the semi-literates persist, though I’m sure that sodomy of any sort is now at least restricted to consensual zones.

It’s been almost six years since my back was wholly divested of the UO monkey, and though I’ve found other online vices to supplant it and erode my academic viability, Second Life came up in my research for Clare Brett’s Educational Applications of Computer-Mediated Communication course last term. The article[1] talked about virtual classroom environments being built and coördinated with university instructors to facilitate seminars and broadcast lectures—something that struck me as tremendously groovy and mitigates somewhat the picture of the silver-fox furry sitting among other virtual students. The picture on the top of p22 shows a group of students participating in a virtual seminar attached to a Harvard Law course, where apparently the video from the real-life seminar room is broadcast to groups of students in the virtual environment. It would be amazing if this was happening in real-time, with a corresponding portal in the real-life seminar room open into the Second-Life seminar, allowing for full two-way interaction (though I have no idea if this is how it worked, and suspect that it would be too bandwidth intensive under the restraints of present technology). With this in mind, and hearing Stian describe the micro-communities that formed from the broader ecosystem of his Wiley Wiki experience, I started doodling an interface pipe-dream upon which I shall presently expound. Read more »