I belong to an enormous listserv of educators in Second Life and have been following the discussions there regarding the NMC’s venture with Sun Microsystems. Some people are a little concerned this new platform may take the place of Second Life since many edu’s have made enormous investments in SL. The NMC is huge in Second Life and seems to have made the greatest investment of all and is at the center of much edu activity in SL in terms of support, events, community maintenance, etc. So its understandable that people are a little concerned. Here’s the NMC’s video on the project.

From my point of view, I am excited about this and any other viable application that can be used with students. I do not see any of these other applications taking the place of  Second Life because the others simply cannot provide the community found within an open grid. That said, I do like the idea of being able to make standalone 3-D simulations on a secure platform. The ability to create technical training/simulations that are not meant to be synchronous or community-driven will, to my mind, become more and more important to CC education. As well as the ability to share these simulations and collaborate on their creation! Of course, these things can be done in SL. But let’s face it, SL can be a tough sell because of the very thing that makes it so powerful. The huge community, the openness of the application and its commercial nature can be just as limiting as it is liberating.

If commercial vendors can get into the business of creating proprietary training simulations why shouldn’t we take advantage of these synchronous VR platforms and make our own? Here’s an example of a company that does these game-train modules. http://www.etceteraedutainment.com/virtualtraining.php

Though this company designs for students who cannot pay attention for more than an hour (!), they do have a point about traditional training being ineffective.