19 May, 2008
Wired Campus: NYU Student Creates Virtual Girlfriend – Chronicle.com
First Lars and the Real Girl (once the site opens, click on the Trailer), and now another variation on the theme of girlfriend. I have two comments right now:
15 Oct, 2007
I am such a morning person that it is hard for me to figure out what do do first. I like to get up between 6:00 – 7:00 AM, and after going through my morning routine of letting out the cat, making coffee, checking email, and then going outside with the dog, it is always a toss-up as to whether I go for a run or bike ride or get some work done. The problem is that I have found once I start to work on the computer, it is hard for me to break-away. But I also know that if I don’t exercise in the morning, I will rarely get to it in the afternoon. I always worked out in the morning, even when I was working for someone else and needed to be somewhere other than home at a specific time in the morning.
This morning I decided to go out for a run since I had been sluggy all weekend and only walked the dog rather than anything really aerobic. Even though it seemed to take longer this morning to feel a sense of energy while running, it did finally happen.
While wondering about what to post about, I remembered one of the conversations that some of the faculty at the Marlboro College Graduate Center have been having about the viability of Second Life. This had been prompted by the article from the Chronicle’s Wired Campus in which the New Media Consortium detailed a survey they conducted with more than 200 educators who were in SL. The responses were about split between those who felt that 3D virtual worlds have potential and are here to stay and those who felt the mucking around in virtual worlds are a waste of time and will not make it into the mainstream.
Although I rarely venture into SL lately, I have been a resident of SL for a while; in world I go by the name of Isabetta Capellini, reclaiming my Italian heritage. I started out thinking that SL was just the coolest application (which it is), and was keen to become facile with and in it. but I was daunted by the initial learning curve. and the required updates were so frequent that apparently one of my absences had been long enough that I couldn’t even get back in, requiring an extended time commitment to rectify the situation.
Today I don’t think SL has enough practical application for education for the masses. Do I think that 3D virtual worlds are going away-NO. In fact Wired Campus did a follow-up article talking about how SL is being modified such that people with disability who are unable to use a mouse or speak, can use their thoughts to control movement inworld. Check it out. Yuot blows my mind.
