Virtual U

At The College we are experiencing pressure from online courses, especially for evening (adult learner) programs. I discovered Second Life the other day, after reading about it in Newsweek. I tried to find the article to link it here, but their search engine is terrible. Anyway, the basic account is free, so I signed up to try it out.

It looks like the future, folks. You can own land and build on it, and make a living developing it. You can make a living designing clothes for the citizens (according to Newsweek). I saw a wedding--okay I crashed it, but I didn't know I was supposed to have an invitation--and snapped the photo above. Unfortunately I had dressed in blue for this gothic ceremony and stood out like a guy dressed in blue at a wedding where everyone else is wearing black. There's a cool scripting language that can be used to animate objects and such. I made a large donut, stuck it in my head, and programmed it to bless anyone who touched it. My attempt to create a butterfly was risible, however--I couldn't shrink the thing after I spent 20 minutes building it, so it was WAY too big. It would be really cool if you could do genetic programming on it so they could breed and create new kinds of butterflies...

Anyway, the point of all of this is that there doesn't seem to be a school yet in SL. Why not? SLU is already taken, however. Maybe 2LU? Sounds more techie anyway.