Over the past few months I have been reviewing literature on virtual worlds, their place in the web of on-line communities, how they have evolved and what is happening within them today - most specifically focusing on Second Life. Why Second Life? Well many reviews of virtual worlds tend to use Second Life as a key example, with hype and criticism on the value of virtual worlds focusing on Second Life – a space where content is created, people collaborate and groups of communities form and grow by the interests of users (residents).

I cannot help but ignore the ever-growing criticism of virtual worlds, the numerous organisations that have experimented and left e.g. Google lively, as well as my day to day encounters with people still hung up on the question “why would anyone spend money for a pair of virtual shoes in a game?”. My simple answer to this is that if you are still using the world game in describing virtual world environments such as Second Life then you need to stand back and really see what is happening in there.

Virtual Worlds are not the be all and end all. Will all distributed businesses replace teleconferencing etc with virtual worlds? Will masses of users flock away from amazon.com to go wander around a virtual shop to do some last minute Christmas shopping? in both cases... hardly. For many, virtual worlds have yet to prove their value, having glimpsed and simply moved away with their own quick conclusions that these spaces provide little value especially in their current state. They may be right. But looking beyond what virtual worlds can do for the inner workings of a business (such as the virtual meeting via avatars that we have all heard about), we must acknowledge the current way various people learn and where they learn.

Are next generation of users, current professionals and many others using and learning in them? Are they providing some with severe disabilities with a highly interactive social outlet? Indeed they are. Of course virtual worlds are nothing new, before ever reaching university I had spent many hours as a teenager in Activeworlds (think pre-secondlife) where I built virtual buildings, made on-line connections with people, learned a basic in-world scripting language allowing for a (then) highly interactive experience. I have often grounded by basic understanding of many things from coding, on-line collaborating, text chat (lol’s, lmao, brb, afk etc), editing photos in Photoshop to create a picture to simply place in a virtual environment, etc by associating them with things I learnt growing up during times socialising on-line in a virtual world. Yes that’s right, I logged on and interacted in a virtual world growing up, It didn’t consume my life, I just liked the idea of chatting and ‘building’ with other people on-line. Similarly, today when users build in Second Life they use and sometimes create their own scripts and textures and mashups, which receive feedback and criticisms. They learn. I am a firm believer that this manner of learning in which many younger users are becoming more and more accustomed to can and should be harnessed more effectively. Having students learn new skills in a social context still ends up with the result of students learning. And yes it is a social context, spend some time in a virtual world, treat it as a world not a game. In a game things jump put out at you, entertain you, keep your attention. I am talking about a virtual world and in much the same way as in the physical world you must search for things that interest you. It’s all there, just look. So if you are a lecturer, why not bring a class into a virtual world – a shared learning environment? See the many universities working in Second Life for example California State University, Los Angeles whereby the class of students developed their own shared creations.