Holodecks in EduNation

St Valentine’s day evening in Second Life Osna and Mary put on a  Holodeck Faire where people shared their holodeck scenes. There were several amazing builds on show! The project was part of the Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds course.

It was so well attended we ran out of space on ENll and spread onto the second sandbox in EduNation. There were many people all interested in the scope of using holodecks for teaching languages in Second Life.

The real virtue of a holodeck is that if you have a comparatively small plot of land somewhere you can rez a whole scene to teach in and replace it instantly with another. So, for example, you may have the airport scene, where a visitor arrives in a new country and practices the language involved there, followed by situations like the taxi and address systems, registering in the hotel, dinner, breakfast, arranging meeting times offer more scope.

I lost track of the number of scenes I visited tonight but among them were

·         An aquarium

·         A French class with masses of self study resources

·         A church in Venezuela

·         A shop in Venezuela

·         A castle

·         A forest scene

·         Meditation Tower

·         Dogme Gardens

·         A tree house

·         A night club with a wonderful rainy road leading to it

·         A haunted house

·         The Mad Hatter’s Tea party

·         A pyramid

·         A temple

·         The Black Cat Nightclub

·         An Asylum

·         A maze

·         An auditorium

·         A lecture hall
Lots of people attended, the sims were quite full at times. There was lots of networking with people sharing ideas and planning to work together to produce educational resources. It seemed to me to be a hugely successful night and I must congratulate Mary and Osna who ran it, it was a good idea that worked very well. To see a whole set of photographs visit Flickr.