I recently tried Second Life as part of a course I am taking on Educational Technology and, although I felt that the whole thing was very weird, immediately saw the benefits for education. I did, however, feel that the dangers and shortcomings outweighed them and therefore wrote Second Life as an educational tool.

Until today…

The biggest problem with Second Life is the  fact the lack of privacy control and the lack of control for a teacher or parent. You are essentially handing students the keys to a world where they can go anywhere, meet anyone and do anything without leaving there bedroom. (I understand that this is essentially the same thing as the internet, but the nature of interaction and the fact that it runs through a separate client make it fundamentally different.) With this amazing opportunity for learning, also comes a tremendous dark side, and the current system doesn’t allow for much control and oversight.

OpenSim can potentially do for Virtual Worlds, what the Apache Server Software did for the internet; create an open network of worlds that anyone can host, operate and control. This type of environment allows for better focus and oversight in the educational application of this technology.

OpenSim, short for Open Simulator, is a platform built on the Second Life platform, which is open source. It runs on multiple Operating Systems and allows for import and export from Second Life and other Virtual Worlds. The goals being the creation of a “grid” of virtual world which avatars can pass between seamlessly much in the same way that we pass between websites today. This vision of the future is far more intriguing to me as an educator than the current model of Second Life and other exclusive Virtual Worlds. It allows for more control, age restricted access and private areas for work and simulation.

Imagine a virtual school built on OpenSim in which students and teachers from all over the world could collaborate to learn and virtualize educational concepts…