Educational Gaming Commons Second Life Workshop

Faculty are invited to attend a workshop on the educational benefits of the online virtual world Second Life on November 12 from 1:30-4:30 p.m. The workshop will take place in the Educational Gaming Commons Lab in 6A Findlay Commons at the East Halls, University Park, and will be facilitated by the Educational Gaming Commons staff and Shannon Ritter of Penn State Outreach.

Virtual worlds are 3-D, online, persistent spaces created and evolved by their users. The virtual world Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/) offers tremendous potential for research and teaching. Within this vast and rapidly expanding place, you can do, create, or become just about anything you can imagine.

Virtual worlds provide many educational benefits. The two strongest benefits may be an immersive problem-solving environment coupled with social interactions. For example, at Penn State, Second Life is used for teaching Spanish, as a meeting spot for World Campus online and distance education students, and more. The Penn State Educational Gaming Commons hosts space in Second Life for educators.

This workshop will first introduce you to the basics of Second Life, including how to acquire a free account and to navigate within the world. The second part of the workshop will demonstrate discipline-specific uses of Second Life to spark your imagination on potential uses of this environment.

Space is limited to a maximum of 12 people. To register, complete the online form at http://tinyurl.com/EGCSLWorkshop. The form will ask you to indicate your academic discipline as well as which aspects of Second Life you would be most interested in seeing during the workshop. If you have any questions, e-mail gaming@psu.edu. The workshop is sponsored by the Educational Gaming Commons, a service of Information Technology Services.