Before I read Gardner's recent comment, I took the plunge into the basics of scripting and animating in Second Life. I had feared that animations would be a tremendous pain for many reasons. Fortunately, I think they would be a pain for a relatively small set of reasons--the reasons inherent to any kind of animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame positioning of each element. Avimator is really nice application for the details. It gives a basic SL avatar and the controls to define an animation of 30 frames with a really nifty user interface. The only hard part is the frame-by-frame positioning of each part. I have a newfound respect for the California Raisons.

Scripting with LSL is fairly pleasant. The tutorials and references online are pretty helpful, and I suspect will be more and more helpful as/if I develop a sense of what is available (i.e., discovering the SL equivalent of the Document Object Model). But I have at least one object with a script attached--if you say 'hello' near it, it writes "Hello, (your name)" on itself. It's a start!

Our ITS crew took a group exploration of Second Life today. Part of the good fun was walking around in a virtual world with a group of people who were all in the same room. ([CF] New World Notes' suggestion).

The question lurking in all of our minds, which Jerry made explicit afterward, was "how could this be used in teaching?". That's why we're exploring, and why people like Rachel Smith are exploring, too ([CF] her Faculty Academy Talk.

I'm starting to think of two conceptual directions: representational and behavioral. Representational is a bit more traditional, in that it would allow, say, recreating an ancient building in order to convey a richer spatial sense of how a culture would experience a cultural space. Of course, doing so would also introduce the possibility of a distinctly opposite experience when, for example, a student would fly around a building, rather than walk around it. I think flying can be disallowed, but the basic point that, even while it would introduce a more complex representation of the artifact, it would also mediate the perception of the artifact in equally complex ways.