Hello all! I am hoping some of you have some experience in using Second Life as a training tool and can share with me your successes and challenges in using this tool. Also, I am looking for information on how to create learning opportunities in Second Life. I just discovered this site recently, but have not been able to find any documentation on how to create training in this virtual world.

Any assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,

Mikel

Well, I have been interested in this for a long time. My problem is that I have the fastest internet access I can get: 1Mbps+ downstream; 400k upstream. It is too slow for SL. The user experience is just terrible.

So my challenge is that a good user experience requires a good fast connection.

Tom Kuhlman's December 9th blog entry at the Articulate site had some very creative uses of a 3-D learning environment like Second Life.

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

Scroll down to Dec 9.

Second Life indeed has challenges for users with both the quality of the broadband connection and firewall issues. But you don't always have to bring the learner into Second Life. Bring it to them!

I speak on this at conferences and have free resources on how you can use Second Life as a fairly rapid delivery tool for very little money. You can create scenarios and general video to enhance your eLearning, up learner engagement, and increase retention.

My site subQuark has free tutorials and resources to help you explore this option.

As to learning opportunites, there are over 250 universities in there and the Alliance Library System is huge in learning activities.

As to creating learning opportunities, plan on investing some time to learn it and its culture. It is a wonderful collaborative environment and I have been lucky to have done some interesting custom work in there.

If you have any questions, I am passionate (lol, can you tell) and own 12 sims.

There are lots of great resources from Linden Lab online, including information request forms.

Good luck and have fun!