Web 3.0 Applications & Real World Usage
Sharon Tettegah (Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction)
Web 2.0? Web 3.0 is up and running. The World Wide Web, Internet, and other technologies continue to evolve. We are experiencing e-ecologies and virtual learning environments with the capacity to immerse the user in a place across time and space. What does it mean to teach and learn within and with virtual reality and virtual environments? It means that we as learners are no longer engaged in one way interactions. Virtual environments have enabled us to be in highly immersive object oriented spaces that yield high social presence, immersion, constructivist learning, interactive problem solving, and surprisingly still be enjoyable. This presentation focuses on the use of chat spaces, 3D Web or object oriented web, virtual reality environment applications within Web 3.0.
Presentation Summary
We've already seen the tremendous growth of Web 2.0 based content on the internet, and most of us are already comfortable using social networking web sites and other online services like blogs and podcasts. However, things move quickly, and now Web 3.0 is already making its presence felt!
Dr. Tettegah holds a degree in Educational Psychology from the University of California. She is a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Curriculum and Instruction and an affiliate faculty member in the Beckman Institute Human Perception and Performance group. Her field of professional interest is the application of simulations and virtual reality environments to education.
Sharon started out by highlighting the various areas wherein Web 3.0 is currently being implemented – including smart phones, social networking, "massively multiplayer" online role-playing games, and (most importantly) virtual worlds. Its use in virtual worlds was the primary focus of this speech.
Second Life is a very large multiplayer environment where people can interact with each other and lead an entire life within the confines of an online world. Second Life has attracted players and business from world over and participants are only just realizing its tremendous potential.
Having been in the game over a year and served as an instructor for a virtual course therein, Sharon has hands-on experience with how things work in Second Life. In fact, her journey has compelled her to write a book on Second Life, which will be published in the near future.
The most amazing thing about Second Life is that it's a self-sustaining economy. People make real money in the game by offering products and services. So if you make a new avatar, you need to buy clothes for him/her with real money. Another interesting aspect of Second Life is the ability to buy and sell real estate. Sharon has traded land and for a nice profit too! Of course, you're not limited to only real estate or clothing. Nike opened a virtual store in the game and took public opinion on new sneakers before producing and releasing them in the real world. The possibilities are endless!
Apart from this, Sharon studies the educational implications of Second Life. Her goal is to promote the use of Second Life as an alternative to the physical classroom in a way that benefits the students. She was the instructor of a class of thirty students in Second Life. She has found it's an extremely effective way of teaching that is both fun and interactive for the students. Sharon's course utilized Second Life's capacity to inspire students to test their creativity by allowing them to build structures from different materials and designs. Sharon started by buying undeveloped land in the game, just as you would buy land in real life. She then split the class into groups and gave each group a stipend. Of course, doing anything in the game needs money, so when the students got their money, they had to budget for whatever development they had planned. By the end of the course, they had turned barren land into a fledgling educational complex.
In addition to designing their own environment, they also had to do something productive with it. So they came up with pre-school, elementary, middle school, high school and college/university environments and, within them, they also built the supporting curriculum. Sharon made sure that each group of four students had at least one CS major for the coding;activities and two curriculum experts. For the middle school environment, they constructed a marine biology curriculum and designed a coral reef. You could walk the ocean floor through this reef and identify the various types of marine life living there!
Of course, there are also some issues with the way Second Life works. It is increasingly difficult to maintain a stable grid to handle the immense server loads. The weekly updates also take up a sizeable portion of your bandwidth. Second Life can be tried for free, but if you want to be able to trade in the game, there's a fee of $9.99 per month. Policing in this virtual world is also an issue since there's no authority to, for example, punish the players who don't honor transactions.
In conclusion, virtual worlds can be extremely immersive, helping people develop extensive social networks. They have extensive potential in the classroom. It gives people a chance to have something and be someone they could not be in real life. It is upon us to effectively implement these technologies to help us enrich our lives.
You can email Sharon at stettega@uiuc.edu if you have any questions.
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