John Miller, a Nursing Professor, at Tacoma Community College in Washington is spearheading a nursing simulation hosted within Second Life. Scenarios can be simulated which reproduce life-threatening conditions in a safe ‘virtual’ environment. I've written about Second Life before and it seems to me with the work of simulation pioneers like John Miller, the potential of Second Life as a simulator are being If you want to be a nurse then you need to go to school. Many schools are using technological tools to delivery nursing education;

Here is this Month's ASTD Big Question: Second Life Training? More specifically: In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life? If you were to develop a training island in Second Life, what kind of environment and artifacts would you consider essential for teaching? Just as there are considerable differences in blended learning and virtual classroom training, what are some of the major differences (surprises) in training within virtual worlds? First I am going

Here is a companion post to two previous posts on the topic: Alternatives to Second Life Alternatives to Second Life Continued If you know of more, please feel free to add in the comments section. web.alive Short "flyby" of Nortel's web.alive. This is Nortel's entry into the 3D space. Tags: virtual immersive environmen web.alive is an enterprise ready, network secured virtual world platform designed to solve business problems of working together over distances in real time and the costs associated with travel and training on complex equipment or in hazardous areas.

hope it illustrates some of the advantages of 3D environments and some of the things that can be done to faciliate learning within a 3D environment. The video is based on the work Tony O'Driscoll and I did for the e-learning guild's Synchronous Learning 360 Report . For a full discussion of 3D synchronous learning, you want to get your hands on that report, it contains a complete essay describing our view and explains how to create your own interactive synchronous learning as well as providing a maturity matrix of the use of 3D synchronous learning environments within

This month's question came from a reader the June 2008 Big Question is: Second Life Training? More specifically: In what situations, do you believe it makes sense to develop a learning experience that will be delivered within Second Life? If you were to develop a training island in Second Life, what kind of environment and artifacts would you consider essential for teaching? Just as there are considerable differences in blended learning and virtual classroom training, what are some of the major differences (surprises) in training within virtual worlds?

Every week or so I hear about a company looking to Second Life as a teaching environment. First, I have to say that Second Life is a great Web 2.0/massively multiplayer environment. respect the ability of people to make money in Second Life. I I respect the ability of people

I'm sure that once you add presence-based audio (meaning you can hear people who are close to you) that WebEx style systems will begin to look more like second life so you can have easier break-out sessions. So, in a couple of years, we would expect to have virtual conferences, virtual meetings in these kinds of environments. There are some neat learning Tony O'Driscoll - who will be on a panel at the eLearningGuild conference in Boston coming up in a few weeks and will be talking about this very topic - has published a paper in eLearn and created an interesting blog post with video (embedded below) that starts with a question many of us are asking: Are virtual worlds a breakthrough technology that will forever reshape learning and business?

Second Life truly is a phenomenon. Meanwhile, corporations will set up shop in Second Life, as in FaceBook and MySpace, to be where the kids are in an attempt to speak their language and get some eyeballs. In fact, here are my list of top ten missing features from Second Life: Support for a good scripted story . It is exactly what the name and vision imply: an example of a parallel "multiverse". People will learn much in it, as they might alternatively learn via participating on a real -world sports team, running a real-world lemonade stand, or

With all the bad news in the virtual worlds space this week (read Not a Good Week for the Virtual World Space ), I wanted to point out that many healthy 3D virtual immersive environments still exist and more are coming on line daily. Here are three more virtual worlds to explore Blue Mars Hanging out in the visually rich Blue Mars Virtual Immersive Environment. Blue Mars features CryENGINE™2 powered graphics for highly realistic avatars and environments. The engine is enhanced with custom hair, skin, and cloth shaders along with multi-threaded performance optimizations and MMO server integration.

In my listing of Alternatives to Second Life , many packages were missed. Plans for future updates include the ability to share applications in the virtual environment, and to link whiteboards in physical meeting rooms with the virtual space to show up in both online and offline worlds. For more information, you can read Sun unveils corporate 'Second Life'. Here are two more. MPK20:Sun's Virtual Workplace "Wonderland" The MPK20 virtual world is also known as Wonderland. Sun employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with