Classics in Second Life

[Roger Travis]

I was at an incredible presentation at the Game Education Summit this morning, by a professor of religion. She's working on a game to teach the Tibetan Book of the Dead in Second Life. I hadn't known what was possible in Second Life, and now I'm wondering who's working on teaching classics there: I'd love to move towards some kind of collaboration on some immersive learning.

[Andrew Reinhard]

Hi Roger. Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers (for which I work), has a space in the Roma Subura, Plot #31, which is a designated Latin house meaning that it is intended for the use of those people interested in practicing conversational Latin. It was also built in support of the new textbook series, Latin for the New Millennium. Students and teachers are encouraged to visit as a group and play. The area is Voice-enabled as well, a boon to practicing conversation. Posters are on the walls to serve as conversation-starters. The SLURL is: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ROMA%20Subura/204/168/24.

You might also be interested in the Trondheim conference on gaming and Classics which was held this past February; the proceedings will be published in book form and online in early 2010. Here's the site (not a good one, I'm afraid, but more content is forthcoming: http://classicscomputers.wordpress.com/.

Lastly, there was the Re:LIVE 08 Conference hosted by the Open University in Milton Keynes which focused solely on MMOs and virtual worlds as virtual learning environments. You can read about that conference here: http://www.open.ac.uk/relive08/.

There is some primitive machinima both here on eClassics and on YouTube from the Re:Live conference -- we held a virtual conventiculum featuring students from three countries (Sweden, America, England), speaking Latin in real-time. Voice in Second Life was pretty awful, so I am playing with Skype or Vent, running the audio outside of SL.

Andrew

[Roger Travis]

Thanks, Andrew! I'll keep you posted on what, if anything, we're doing at UConn. I met some folks at the Summit who might be interested in being on the programming end of the collaborative.

[Clara Shaw Hardy]

My colleagues and I looked into 2nd Life a little for a simulation/game we wanted to construct for a civ. course; we were intimidated by both the cost and the start-up investment of creating spaces. What we decided to do instead was create the game in a social networking (facebook-style) environment. This was really interesting and much easier to set up: you can read more about it here:
http://classicsblogging.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/roman-social-networking/
Clara

[Roger Travis]

Thanks so much, Clara--that looks incredible!