There may be a good case for some of the facilities offered by Second
Life, I really cannot judge that. Whether Second Life is a program that
can be deployed to our PCs is a different matter. It does hog resources
and needs frequent updates that require admin permissions. (I am pretty
sure that it checks the admin group membership of the user and not just
permissions.) We already get complaints from student users that they
cannot get onto a PC because others are simply using them for email and
personal browsing. Second Life won't help.
Second Life is not alone in its update problems. There are other web
based applications and applications that automatically update from the
web that give our current security and deployment models problems. These
are basically anything that wants to download into protected areas at
times dictated by the update site. Even if we could give them access to
our PCs it can leave different installations with different patch levels
- not good for support.
This is a problem that won't go away so we may need some radical changes
to accomodate this sort of application.
Dave
Neil Francis wrote:
>> but we're
>> here to meet the demand from users not dictate what the demand is.
>
> And this is probably for the best.....
>
> Second Life is the latest in a long line of new ideas and concepts
> that are often deemed trivial and 'not of academic worth' for teaching
> and learning.
>
> Overhead projectors, computers, email, the web, message boards and
> chat rooms, blogs, mobile phones, skype, youtube, wikis and social
> networking sites have all been on the same list. On-line virtual
> worlds are now on it and I have no doubt educational multiplayer
> online gaming will be next.
>
> This opinion from a 'user' is interesting:
>
> <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/eunis-2005/paper-2/>
>
> and this from some students is also interesting
>
> <http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o>
>
> Neil
> :-)
>
>
>
>
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