Second Life as a film studio

I have not been blogging as I go, and so the start of my blog posts are recollections and may be a little fuzzy.

Some time ago, we were discussing how we could leverage the reality aspects of SL for teaching materials. At the time we were working on a Financial Auditing course and looking at how to spice up some case studies, which were entirely of written medium – boring…

We thought about how SL could be used to allow students to interact with each other through the case study story line, providing a more authentic/realistic experience. However, on our initial evaluation of SL, it was decided that the technology would become a significant barrier to the learning process due to the learning curve involved in simple navigation amongst other things for students. I had the idea instead of acting out the case studies in SL, and video recording it. This was as a replacement to the more traditional approach of hiring real actors to act out case studies and film them. The more traditional approach is very time consuming, and can be costly where more specific props are required. It wasn’t until later that I learned that this concept was known as machinima.

More to come…