EDUC387, Fall 2007: University of Delaware
Making Machinima
Creating movies with virtual characters in Second Life
Mac users, please download the .flv viewer here
What did we do?
During fall semester, 2007, 24 junior and senior educational technology students from the University of Delaware entered Second Life as "newbies" to try to create short movies on issues in technology and education. To prepare for our adventure, we spent one hour-long session creating & editing our avatars, and learning how to navigate & interact safely in-world. Our instructor then created our "set" based on props we requested. Finally, we spent a second two-hour session filming, editing and adding narration. The tabs above will bring you to our final products. Enjoy!
Second Life: What is it?
Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment run by San Francisco-based Linden Labs. The 10 million+ users of Second Life log in as personalized avatars that navigate and interact on the 10,000+ islands. Island content is entirely developed by users, some of whom have made tremendous efforts to develop educationally-valuable spaces.
Why we tried . . .
As future teachers learning about educational technologies, it is good to look toward the future. K-12 students of today and tomorrow will have vastly different understandings and expectations of technology use than we did at the same age. Learning about online environments and how to use them will help us prepare for our professional lives.
What we thought . . .
As newbies, we thought Second Life was fun, frustrating, facsinating, confusing, cool and weird at the same time. It also took us a while to figure out how to use Second Life and the other programs needed to create our movies! Once we understood the technology, we had a lot of fun making our movies during the last class meeting of the semester!