I just finished building the self-directed Second Life training area on the Media Zoo Island.

It’s true that there are many such areas sprinkled around Second Life, but we need our own, for two reasons. Firstly, don’t want to ask our volunteers to leave the relative safety of the Media Zoo. Not that they shouldn’t go to the thousands of amazing, beautiful, bizarre, wonderful, and sometimes unpleasant, virtual places if they wish to. It’s like going University, there’s usually a big town or city outside its walls, and students usually venture forth, but University tasks tend to take place in University controlled spaces – it’s easier to organise a suitable learning environment.

Secondly, we don’t want to waste our volunteers’ time by teaching them everything they could possibly do in the virtual world. They can find that out later if they like. We just ask them to learn the things they will actually do in the virtual genetics lab.

Experience from the first SWIFT study suggests that our participants will pick things up really quickly on their own. Hopefully, this will hold true for the second study later this year. We hope to have over 80 volunteers, so the more who use the self-drected training the better – although we will be running Second Life training sessions in the University’s computer lab for anyone who would like a taught session.

Please feel free to take a look around the new area. You need to install the Second Life software on your computer (a free download), and then point your browser here. Please add comments to the discussion forum!

Paul Rudman