Virtual journal clubs, second life and all that jazz

August 23, 2007

There has been a lot of science activity on Second Life lately, courtesy Jean-Claude Bradley and Nature. This led to a post about the potential of Second Life in education and science on my Kyte.tv channel last night. Turns out that Attila has been thinking along the same lines, although not necessarily about Second Life specifically, but more general to the web.

This is far from being possible today, but there is no reason, either for public consumption, e.g. a conference, or private consumption, e.g. a journal club, that video, audio, slidecasts, screencasts, etc cannot be captured. The advantage of a metaverse is that you can return later, explore things in a 3D environment, click on something, and it can get served to you from the hosting site, e.g. Bioscreencast for screencasts or a slideshow via slideshare. You can also have virtual meetings right there, with high quality slides and other material available for reference.

The possibilities are endless. What Attila proposes is possible today. The virtual aspects will come sometime in the future, but they will happen. The assumption here is that the 2D internet as we know it will be gone some day, replaced by an interactive 3D version, perhaps 15 years from now, perhaps more, perhaps less, but one can dream.

Technorati Tags: Journal Club, Second Life, Education, Communication