Am glad to have taken this class, because I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to experience Second Life, and I must admit it was quite an experience. Am not a video game fun and though I enjoy playing around with flight simulators, Second Life is a virtual world like no other. It took a while to get used to the environment and though I thought I was comfortable with it, I still got lost during the seminar. I have been playing around with it since then, and it’s still difficult to introduce objects. Flying around the Island feels strange and while am more comfortable walking, I don’t seem to get very far without bumping into some wall.
I found the presence of all the other avatars very distracting. Some were flying, others trying to sit down and others completely blocking my view while others were constantly typing IMs. In a doctor –patient interaction, would the doctor have a private Island with just one patient, or will there be many doctors and many patients at any given time?
Can Second Life be used in a doctor –patient interaction? I don’t think this will happen any time soon .Since Second Life is a virtual world, I think it will be best used in “simulating” real life medical situation and I think it will be greatly used for sharing health information and a learning environment for medical students. But I cannot visualize myself as a patient meeting my doctor as an “avatar”. It will not feel real and is a little disconcerting.
I think it’s a great place for health professional to share information and simulate various scenarios, especially medical scenarios that have worked elsewhere, and may need to be replicated somewhere else. Since SL can be accessed world wide, this would be a great place where psychiatrist, surgeons and others from different parts of the world can meet, and literally perform some medical procedures, outcomes determined, before applying them to real life situations.
Security-One thing that I got concerned regarding SL is that I was able to teleport to other Islands and I didn’t need any security authentication. I could listen into the conversations, and while I understand that there are some private islands one cannot access unless invited, I wondered whether some determined hackers out there can assume a patient’s or a doctor’s avatar for the fun of it or even for some more sinister reasons
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