What is Second Life?

So there are good sides and bad sides to Second Life. Which one should I start with?
The good side is that it is an online virtual world where you can become whoever you want, dress how ever you want and speak the way that you want to. If you have had an accident or for some reason you are bedridden for instance then it is a great escape and a way to meet and socialise with new people when ever you feel like it. The bad side is that it is 14 years old and the graphics dont look like they have been changed since its creation. It was all the hype at the beginning but due to viruses and technology not being what it is now days it went bust for a while and all the people went with it by the looks of things. Apparently there are 1 million people using it , I have visited the Island a number of times and have only met one person and that was at the start ,but hey, plenty of time for explorations.
But lets not be all negative and cynical there is another good point and that is that people can build what ever they like in the virtual world as well. You can use money to buy plots of land and contract people to build you a house if you so wish. That is what John O 'Connor has done with the Dublin Institute of Technology. He has built a virtual college in Second Life and holds lectures there every week . The great thing about this is that anyone can join a lecture any time from anywhere in the world which is great! You are able to control who enters the lectures if you so wish by changing the setting as well. In this blog I will be documenting my experience with the module over the next semester in Second Life. Lets hope my feelings on it will change and I can even recruit a few more to join :)            

Prologue

 I am an artist in training on an small island in West Cork called Sherkin Island. The course I am doing is a B.A. in Visual Art run by the Dublin Institute of Technology. For one of our sessions we went on a trip up to see the college in Grangegorman and was introduced to John O Conner the Dean of DIT. I had seen him previous to this when he was giving a lecture at the Uileann Art Center in Skibbereen about an online game called Second Life. I will admit that I feel that I am using the wrong word when I call Second Life a game as it is not really a game- you cannot run around collecting things and shooting people for entertainment, no, it is more like a virtual world, a chat room and is always being compared to another game like it called the Sims, need I say more. After being introduced to this Second Life in Uileann our course director Glenn informed us that we would be having Second Life as a module for the rest of the year. There were alot of mixed feelings towards this, from me especially but this is why we were all there sitting in Grangegormon being introduced again to John O Conner and introduced to Our Second Life.