Reporting in from my Second Life journey

I've spent a ridiculous amount of learning Second Life, its tools for building, its scripting language, and all the many check-boxes which can be checked or unchecked depending on what's needed.

I started by watching about 10 hours of video tutorials on how to do things in Second Life (which, incidentally, I watched on Web 2.0 tools YouTube and the official Second Life wiki). Then I went to work on the FSU Island, trying out some of what I learned. After I figured out I still didn't know what I was doing, I went back and re-watched some of the videos, trying the concepts at the same time (which involved lots of pausing and rewinding while I decided why they made it look so easy when it didn't work for me).

Finally, it all started to click and I spent about 12 hours Saturday (until 4:00 am, for which my girlfriend call me insane) and four or five hours on Sunday trying out my new techniques. The result is a one story building with no roof, which is suppose to end up as a multi-story building, and a giant wood sphere that links to our Web 2.0 Course Wiki when you touch it.

Here's the horrible part. I don't like it. After spending all that time building the structure, I now know I could have done it differently and created something much better. I'm going to leave the existing structure and start a new one on another part of the island. Or, I may work on both simultaneously.

I've learned the beginnings of a whole new language and now, much as Shirkey described in his book, I have to use it. I think I can create a pretty cool place for us to visit and get information.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on the perspective), I have let Second Life and self-directed discovery learning dominate my week in the class. My "this is what I did" post is going to be a little more barren than it was last week.