Learning from Media Arts: Second Life as Augmented Reality Interface for Learning

Abstract: Contemporary artistic approaches to Second Life provide a variety of models for meaningful interactions with physical and digital reality. By offering multiple forms of communication and interaction as with Second Life (SL) they help to broaden social, ethical and professional competence. However, if SL is restricted to the digital replication of real-physical space only, the potential for new learning spaces and methods will remain unaffected as shown by numerous hierarchically structured virtual spaces of high schools and universities in SL. Contrarily, the spaces collectively created by many creative SL users already show more complex and rich forms of communication and interaction. With an artistic and critical intertwining of these digital with the physical spaces of real life the collaboratively created utopia models may have much more impact