I’ve been more impressed with the current use of audio in Second Life, actually. I really love that you could leave audio in a space and let students gather together and listen to it together. It never occurred to me how isolating audio on the web is right now until you took me to that album display space, you know the one, where we sat with a friend of yours and listened to some new music. It’s great that we currently get to pick when we hear audio, but we lose something by not being able to listen to something together. Actually I think the first time I realized we were all hearing the same audio is when we were dancing with some friends of yours and one of them starting singing along. Funny how the idea of shared audio got so totally destroyed on the web to the point that it never occurred to me that that was possible.

I’ve been to a few live audio events now too, and I think that’s quite a rich environment as well. While retaining what’s there normally, and adding a single, controlled piece of live audio that sits at the centre of the experience and reacts to everything else, I think that can be quite powerful. You’d have to be very deliberate about how you use it, but I can imagine many many circumstances where that would be a really great experience. But I get your point about the beta grid. It will definitely change the dynamics of all spaces.

But I think I can answer your question about “why are we standing together”. I realize this plays out differently for you personally in-world, but being “with” other people is the great power of Second Life as an educational tool (or, at least, one of them). I’ve experienced this a few times now myself when bringing some of the girls at work in; people are more willing to explore if you’re “with” them. There’s some level of reassurance going on when people can see (and maybe hear?) their classmates. It’s a kind of emotional scaffolding to help people take more experimental and challenging steps. It also allows students from learn from the experiments of others.

But I agree with you on most levels. If educators are going to use this place as a glorified chat room (highly likely), they’ll be missing all the best parts of it.