Lively

I am bought over by the potential of Lively to be used as an educational tool for enhancing greater participation from students to chat or discuss about their subjects of learning. I was never a believer in using Second Life for educational purposes largely due to its cumbersome application which uses a lot of bandwidth, at least in my personal experience. I am also put off by the fact that I had to open another application and interface to conduct my explorations in the virtual world. Lively gives me a new flexibility that I never had with Second Life. I am able to embed my virtual rooms or spaces into existing virtual learning environments simply by pasting the generated script to my web page or blog. In this way, I can encourage students to login to an existing VLE and make use of Lively to conduct educational activities within a virtual academic context which Second Life could not do. I am also interested in the 'lightness' of Lively which requires only a small and simple installation on our desktops. Another feature is its features of deciding on access rights which I could use to formulate open or close tutorial sessions. On top of that, I have the capability to archive all conversations for research, assessment or evaluation.