The woman with the appalling fashion sense is actually a virtual mannequin experiencing a drug overdose outside a nightclub; it's part of a paramedic simulation course recently created by the Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences, developed by St George's, University of London and Kingston University. Its purpose, reports Medical News Today, is to train paramedic students located across the country, who'd otherwise have to travel to a real world facility. One cool feature: each week, the students are e-mailed a direct SLURL teleport to a new location and emergency situation.
Speaking of which, this SLURL link will take you to the University of London island in Second Life, so you can go through the long customized SL orientation process, and finally progress to the paramedic simulations itself. In fact, the training in the user interface is so time-consuming, I wonder if this is an effective educational use of the medium.
The successful Canadian border crosing simulation mainly relied on non-interactive visuals and voice communication in a lab overseen by instructors, which is probably what made it work. With this paramedic course, it's almost as if the students must spend as much timing learning Second Life's cumbersome interface, as learn, well, how to save actual lives. But perhaps it's effective after that initial learning curve; I'll definitely look for result metrics, as I did with the border simulation.
And yes, my feet seem to stuck in concrete. It's a paramedic simulation, I suppose physics were a second priority. Or maybe an impromptu earthquake was part of the scenario.
Check out news coverage of one of the latest emergency preparedness exercise in SL
http://www.kidk.com/news/33417439.html
Posted by: Moriz Gupte | Monday, October 27, 2008 at 08:16 PM