This picture shows me as Frances Obolensky in Second Life learning about information sources for Swine Flu.
Cambridge University Medical Library has been posting information for medical readers on swine flu. I belong to the information literacy group in Second Life (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life ) and Sheila Yoshikawa there is trying to educate the group on how to find information on swine flu (in real life she is Sheila Webber of Sheffield University.) I hope to attend her meeting on the subject tonight but until then I am wandering around the teaching installation she has built on Second Life Infolit Island and learning by looking at the exhibits. I hope to get a chance to learn to build in Second Life too. So far she has taught me that you can search the Medline plus and Reuters site for news http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ or http://www.reuters.com/ Reuters is quite hard to search apparently. There is a good PubMed swine flu link at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/ and a World Health Organisation link at http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/index.html and by contrast a silly game at http://www.swinefighter.com/#heyzap_game=swinefighter (presumably an example of an apalling source to be avoided at all costs - although the game is strangely addictive and much more fun than the other sites.)
My feelings about Second Life have been a bit ambiguous. Setting myself up to learn to move, get dressed and talk takes ages, almost like being a real baby again, and you have to ask yourself how much time or money, if any, one should invest in Second life. Once you have learned to walk talk and fly etc you can wander around people's places and go to meetings etc but this seems pretty groundless until I guess you take a deep breath and fork out some money and start building things- your own place, your own business or your own courses.
Then that would take hours and hours and hours of your real life when you could be out walking in the sunshine. But would you actually be walking in the sunshine anyway, I ask myself. Actually the other things I have to do today are writing up the minutes of a church meeting, updating a website, reading a book about Christian/Islamic relations and writing an essay for my Management NVQ. In the light of these alternatives, procrastination in Second Life becomes an attractive alternative. My bosses at work are quite keen that I become an expert so I think I shall vow to take the plunge and buy some land and spend a little time in Second Life once a week to learn more. Decided to look at the very early days of Sheila's blog to see if she explains how she knows so much. See http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-05-24T07%3A12%3A00-06%3A00&max-results=50
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