Virtual Reality Medical Education in Second Life
Increasing numbers of people are using the Internet for the provision of all sorts of health services, from prescribing, through consulting to setting up automated self-treatment programs. But what about utilizing it for education and therapy? After all, in theory, the crowning form of cognitive behavioral therapy should be “realistic reality therapy.” By simply having on your wrap-around sound and vision multimedia headset you can be instantly enchanted to a cliff edge, soar in a plane thousands of feet above the ground or be environed by a gathering of thousands of spiders depending on your phobia. And the ultimate form of online education should be fully interactive, case established and student driven, all of which I now use in my instructing in Second Life
The phrase “virtual reality” was coined by Jaron Lanier in 1989 to describe computer simulations of physical environments. Since the mid-1990s, the video game industry and 3D graphics card manufacturers have driven forward the state of ad hominem computer graphics, passing on it far beyond the needs of most business users. These systems range in capability from uncomplicated displays of 3D objects to smooth realistic cities. Virtual reality systems are now being routinely enforced on personal computers for a variety of activities. One of the most democratic virtual reality programs is Second Life, brought forth by Linden Lab, Inc. Second Life is a general-purpose virtual world come-at-able through any Internet-connected personal computer. In order to act in Second Life, users create “avatars”, or spiced characters, to stand for themselves. Individuals use these avatars to maneuver through individual “worlds”, accomplished with buildings, true features, and other avatars. While the system borrows heavily from video game technology, it is not a game there are no points, no levels, no missions, and nothing to acquire. It is simply a platform by which people can create virtual communities, model geological, meteorological, or behavioral phenomena, or do events. I have been working in Second Life for several years now
Users of Second Life include a variety of education organizations, from Harvard Law School to the American Cancer Society. There are currently areas of the realistic world that render much heterogeneous services as instructing heart sounds and auscultation technique, rendering cultural support for individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome, and patterning the effects of tsunami on coastwise towns. The system has over 10 million account holders from all over the world, most of them with loose alkalic accounts. Approximately 800,000 of those users are about, with over 80,000 of them tied to the system at any time. Virtual reality programs such as Second Life are increasingly being utilized for instructive purposes in a variety of fields, including medical training and disaster preparedness. Linden Lab currently operates the Second Life Education Wiki which functions as a source of information for educators and trainers in a variety of fields who care to use Second Life for distance larning or large-scale training purposes. A number of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, have (U) down utilizing Second Life to keep meetings, conduct training sessions, and diagnose ways to make access to information more readily accessible around the world. A modern across-the-board survey destined to garner information on the activities, attitudes, and interests of educators active in Second Life carried on by New Media Consortium announced that the majority used it for educational purposes such as teaching and taking classes as well as for faculty training and development
I have been using Second Life as a teaching and learning environment for several years now. With colleagues I have created a “realistic hallucinations” environment, which demonstrates the dwelt experience of psychosis and allows participants who travel through the environment to experience both seeable and auditory hallucinations; visions and voices. We utilized this environment to instruct this experience to our medical and psychology students. With the California Department of Health and other colleagues I have created a virtual bioterrorism crisis clinic to train health workers, and more recently, as part of our Health Informatics Certificate Program, with University of California Davis Extension, we have instructed informatics students in a virtual conference center on our personal secret island; Davis Island. Students happen the environment square to larn to voyage, and within a week of our informatics students being introduced to the environment they were competent to travel and tour around Second Life with the rest of us with ease
Second Life and similar multi-user environments offer enormous possibilities in the medical educational world, where such applications are now called “serious games” rather than social or fun software. Students of the future will conform to them very easily, and it is unclouded that applications much as Second Life have an enthusiastic instructive future before them. I appear forward to going on to instruct classes of medical and graduate students “inworld”
Topics: medical education, medical training