BB Vista versus Second Life

Well to begin, Blackboard Vista's chat rooms are specifically designed for students to easily be able to talk to a classmate from their group or even a professor if they have a question or an issue that needs to be dealt with. Also, BB Vista clearly states the day and times that professors are available and as far as contacting other classmates, we can simply send an e-mail. So BB Vista was designed around the efficiency of communication and so this is what its good at. If it weren't for BB Vista, it would have been virtually impossible to coordinate the way we did in order to accomplish what we needed to for Second Life. In BB Vista, students are able to clearly see who is online and from there we can be chatting with someone at the click of a button. We all needed to be on BB Vista in order to coordinate a meeting for Second Life. This ease of finding a friend or classmate was not present in Second Life. In fact, it was especially difficult to find eachother even knowing the names of our group member’s avatars. Even as we were all chatting in BB Vista, there was still confusion in locating eachother. We were all in different places and it was actually quite frustrating at times. In fact, a considerable amount of time wasted in trying to find eachother that we could have been getting some work done. Another issue we were all having was the speed of Second Life, it could not keep up with our typing or walking too well, which is not an issue in BB Vista. Despite the fact that we were all in the same place at the same time in Second Life, which was neat, the only difference was that we could see eachothers avatars and so it was almost like real life meeting. However, there was still the minor inconvenience of the typing issue, which wasn’t bad enough to get frustrated with, but BB Vista does not have any such difficulties so I would rather just work with that. On the other, BB Vista is not perfect and that has its flaws on occasion, which I actually experienced one night we were all trying to coordinate a meeting. However, we could still e-mail eachother on BB Vista and so that is how we communicated and eventually found eachother on Second Life. So in conclusion, the In World meeting for Second Life I think was worse than Blackboard Vista because that is not Second Life’s focus.