April 29, 2007

A Cheatsheet for Second Life

Having been active in Second Life since early 2005, I have found it to be an exciting environment, with huge potential for educational applications. Part of my interest In Second Life is related to my research into Third Places; part of it is related to new approaches to learning made possible by virtual worlds; and part of it, to be perfectly honest, is related to the fact that Second Life is a lot of fun.

As part of this work, I have been helping newcomers to Second Life dive into the world as quickly as possible. One item that I have designed as part of this process is a "cheatsheet" containing keyboard shortcuts for the features of Second Life most useful to beginners. All the shortcut lists I could find online were both incomplete (missing important shortcuts), and over-detailed (containing shortcuts that only the most advanced and specialized users would ever need.) More importantly, the lists were generally not organized in a manner that would be helpful to a Second Life beginner.

Which is where this cheatsheet comes in. I've refined it over a series of training sessions so that it:

  • contains the commands that newcomers (and not-so-newcomers) will likely need;

  • groups together commands according to the task to be accomplished;

  • organizes the groups so that more fundamental commands are encountered in the first column, more advanced commands in the second column;

  • and works equally well for Windows or Macintosh.

The cheatsheet is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Posted by Ruben at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)