Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Mona Lisa in Metaplace

Portrait
Location: Metaplace's Portrait World

With a few moments free, I decided to see what new worlds have appeared lately in Metaplace.

I came across Portrait, focused on da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It has:
  • A giant canvas of the painting
  • Embedded video on how to paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint
  • Links to the Louvre and Wikipedia Web sites
  • Explanatory kiosks about portraiture & da Vinci's masterwork.
It's all simple and straightforward fun, and for middle school students, it would be a great place to begin learning a bit more about the visual arts.

Update: At tonight's SL Roundtable meeting (details coming soon) I was pleased to hear Tom Boellstorff, author of Coming of Age in Second Life, praise Wikipedia as a non-academic source. One of my students recently said that Wikipedia is like "having a very smart friend." Tom noted its accuracy ranks alongside most printed and online encyclopedias. Teachers...get over your aversion to this tool.

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