There Goes the Neighborhood

Watching this YouTube video of Newt Gingrich in Second Life on the Virtual Capital Hill, I was disappointed on several counts. First, he did not have a female avatar with white hair in ponytails, as I had hoped, based on the opening credits. Second, almost as soon as he opened his virtual mouth, he called it "Second Voice" not "Second Life." Finally a good chunk of his speech was spent in praise of distance learning, with the Harvard law school experiments in Second Life as an example, even though there has been some criticism of the online instruction there. I'll have to look into his claims that he invented the Thomas system to follow the progress of congressional legislation online.