FASHIONCAD.INFO

INTRO SECOND LIFE FASHION SERIES

OpenCourseWare by
Elaine Polvinen Professor,
Buffalo State College
Fashion Textile Technology

[only for non-commercial use]
About this series...

This series is meant to serve as a very basic aid and guide to other RL fashion educators [as well as anyone else interested] so that fashion students will gain a comfort level working on different fashion related projects in a multidimensional environment. This series was not developed to train fashion designers for Second Life although it could be used as a very basic introduction to fashion design for SL fashion designers.

I only just learned about Second Life myself last January [2007]. I immediately attempted to integrate it into my FashionCAD class last spring as was pleasantly surprised to discover multiple values of teaching fashion education concepts in a virtual world.

I presented the results of my spring and fall 2007 ISecond Life for Fashion Students experiment at:

  • 8/24/07-8/26/07"Educational Simulations in Second Life for Fashion Technology Students" paper presented at the SLCC Second Life Community Convention, Chicago, Ill.
  • NMC 2007 Symposium on Creativity in Second Life, August 12-18th, 2007. My display was titled: Innovative Pedagogical Techniques for Fashion Education in Second Life.”
  • 10/16/07 "Fashion Education in a Virtual Environment?"Presented paper at the AACE Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Quebec City, Canada.
  • fall 2007, “Virtual Fashion Education?” presented at the BSC Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Creativity Celebration.
  • 11/30 & 12/04/07 "Teaching in a Virtual Environment" presented to FIT in NY.
  • 3/8/08-3/9/08 Paper presented, “What Comes First, the Virtual or the Real?” International Foundation of Fashion Technologies (IFFTI) 2008, Melbourne, Australia.
  • 4/25/08 ““My Avatar Myself: How Avatars are Transforming Product Development, Marketing, Retailing and Education,” presented at Technology Day at FIT:
  • 5/28/08 “Virtual Fashion Education,” presented at CIT 2008 Conference at Genesee Community College.
    Teaching and learning in Four Dimensions




  • I am theProject DIrector for the Buffalo State Island sponsored by the SUNY Research Foundation at Buffalo State College.

I continued working in Second Life in the fall 2007 semester with the Virtual Fashion class. This semester (spring 2008) I am teaching a second Intro to Second Life project in my FashionCAD class. I have set up this site with overviews of a sequence of assignments that the fashion students are working on. I have included links to widely used videos that are currently available to get started in Second Life.

Here is an informal index to the videos I have created for Second Life. Please keep in mind that while some of these videos represent finished products others are just rough guides completed as an aid during a class project in that was in progress.

Second Life for Fashion Students-Video Tutorial Index

A number of these videos are just rough drafts and will be continually updated but I really wanted to share this information with the hopes that other fashion educators (and anyone else that is interested) can use it for educational purposes.

Everything in fashion product development and merchandising is currently shifting over to multiple dimensions and Second Life is an ideal free application for student to gain skills conceptualizing in 3D.

I hope you will find this information of use.

SURL: Visit the Intro to SL Fashion Student exhibit on Buffalo State Island.

My blog post about this SL series: Fashion CAD OpenCourseWare Basic Function Series: Intro to Second Life for Fashion Students

Post me an e-mail if there is something you would like to have a more in-depth explaination about. Please specify this inquiry is from the FashionCAD site.

Elaine Polvinen
If anyone is interested in learning more advanced fashion design in Second Life there are many exceptionally gifted SL fashion designers.
Intro to SL Main Page
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