Blog #7 Second Life

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/learning/lr1grorg.htm

Second Life is a novel opportunity to engage students in active student learning. In this digital age it is a new learning experience for students that has a lot of potential. Two of SL’s greatest attractions for education would be online learning and a active student learning. The pseudo real-life experience provided in SL gives the users the feeling of being apart of a real community. As stated in the slideshow, a major downfall of online education is the student’s feelings of disconnectedness as a result of a lack of face-to-face collaboration. In general people are social creatures. Interaction in SL gives online learning the feeling of community and belonging that is missing from most online learning.

With only a small percentage of educators even aware of SL and an even smaller amount using it as a learning tool there is amazingly a large amount of content in SL that is valuable to learning. It seams that higher education is the area of education that is making the most of SL. There are hundreds of colleges and universities that have spaces and conduct classes in SL. On Facebook there are 3,390 members on the Second Life for Educators Group, which shows that many people are curios about the possibilities of SL. What SL has to offer that gets people so excited is the opportunity for students to explore words in a digital setting, almost like a field trip, that would give them and understanding of placing and ideas that wouldn’t be possible any other way. For example students can explore Rome and ride a chariot or walk though Greek architecture and see things first hand (kind of).

With all its legitimate possibilities there are some major concerns with SL. One of the major ones is adult content. There are many places and people in SL that are like walking down that certain street in town. No educator wants to subject or even give student an opportunity to see this kind of material. There isn’t a whole lot of control for the teacher with whom students decide to speak with and where they decide to travel. The other difficulty is learning curve that is necessary for working with SL. This makes it almost unusable for corporate training. In the school setting, even if you were to use the Second Life teen addition the bandwidth needed to support a whole class in the computer lab logged into SL is too much for school networks to handle.

Second Life is a great tool that can be used well in education. Is it going to be an essential learning element in years to come? There really isn’t any evidence that it will be headed there. If it suites the needs of your setting SL could be a great asset that will engage and motivate students. If it doesn’t work in your particular situation your students won’t be falling behind.

The following link describes one school trial of SL and working through the concerns of SL.

http://www.westleyfield.com/ithought/2007/03/concerns_about_.html