Second Life, too much like real life?
Posted by: mferrinda in Expert Presenters, tags: education, future, Second Life, virtualAfter a great presentation from Hayley and Jess on Second Life, I now begin to wonder if Second Life is too much like real life. Is it all a little bit scary that we can go and grab a coffee with people over the world at an American University? So my question is where do we draw the line? Do we continue to push the boundaries and create a platform that allows us to have the world at our keyboards and mice?
Place in Education.
Does the virtual world have a place for our students? I think it does, just where that place is has not yet been clearly defined. A program like Second Life however I do not think has the place in a classroom from what I’ve experienced. Although I am unable to judge without seeing Teen Life. The interaction between students and the educational ‘excursions’ that students can venture on do have potential.
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September 21st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Hi Matt — The most amazing (and surprising) part of Second Life is when you are in World it’s very real. Walking through Ancient Rome definitely creates the sensation that you are there. Is it scary? Not really if you’re trying to create deeper connections. One of my friends told me their amazing story of how they watched one of the NASA shuttle launches at NASA Second Life island. There was live streaming of the event into Second Life and people everywhere — together they discussed the history of space travel. Yes that same event was shown on TV but compare the difference of sitting at home alone in a room with watching the same vision with a huge group of people remembering previous times. Which gives you the greatest learning?
You won’t understand the place that Second Life offers in education until you experience the learning that can be gained using these technology. But this is no different from any of these tools. You can’t make judgments from the outside. Without experiencing Twitter first hand wouldn’t your first thought be that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of? PS the greatest learning from Second Life comes from the creation not from the consuming (like many of these tools). You can read more about it here on my post.
September 21st, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your opinions. I do agree with Sue, in that you can only truly understand the the educational aspects of Second Life until you experience it. So, if you do have the chance I recommend having a look at the program. Like I said in our presentation, I haven’t really had enough experience with Second Life myself to understand fully what it offers in education, however, I hope to keep using it to find this out. I am still a bit unsure about privacy and security issues and how you would carefully monitor your students, but I hope to find this out so I can put it on our Wiki page. Thanks for coming to our presentation!
September 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
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