Second Life...Like I need another life to deal with. I have an account there (Snook Zeplin is the name). I have taken 2 courses from Sloan-C: one on the basics and one on using it for education. I have lost entire days wandering around trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I am still really not sure. There seems to be a lot of sex going on...that is a shock the first time you walk up that! It is a fantasy world and the stores that are in there definitley allow for you to explore any fantasy you want (again, its amazing what you can walk into). I think the two most interesting things that I have done are attending the Science Friday broadcast (I got my t-shirt) and figuring out how to make my avatar have bare feet.
Using SL for education...I know people are doing it. I keep thinking about what I could do. Without ENORMOUS development, I am not sure that I would feel comfy sending students in there to study ecology and evolution. I have been to Univ. of Cincinatti's Galopogas Islands to study Darwin's voyages and I wasn't all that impressed from an educational point of view--I am not convinced students would get much out of it. I have thought that you could use it as a virtual meeting room--maybe good for office hours or review sessions. I don't teach fully online so my use is limited that way.
I have some other concerns to work through before I would use it to teach. The major one is the use of avatars. Wallace and Maryott wrote an excellent article discussing this. They found that students were more likely to interact with other people (actually their avatars) if they were of the same ethnic group. If you knew your group might have a bias you could change your avatar to "fit in". I find this kind of a slippery slope--do we really want to encourage that sort of behavior? On a related note, is it better to use an avatar that looks basically like you if you are acting as an instructor (maybe I can be skinnier than in real life). Would students take me seriously if I show up with wings and horns? Would I take them seriously if they showed up as a snowman? Things to think about as this sort of thing grows...
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Wow, I think we have the same oppinion on Second Life. I found the site very distracting when I was trying to navigate through and thought about my 18 year old son using this site for the first college course that he took. His mind wonders as it is already so for him to enter this type of site in order to learn would be pointless.
ReplyDeleteYour blog makes good points to the experiences that you have had but you didn't include the link for the site and that could be helpful to visitors.
Several of the articles that you have referred to both in here or other blogs were without any information on how to get to them. This would have been quite helpful, especially on the article about the professor who let his students phone a friend for tests.
You have made some excellent points in your blogs and have shared you experiences and that has been helpful.
I linked directly to the sites and articles in the post...One of the nice things about blogs is that it is not a research paper with a formal citation style.
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