Week 4 - Blog #7 - Second Life

In the future, I imagine that virtual schools could have their own islands in a Second Life type of environment that integrates augmented reality to make the experience even more interactive and lifelike.  Students would create avatars and could then attend classes with other students from anywhere in the world.  As a parent, I would be excited to send my children to a school like that.  As an educator, I am excited to think about how environments like Second Life might completely transform how education is delivered.  I truly believe how students attend school will undergo some drastic changes in the next few years.  Virtual and online education environments have the power to differentiate and individualize instruction with ease, which every educator knows benefits students but is often taxing to consistently do in classes of 20-30 students.

            Unfortunately, Second Life as it is right now is difficult to maneuver through because it is not  focused on only educational ventures.  Therefore, some environments that seem like they would be educational end up being inappropriate for educational uses.  Egypt Adventure is one such environment that I visited expecting to learn about Egyptian culture only to end up finding lots of different nude or extremely suggestive skins I could try on.  I find it difficult to find new environments in SL.  There are numerous places to search through and I struggle with the words I need to use so that the places I am searching for will be identified by the search feature. 

 However, there are many individuals, universities, corporations, and even non-profit organizations discovering educational uses of Second Life.  I have encountered many rich environments on my different journeys into Second Life – Virtual Harlem, Virtual Bucharest, Virtual Mexico, The Museum of Innovation, The Learning Experience, Immersive Aquarium, Smithsonian Hispanic Cultural Center, and the Babel Language School to name a few.  Most of the areas that I explored held valid educational opportunities, in my opinion, for disciplines like literature, history, science, and design.  Unfortunately, I normally found myself exploring a deserted environment.  Since I was alone in the different areas, I typically left and therefore an educational opportunity was lost.  Yet, when I explored Virtual Harlem with some friends, we could interact and chat and I spent longer in the environment and learned more about 1920’s Harlem culture. I even joined ISTE and TLE and have found both of them to be great groups for educators wishing to use SL for educational purposes.

Yet, could I see myself teaching in Second Life?  Well, no.  I teach math and I just don’t see SL as offering anything to a math teacher currently.  I guess there could be a museum of mathematicians created or a math learning center developed– but it doesn’t currently exist.  However, I did find the SL educator’s wiki (http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki) to be very interesting and a great resource for individuals who perhaps currently teach in a discipline for which SL seems to offer a chance for the content to come to life.  I even listened to an Educause interview with Sarah Robbins (http://www.educause.edu/blog/jcummings/SarahRobbinsonTeachinginSecond/166780), an English professor at Ball State who does conduct classes in SL, and she commented that SL acts almost like a 3D wiki and that you don’t have to be a tech head to be able to teach in SL.  However, the learning curve is fairly steep, so you need to be prepared to avoid drowning (literally, well virtually).