Jenny’s avatar experience
I was quite excited to give Second Life a try after I watched the introductory video on the educational uses of Second Life. I must say though that when I first showed up I did find it cool (flying was fun) but then was quite disappointed. I don’t know if I just had bad luck but I only seemed to end up where you had to pay for things. At one point I was somewhere where they were asking for $300 for some very risque clothing. I did manage to teleport myself to Manchester School of Business but I didn’t find anything of interest there, just more stuff to buy. I must have somehow missed the educational areas. I would like to explore it more but unfortunately my internet is a bit too slow and my computer a bit too old and neither is keeping up with the program. For example, I tried changing my clothes but the updates only half worked so now I have half torn sleeves.
I would be extremely cautious of introducing Second Life to students unless there was some sort of educational version and you could limit destinations (there were some interesting chats going on that I don’t think would be appropriate). We have already discussed the concerns with older technology and I would be surprised if a school had all the requirements in place to make use of this sort of program safely in their school.
Are there educational venture opportunities here? Is the educational potential realistic in a school system?
Posted in: Week 12:
Eva Ziemsen 11:15 pm on November 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Jenny,
You make a great point – there IS an educational venture opportunity here. Since SL discontinued the teen SL version, I think many of us educators feel it is too risky to allow students into SL unless there is a way to limit them in certain areas. At this point, you cannot use SL with students under 18.
As for your Internet conncetion, this is very true. You cannot use SL unless you have a very fast connection. I found it much better when plugging into the Ethernet (instead of using wifi) at home. You might want to try that.
As the sloodle video shows, there are definitely ways to structure a curriculum activity and allow students to interact wtih it in SL.
I relate to your experience of wondering around and feeling a bit…lonely, actually. As I mentioned to someone else, SL and education is ideally suited to getting together with other students in a class. While we wished we could have arranged it, we knew it would present technical difficulties.
As for whether it is realisitc in a school system, I think I will be finding out in the next few years. My intention is to develop courses that are held in SL to teach filmmaking. As the videos tell us, many schools are already using SL. What did you think of the Spanish learning youtube video?
Jenny Brown 3:12 pm on November 23, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Eva,
I thought the Spanish learning video was very fascinating, just like the introductory video and the Sloodle video. I guess the videos I watched didn’t match my experience as I didn’t have the knowledge base to find the cool, free, educational areas and my computer and connection are so slow that it is very frustrating.
That is is an excellent initiative to try to use SL to teach film making. I hope it goes well as I think with an invested effort by a teacher and support from the school for the right technology it could be a great tool (I think of students connecting with each other online where at the school they may be in different groups and not connect). As an Educational Venture Analyst – I just don’t see it being viable for most schools.