We have looked into 2nd Life as a tool in health science education and concluded that the actual LEARNING tasks available through 2nd Life are no closer to reality than in any other Web 2.0 technology. You're basically just chatting, web surfing, and reading-- albeit with the distraction of all the extra visuals.

Another drawback is how resource intensive it is to build custom locations and scenarios in 2nd Life. The worker-hours could be better spent developing clear, quick, easy to experience ed resources that feature text, video, and blog/wiki interaction.

FOr more information , read my post on it at http://www.tedcurran.net/2010/04/second-life-how-virtual-is-it-scenes-vs-skills/

Ted

http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/collaboration/virtual/worlds

I believe in SL you're allowed to import or stream video. I'm not exactly sure how it works but, if there is a virtual lecture hall the prof can give the lecture portion of the class there and then go to their sandbox (aka the space that will allow everyone to create their own content) to try making things.

IMO, sex ed on SL is not a good idea unless the school's idea of sex ed is showing students how to have sex. (BTW: Linden Labs have made it so minors can not have access to mature and adult parts of the site so they can't obtain sexual items nor can they engage in or watch sex.)

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Kelly
Fitness and Health gal

You could learn presentation, sales, money management, work ethics, and other real world skills in the "real" world. Course projects and papers could be based on the results and interactions of a given situation. It could be great!

But for teaching in the classroom, I'm still very old-fashioned. Get yourself to the classROOM!

I do suggest a better title. Doesn't make as much sense.

I taught a workshop last fall on SL at the local University.

http://www.mansfield.edu/~art/MUartpages/MUeArts.html

It went really well. However, this is a school that is just starting the online course option, so asking them to ok a full course in SL would be a bit too large a step for them.

As far as the time required to set up a virtual university... I think they have the budget to buy whatever is required without having to make it themselves. It would likely be an aquisitions committee headache, but it's do-able. The trick is getting some content creators to shift to the education market. The Linden Prize was a good step in that direction.

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EvaluationofEvidenceBasedPract/174235

"The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction"

I prefer to get my calculus from a rabbit. LOL

...not to mention the field day that sociologists are going to have. :)

My husband is currently under commission to build a replica of the Ben Franklin printing press. He was given copies of Ben's original sketches and specs and is re-creating it piece by piece to scale. In the end, people will be able to come see how it works and also (in a blow-out example) how it was made. You could do this in real life (and people have) with the help of a master carpenter and blacksmith, but there are still a lot of limitations on how many people could travel to see it, or how many people it could travel to see. By doing it in SL, you enable countless people to come visit the press and learn about it in their own time.

I came from a community management background for sites like Splice and Aviary, but found the community culture in SL to be more interesting and left to do full time sim building for educators there. My husband is a university level art lecturer in the UK and his uni has embraced SL as a classroom. It makes a lot of sense with art students, and they're having some success with philosophy students, too, as they seem to enjoy discussing the nature of reality while ensconced in digital surroundings.

A great example of the potential for SL teaching over video conference is this: Imagine you're a history teacher doing a unit on Shakespeare. In SL, you could actually replicate the globe theater and dress your students as characters in the play. Clicking things in the surroundings could cause them to 'talk' and explain their historical value, etc. You can't do this on Skype.

HOWEVER, the trouble is that schools nearly always underestimate what it takes to BUILD such an immersive environment. It could take weeks to set up a scene like that - building objects, texturing them, scripting them. And what schools do to teachers is to expect them to be builders, too, which is just ridiculous. It'd be like telling them they can teach a unit on England in the dark ages but first must write their own textbook on the subject. For every subject. Or like telling them to set up a wordpress blog with beautiful CSS and SEO but without help from anyone in the IT department. I'm sure some of them can do it, but that's not what they were hired for, right? They should use their time for working directly with students, not with 3D objects.

I think there's a market for a major textbook manufacturer to set up a sim with scenarios to go along with units in their books. I'd love to see how that played out.

Also, people need to remember that SL is like a mini-internet. You do get all kinds, and if you are a good administrator of your digital space there, you can keep the nasties away rather easily. People being griefed by flying penises shows nothing but a lack of care on the part of the person being griefed. It's entirely possible to protect a learning environment there with the built in tools. In fact, most of my work on the grid can't even been seen by anyone outside of my clients because they are locked away from the public for the safety of students and educators.

(I'd be surprised if this was not happening already....)

www.pixelsandpolicy.com

1. Linden Lab are addressing the adult content issue by creating a separate continent. It won't be perfect but neither is the web and most schools teach on their own islands anyway.

2. Some people would see the absence of PowerPoint as a major gain though most save and upload images of their slides and there are any number of free viewers. The advent of functions that return prim positions is also leading to some innovation in tools. The current web integration is due to undergo significant improvement but even so some of the realtime collaboration sites such as Etherpad, Twiddla and Solvr are at least partially usable as things stand though you have to swap between web-on-a-prim and the internal browser for the first two. I know people have used Google Docs as well for collaborative writing.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like all that's happened is that there's a new name and a new announcement on an old thing.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/16/secondlife_alderman_class_action_lawsuit/

Is that really the ideal platform for classroom instruction?

Doing course design is incredibly time-consuming.

Time is for most schools even rarer than money. Add to this the fact that there is not, and never has been, meaningful incentives for innovative course development and you have the answer to your question.

It's pretty much all schools can do to merely manage the load that has been given to them. Undertaking major initiatives happens mostly only when there's a grant involved. This removed SL from most public schools right off, and for universities it means we can create a spiffy initiative, but we cannot integrate it into the broad curriculum.

Look, for instance, at how learning management systems worked their way onto campus. Second Life cannot follow that model, so it will always be peripheral to mainstream teaching. This has less to do with f2f versus virtual and more to do with funding models, IT / academia relations, and fundamental attitudes toward rewarding teaching versus rewarding research and publication.

Are you seriously suggesting that schools should support a virtual world whose most popular use case is cybersex?

Yeah, I know, the furry sex zone is separate from the rest, but even so....

But this is still very bizarre. Second Life is the home of some of the worst graphics and design of any existing virtual world, and performs no useful function whatsoever despite the endless hype it has received over the years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCUWcpVPtMM

I am aware of some exciting possibilities with virtual worlds when it comes to simulation e.g. walking through and manipulating molecules for chemistry experiments.

I'm wondering if Augmented reality will be more "natural" and useful in education.

I think you should consider an article title change though, people may not understand.

However, all that being said, the future will most likely combine virtual reality with augmented reality, providing a hybrid platform for education in all arenas. I'm virtually certain. ;-)