Second Life. These words have always conjured up feelings of boredom for me. I remember reading about Second Life years ago when it was first being introduced, and thinking to myself – well, it might not be too bad. I created a character, logged in, looked around, and promptly logged back into my Horde Rogue in World of Warcraft. I have never looked back – until I started my program at Full Sail University. The course directors at the school decided that all students should know about Second Life and be able to use it as another tool in our teaching kits. In our first month, I went through the process of creating another avatar and was really excited, because I wanted to see what this virtual environment really had to offer me. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a whole lot in there yet except for some basic exploration, and I was not impressed. I began to wonder, do my students even care about this program and environment? So, I asked them. Out of 36 students, ages 16-46, only 13 even knew what Second Life was. Out of those 13, only 1 student was really into it and enjoyed going into the world and creating things and playing in there. I was blown away by these results! I asked my students why they didn’t get in there and play and the answers were pretty much all the same: “it’s boring”, “there’s nothing to do”, “the barrier of entry is to high”, “too much of a learning curve”, “I don’t know what to do in there”, etc. My initial reaction to this enlightening of the teacher was “so why the heck are we wasting our time with this in my Master’s program?” Then things changed for me on Tuesday night.
Tuesday night, our class got together for our weekly Wimba session. We had a special guest who decided to take us into Second Life to show us what we would be doing in her class (imagine my excitement at this point). So, everyone got into Second Life, it took a while for everyone to find each other and get situated (I was almost in tears at this point and had thoughts of dropping the program before I was subjected to a whole month of this), but once everyone was together, something happened. We were shown that with items in Second Life, we could give presentations in there. I have heard of this being done obviously, but I am a visual person and “seeing is believing”. I was taken aback at the implications this could provide to educators and trainers. I began reflecting on the results of my informal survey and realized, that with enough proper training, once students were introduced to the world of Second Life and given the tools and guidance they would need to understand the world, they might change their views on it.
Now, I haven’t completely flipped my opinion on Second Life just over one night’s experiences, but my excitement, hope, and expectations have been raised and I am looking forward to delving into the world and seeing what it has to offer me.
Use the below links to find some information about using Second Life in education:
No comments:
Post a Comment