Education and Second Life

After watching the video by Sarah Smith Robbins we were asked our opinions about the future of education in conjunction with Second Life.

In the video, Smith calls attention to five things which are important to consider when looking at Second Life as a teaching apparatus. The first is Collaboration, which is facilitation of various forms of communication in the medium via chat, private chat, presentations, note cards and more. She also mentions the Creativity involved in Second Life. People are able to express themselves on conjunction with this corporal life, and perhaps look like what they wish they looked like or would like to look like specifically that day. Creativity is also expressed through object creation. There is a certain element of Authenticity involved, in that the environment is mostly user created. There is also an increased opportunity to create a Community, through the exchange of lingo and memes in order to differentiate the ways of communication. Finally, there is a change in the way people may become Engaged with users the the environment. There is live streaming, live chat, events and activities which people may become active in.

Robbins points to a new face in education which involves a fluid mixture of technology. She describes web 2.0 (prosumerism, remote applications, sociability and application program interfaces) as important in conjunction with a multi user environment and a participatory network. It lends itself towards hypertextual learning.

I think that this is a step towards the future way of teaching. I have an idea where class rooms all have public chat displayed on the board open for discussion. I do not believe in the full implementation of technology without the corporeal because the technology is not yet capable to fully supplant realities and this takes away form the experience. It must always be used in conjunction with each other. Sarah is enabling the merging of this, however the technology is still lacking. This is not to say that I am not for this inclusion of this technology, however the proper appropriation must be utilized. We have seen in the past through WebCT and Sakai how not to use technology. We must not simply mirror teaching now through a virtual setting, but rather properly execute technology in order to fully appreciate the potentials within.

I think her argument is one that shows considerable strength. It would appear that traditional forms of teaching are becoming ancient and outdated like a computer from 1995. Society is changing, the system is changing, so change how we are learning so we may better understand our environments. It must become hypertextual along with previous forms of learning, otherwise our way of understanding becomes outdated. If education programs our software in our brains for learning, we should be updating it as much as possible.

Group work was a mess. Everyone is really busy. It was incredibly difficult to meet, even in an online environment. We kept out of Second Life because it was too buggy, and there was too much lag to effectively operate together to perform research efficiently. We all went in SL, but at different times.

What did work was our ability to come together for the brief moment we did and experience the same data at the same time in the same mind frame. This was incredibly important in out shared understanding of the groups we chose to research.