Real-Life Teaching in a Virtual World by Denise Harrison

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/02/18/real-life-teaching-in-a-virtual-world.aspx
Summary: This article discusses possible of ways of using the game Second Life in an educational setting. The article mostly emphasizes combining different aspects of learning such as role-playing, collaboration, many others, and combining them all into one package. This allows students to have an experiential learning experience unlike anything else that we can accomplish. Second Life also allows educators to get together and collaborate together in an environment where no one needs to travel to see each other. Basically, Second Life allows a class to do everything they can do in a physical classroom and more. Students can get power point presentations, open links, copy entire lectures to word, and all for free too.

Reaction: I played Second Life for a bit last year so I'll add in my own opinion. First, I would hardly consider Second Life a game. Games have some kind of goal. Second Life is more like a 3d chat program like IMVU. While people do have fun there is actually a lot that goes into playing Second Life before they can actually start. Choosing a viewer, or user interface is important but a lot of the better ones have spyware embedded in them. It also takes a long time to customize an avatar. Hair specifically is extremely hard to customize. I also found it quite hard to find education communities in Second Life. The one I did manage to find turned out to be some type of sexual fetish community. Other than that I do think the article makes a fair point about all the advantages in using Second Life in the classroom. I believe that there would be too many obstacles in using Second Life for younger students though. I think this should be suitable for upper high school or college students. I also believe the best way to fully utilize Second Life would be combining whatever class you want to teach with a visual arts class because a lot of the customizable features in Second Life are created by normal people using scanners and Photoshop. Students who create items using this can also sell them in the Second Life store for game credits that they can use to buy various items that are also created by other users.

Harrison, D. (2009, February 18). Real-life teaching in a virtual world. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/02/18/real-life-teaching-in-a-virtual-world.aspx