SL in Education

The Chronicle has a nice article describing the way some Universities are using Second Life in the classroom. It is titled The Avatars of Research

Thanxies for sharing, Satch, but this appears to be a subscribers-only article, unfortunately?

Grrr.... I didn't realize this because I guess my Uni pays for the subscription. How bout I cut & paste a few nuggets under the fair use umbrella? Becasue deep down in my heart I know you'll all pay a ridiculous subscription fee to access information that should be free.

edit: p.s. I removed one name because I didn't know if there were any privacy issues involved. Professor Conklin is well known for her SL av (she presented at GLS).

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Business professors are interested in Second Life because subscribers create, buy, and sell the colorful characters, costumes, virtual belongings, buildings, and neighborhoods that populate the cyberuniverse. The digital inventions are purchased with a virtual currency called "Linden dollars," which can be exchanged for real money. Indeed, a few people make a living by selling real estate in Second Life for real money. Virtual goods worth an actual $18-million are sold among Second Life participants each year, according to Linden Lab.

"Going up and setting up a business in Second Life is fundamentally not that different from setting up a business in the real world," says Kevin Werbach, an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "You have to have a core set of skills in defining an idea, implementing it, selling it, and managing the processes, which is really the essence of being an entrepreneur."

[....]

Ms. [Megan] Conklin shows the Elon professors her avatar, named Professor Radiks. Dressed in a Victorian-era bustle and wide-brimmed hat, she moves around online amid the professors' avatars. These include Tatsui, a woman in a skintight red outfit; Liniope, a large, muscular man with a creepy gaze; and [name removed] own avatar, Echinacea. (A gardener, the technologist named her characters after herbs.) The character looks like its creator, dressed in a purple shirt and black sweater-and-pants set, the same outfit worn by [name removed] during the workshop.

[...]

Architecture students at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of California at Berkeley have used Second Life to create virtual buildings and public spaces to see what they might be like to inhabit. At the Wharton School, students are interested in testing their entrepreneurial and marketing techniques by setting up businesses in Second Life to bring in virtual cash.

Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor of communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, had his students use Second Life in the spring of 2004 to study game design. They took advantage of object-creating tools in the virtual world to develop games that could familiarize new players with the software. Mr. Delwiche also had an expert on virtual worlds who lives in Copenhagen deliver a guest lecture to his class remotely, using the Second Life environment.

[...]

Linden Lab never anticipated that its environment would be widely used by college students, says Robin D. Harper, vice president for community development. But once professors began encouraging students to explore the online community, company executives put policies in place to entice college classes to the site.

[...]

Three years ago students in a class in architecture and urban planning at the University of Texas at Austin recommended that the company allow Second Life participants to join multiple groups in order to create closer social networks. The advice was taken.

[...]

In the middle of Ms. Conklin's three-week course in the winter term, Linden Lab raised the cost of rating an avatar from one to 25 Linden dollars, in order to tighten the money supply. "Some economics students immediately were able to start doing graphs and thinking about supply and demand and talking about monetary-policy issues," said Ms. Conklin. "It was really great."

[...]

Not every professor who has been introduced to Second Life is sold on it as a teaching tool.

Barth Strempek, an associate professor of business administration at Elon, says he is skeptical about using the software to teach business skills. "If I want to teach my students how to sell, I'm not sure this is the right place," he says. "I want them meeting people face to face." He also worries that the virtual environments could cut into young people's outdoor activities, like playing sports.

Ms. Conklin responds that because students are going to play around in virtual worlds anyway, they should be able to think critically about what is happening in the emerging social spaces. When students visit virtual worlds for class, she says, "at least they're doing homework in them."

Any info ever given on the staying power of SL with students after their course has finished? Are special instructions on SL usage provided as part of these courses or do they utilize the same learning conditions of any other user?

Thanx for sharing the whole jiggamadig, Satch! LOL... this is cool how you're going about it.

I remember the Radiks! I remember they had this big chair exhibition.

Bit o' trivia: I met pandastrong Fairplay via a certain "academic encounter" too.

Fascinating stuff here... on a silly note,



With these "types" of articles, I often see a comment like this. I wonder if he's one of the same guys who opposed video games in Malaysia and told children to stick to their spinning tops! LOLEX. I don't know his physical age, but this view sounds very "old".

It is important to talk to people face-to-face—something I wish I could do far better—but a truer statement in the present would be "I want them learning online worlds in addition to offline skills so they don't miss out on the communication opportunities new technologies provide!"

Interesting article. I think the potential for an immersive learning environment remains strong. The only hurdle at the moment is the myth being actively perpetuated by software and technologies industries alike as they bring products to the marketplace: You don't have to understand technology to use it effectively.

It will be a grand day when that one finally bites the dust.

Uh, well, I'm one. I started in SL as part of a class. Interestingly, none of the other students in the class and neither of the two professors who were running it chose to have anything to do with SL once the class was over. In fairness though, we studied several different worlds, and I have no idea if anyone chose to remain in any of the others. I fell in love with SL instantly, and the rest is history.