Purplegrrl’s Second life

As you saw from my last post I am currently involved in a group assignment to create an educational community in Second Life. After observing and being a participating in a couple of those community I thought to myself “Wow by the end of my masters I may really be able to create one of these worlds (or islands) and use it for both educational and social networking purposes” I have been playing and using web since 1995 and when I look at Second Life and other multi-user virtual environments and think look how far we come. Anyway I digress (as I often do when writing my blog posts)

Anyway on Saturday I was chatting to a group of students from the E-learning experience class (who is in a another group) and one of them asked me “why Second life I cannot see the educational benefit” and I said there is a perception that places like Second Life are just places where people to cyber date (and other things which I will not go into as I do not want to lose my PG rating on this blog) or social network. I see it so much more than that and 200 educational universities and educational institutions that use Second Life obviously also agree. (Kelton 2007: 3)

I thought why not Second Life as adult educators isn’t it important to use every tool that is available to us provide educational experiences that are both simulating and relevant

” According to metrics data published on July 10 2007, by meta Linden over 26 per cent of those who have Second Life Accounts are between 18 and 24 years old and another 38 per cent are between 25 and 34″ ( Kelton 2007: 3)

As adult educators demographically our students are the group who uses Second Life.

The exciting part of SANJT project is that it demonstrates to non users of Second Life how beneficial this medium can be. A nursing student who lives in a remote area can experience on one level the different scenarios that they will encounter when they are actually in a hospital without them having to make a costly trip to the main university campus (which may be 200km away case in point Southern Cross University).

This is not to say that Second Life is the be all and end all but it should not be discounted because of stereotypes that are promoted by the media (the media has been doing this since the internet has been being used on a mass scale).

References

Kelton, AJ 2007, Second Life: reaching into the virtual world for real-world learning, EDUCAUSE, accessed 7 May 2008, <http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ECAR/SecondLifeReachingintothe/44919>.

I must admit I thought observing a learning community would be much easier than it really is. The first problem I have found is sometimes when there is an learning event I am unable to attend as I have other commitments (mainly work) as many of you may have read in my previous blog entry I am studying a group in second life. Like most people I can only attend these events in my spare time (which seems less and less these days) as I cannot down load second life on my work computer and have a play/or be part of the learning interaction. the second problem is That I have been easily distracted by the other things on second life namely going to parties have learnt a lot about how people interact on this medium but not really helping with my assignment. Thirdly finding time to read the readings so I can situate my experiences intotheoretical framework. Has anyone else had these problems so I am alone in this dilemma?