Okay… I’ll admit it… I’m beginning to get just a little addicted to Second Life. In an effort to understand this game and it’s potential for education, I have been exploring it a great deal and am beginning to gain some insight.
Wesley (Speed of Creativity) has posted a very nice review of his recent experiences “in world” and I really agree with him on this point:
What an amazing environment for not only creativity, but also for critical thinking. Things are likely not what they appear to be. Is this an engaging environment? Absolutely.
One recommendation for anyone exploring Second Life, but not ready to take the plunge to pay for a subscription and own your own land:
Do a search on places for “sandboxes”. Sandboxes are areas in Second Life where you can practice your building skills. Otherwise you will have to own land in order to build objects. There is even a “school” where you can go and learn more about “prims”. Prims (primitives) are the basic building blocks of all objects within Second Life. I visited the school last night and learned a great deal.
After playing/exploring for a while I’ve come up with another use for Second Life in education. If anyone is teaching a computer graphics class and part of your curriculum includes 3D graphics/modeling, then Second Life could be used to teach the basic principles behind this concept. I’ve tried to teach this concept using traditional 3D modeling/animation software, but the abstractness of the software very often created a steep learning curve for some of my students. I believe they would have been much more engaged and less frustrated if they were able to start in an environment like Second Life. However, there are limitations to how and what you can build — this is in no way as flexible as 3D software. It would be a good start for teaching these concepts at the high school (or lower) level.
Just when we thought we knew where this was going…
I ran across this post today that describes the convergence of Google Earth, Sketchup, and Second Life. I read this little mind-blowing statement…
…real world places have already been simulated in Second Life. There’s a virtual copy of Hanover, New Hampshire, for example. He also demos a mashup of Second Life and Google Maps, where a gateway to a Second Life location appears as a pushpin on a Google Map.
…and suddenly started thinking “wow, so what happens when we start implanting chips in our brain and connecting all of this together?”… 
Okay — seriously, these things are beginning to converge and we do need to think more deeply about what this means for our students. Right now, the kind of mashup described above is just fun and games, but in the very near future this will begin to interconnect much more deeply with commerce and business. I can’t find the article now, but I read somewhere this week about real-world (First Life) retailers like Amazon.com and one clothing company looking into the possibilities of selling through Second Life.
In the very near future, the use of Second Life in education may become more that just a simulation environment where students practice skills needed in the real world — as Second Life evolves, is it not possible that some of us may be going “in world” to teach skills that will be needed to succeed “in world”?
I’m only speculating here — but given the fact that our education system is already grossly undercalculating the need for teaching digital skills — I’m not sure we (education) will be able to keep up with this seemingly ever-accelerating pace of digital evolution and digital/real-world convergence. I am very hopeful about the future, but I know we are going to need some radical and drastic changes in our education system in order to prepare our students for a very uncertain, but exciting, future.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, games, learning, virtual worlds, web 2.0, instructional technology
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
