Marketers are finding it hard to sell their products and services in a virtual world, as a recent report in the Los Angeles Times states. With a low active user count and low tendency of Second Life users to make purchases online, savvy companies who purchased & developed land in the virtual world are re-considering their investment. Even Starwood's Aloft brand, the first hotel to enter the virtual world is pulling out and donating its land to charity... the virtual Aloft was a great way to gather feedback that could be implemented in the real world hotels, but now thats done, there doesn't seem a more 'compelling reason to stay', as Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft says.
The Teen Grid: Bringing Your School into Second Life
by Linda L. Briggs
Second Life, which offers an virtual world complete with avatars to represent human visitors, has intrigued some educators. The popular graphical online world, with land, commerce, buildings, and social networking, seems to offer educational potential, but how to get started?
Teachers, media specialists, and others who want to explore the learning potential of Second Life in the classroom might benefit from a conversation with Peggy Sheehy, library media specialist at Suffern Middle School, a high-performing school in Suffern, NY, about 30 miles northwest of New York City.
Sheehy is the originator of Ramapo Islands, Suffern Middle School's presence in the Teen Grid area of Second Life. Suffern has maintained a private learning environment there since August 2006. Teachers who want help developing curricula for Second Life, help convincing administrators of the benefits of the virtual world, or simply an understanding of how to get started, might benefit from Sheehy's experience.
At Suffern, 800 students and 15 eighth-grade teachers participated in Second Life this year, with projects that covered subjects ranging from math to family consumer science to art, health, and social studies.
Also, she pointed out, electronic communication is a natural for today's students, who reach for a cell phones as soon as the school day is over, and who routinely study or play with multiple Internet sites open.
When I joined the group of educators in Second Life called the CAVE (see previous post) I promised myself I would do two things: 1) approach Second Life with an open mind and 2) write about it along the way.
I have written about it to some extent (another previous post, My First Second Life Lesson), but it still feels like I have a long way to go. The last dozen times I’ve been there it’s been a very frustrating technical experience (freezes, crashes) and very little real time to do anything interesting. Even when it works, it still feels like a place that is looking for a use in education, or just reminds me of the dozens of other places I’ve hung out at in my long life online, like Tapped In or various text-based virtual worlds.
My thinking has somewhat crystallized around 3 topics:
Second Life as a place for professional development (vs. professional collegiality)
Second Life as a place for learning with K-12 students (have to save for next time!)
Second Life as a platform in general (another next time!)
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There is significant interest amongst educators in Europe in the potential application of digital games, or digital games technologies and in the use and affordances of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE).
Many European Higher Education (25 March 2007) institutions have established a virtual presence in the most widely used MUVE in education , "Second Life" (Over 46% of those registered do so form a European connection with France having the highest number of registered users, February 2007 ) There are a wide number of educational projects in Second Life and the "teen grid", an under eighteen section of Second Life, including the "global kids" project. For a comprehensive listing of current educational activity in MUVE please refer to http://www.simteach.com/
The use of MUVE presents real pedagogic and interoperability challenges to educators across a number of domains including Accessibility, Assessment, Authentication and validation, network capability, security, the proprietary nature and in the existing business models of developers .
There are projects exploring the relationship between these kinds of applications and existing institutional systems, IMS Simple sequencing in games and the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) in MUVE. One of the most interesting and challenging projects is the current work undertaken by Livingstone and Kemp (2007) with the "Sloodle" project , a "mashup" of the open source virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle and Second Life. they argue that both environments provide largely complimentary affordances.
Work across these domains is still very much at the exploratory stage.
Daliah first came to Second Life in February, directly as a result of her course, where it was a required element. She was a little worried at first, not about learning in Second Life, but because she thought it would be seen as frivolous - "like MySpace" to potential future employers and she was a little scared because she felt she didn't know what SL was all about and what the people would be like. Daliah had prepared a list of benefits she'd seen from learning in SL:
Students could always find someone in SL whether it was another student or professor.
SL made it easy to keep up with the assignments. Everything students needed for class could be found in SL as well so if you couldn't make class, you could still do the work and hand it in on time.
SL was not just an educational tool it helped students learn more about computers than any computer class we had taken in the past because they were actually using them directly and intensively.
SL gave us the opportunity to chat with students from other colleges as well as fellow classmates so we could all help each other, and to research people from all over the world.
Students could meet at one location. There was no need to exchange phone numbers or e-mail address. Using open chat everyone can communicate with every other student there which enabled much better working together and helping each other when you got stuck because you could get a range of views very quickly.
Students did their homework on notecard and sent them to the professor who could correct them and send them back right away, which made it easy to do corrections.
Although, in theory, these students could have met regularly at college, in practice their varied schedules meant it was easier to meet in SL from home at a time that was more convenient for them.
I have written about it to some extent (another previous post, My First Second Life Lesson), but it still feels like I have a long way to go. The last dozen times I’ve been there it’s been a very frustrating technical experience (freezes, crashes) and very little real time to do anything interesting. Even when it works, it still feels like a place that is looking for a use in education, or just reminds me of the dozens of other places I’ve hung out at in my long life online, like Tapped In or various text-based virtual worlds.
