Second Life

I did try to spend some time in Second Life, but I didn't get far. At all. It took over 24 hours to receive my confirmation email. When I did enter SL, I tried to change the clothes my avatar was wearing and ended up mostly in the buff. That pretty much stopped me in my tracks. Seems that if I had so much trouble with that, I couldn't expect my future students to get terribly far either.

I did find some informative sites regarding education in SL before I ventured into the virtual world. Some of those are below:

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib

http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Membership/Member_Networking/ISTE_Second_Life.htm

http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses

This is a link to a Ball State English Comp course that was held in SL:

http://eng104sl.intellagirl.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
(Side Note: I skimmed through the very long transcript of a class that was held - wasn't impressed.)

And here's an interesting interview: "How NOT to Teach in Second Life"

http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=1363


Here's my take on it. As others have mentioned, there seems to be a lot of impropriety in this world. For that reason alone, I would have difficulty trying to use this as an educational tool without A LOT of training specific to SL. It would take me more than a few weeks to become confident enough and knowledgeable enough to attempt to use this as an educational tool.

I can certainly appreciate what has been created in this realm, though. I did watch the video from UC-Davis regarding schizophrenia. (My 2nd love is psychology.) For concepts such as this, and travelling back to the Globe and so forth, this seems to be a wonderful resource. However, as a possible comp teacher, I think I would be hard pressed to come up with something more creative than just having students sit in on a lecture. I'd much rather meet with my students in the real world rather than a virtual one. Guess I'm old school.