Sunya: Week 6

Pedagogy and Learning in the Virtual World of Second Life®

This article presents pedagogy and learning in the Virtual World of Second Life. It tells us what Second Life is about. For example, Second Life (SL) involves multiple users, called “avatars,” who create and interact in a spatially-organized ecology of virtual 3-D representations of people, space, time, motion, sound, objects, topography, and tools. The article also describes the transitional issues in Shifting Paradigm to 3-D Virtual World Environments that is online virtual worlds are still in their infancy in the early 1990s (Ward 2007). During this period, different perspectives on key issues have emerged that are specific to educational applications in Second Life and are concerned with how educational practitioners approach the 3-D virtual world.

The article concludes that there is a challenge to overcome. This is because there is a sustainable trend for users to continue investing their time and capital in SL, but it is still a concern of users accepting 3-D virtual world environments. The needs of the Educational users is that they want more stability in the software platform, faster functionality, lower or less expensive initial equipment requirements easy-to-learn scripting and building tools, increased ability to import ready-made objects from other programs, simpler ways to stream media, and more seamless integration of most other standard-use software products into SL virtual world.

The reason I pay attention to this article because it related to the use of Second Life for teaching and learning. It touches on the technical issue which I believe that is very important part of SL to overcome. If this problem remains, it will discourage people to use SL and he/she will miss out on its potential. In particular if one believes that SL is a game. Therefore, it is important to clarify that Second Life is not a game but games may be played and created in SL. According to Jarmon (2008) there are real classes, real peer-to-peer and team learning activities, and real collaborations among real individuals. This week I attended an English class at LanguageLab about Air Travel, I can experience situation like in real life visiting the airport, practicing English how to check in. In SL student can travel from classroom to the airport in less time and that may not be able to do in real life class situation. This can further be replicated with the help of virtual classrooms and SL in that the lessons take place in the virtual classroom (similar to face-to-face teaching as it involves a whiteboard, text readings, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation) and then SL can be used as the immersive environment for the equivalent of field trips. The real potential of SL is seen in taking the students to visit other places in their natural surroundings which make it a complete language learning experience.

 References

Jarmon, L. (2008). Pedagogy and Learning in the Virtual World of Second Life®. Encyclopedia of distance and online learning 2^nd edition.

Ward, M. (2007). A very real future for virtual worlds. BBC News. Retrieved December 15, 2007, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7144511.stm