June 5, 2007
A Virtual World for Education
Many college professors are turning to Second Life, the popular virtual-reality world, to provide distant students with a colorful, three-dimensional environment for learning. Aaron E. Walsh, an adjunct faculty member at Boston College's Woods College of Advancing Studies, also sees a need for online worlds that are dedicated to education and devoid of sexually-oriented material that many complain is too prevalent in Second Life.
He hopes that like-minded colleagues will flock to his software project, Immersive Education. On Thursday he is to announce that more than 250 colleges will collaborate to develop standards and best practices for the venture, which promotes virtual environments only for education. The project may make use of Second Life's software, which is now open source.
In an interview with Terra Nova, Mr. Walsh talked about some of the challenges and benefits of using virtual reality for education. He added, though, that he worries about the growing number of students becoming addicted to virtual worlds, an affliction he called "immersive illness."
"Although this is an issue today, we're somewhat protected by the limitations of today's personal computers and game consoles. They just aren't powerful enough…yet," he told the interviewer. "But in another decade or more, it'll be a different story altogether." --Andrea L. Foster
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For a differnt take on SL, see this link.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6440565.html
— MYHerring Jun 5, 09:23 AM #
After you’ve read the Library Journal article, read the comments to the article. Several librarians explain in clear (and occasionally) passionate detail why they view Second Life as an important extension of the service mission of Libraries.
— tdugas Jun 5, 09:51 AM #
SL is an fascinating concept, but an appallingly bad platform. The lags and freezes are intolerable, and it crashes on computers running the most common Intel video chipsets. Vast numbers of people with incompatible computers and slow internet connections are totally frozen out of SL. Moreover, it can only really be used if you have great amounts of time to kill. People with busy FIRST lives are pretty much excluded. Why sink resources into a system only a tiny elite can use? Don’t be fooled by those phony inflated useage numbers. 90% of the people who’ve tried SL gave up in frustration after they found out SL wouldn’t run on their computers (I know I did).
— Tom Jun 5, 05:58 PM #
updates, forums great
— carsin kaa Jun 6, 12:41 PM #
SL has great potential. The Discovery Educator Network has a space there which we are exploring to test value and effectiveness as a community space for media using educators.
We do have nagging and perplexing machine problems. People with the same machines have different success rates at entering SL.Platform issues can be significant ones when planning across a community as large as ours.
— Hall Jun 6, 07:10 PM #
I am the blogger who interviewed Aaron for Terra Nova. While Aaron did not use Second Life for his classes at Boston College, I was told by Rebecca Nesson of Harvard’s Berkman Center that SL was a more effective platform for distance education than traditional distance offerings based on the Internet (static Web pages, streaming video, etc.). You can read the full transcript of our interview here:
http://ilamont.blogspot.com/2007/05/interview-harvards-rebecca-nesson.html
I generally agree with Tom’s assessment of the Second Life UI and technical requirements, but I would not discount virtual reality as an educational tool. Although SL’s true user base is currently limited, it will expand significantly as hardware prices drop and Linden Lab (which operates SL) works out software and scaling issues. Additionally, there may be a new virtual world or technology that eclipses SL — VR and virtual worlds are still at a very early stage of development, and the situation 3-5 years from now may cause many universities to more seriously consider virtual or immersive education.
— Ian Lamont Jun 8, 02:25 PM #