Second Life and Teaching and Learning

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters of virtual lands, more than 13 million "residents," and a thriving economy. The ease in which users can build and modify virtual spaces has made it an attractive choice for experiments in learning space design and educational experiences such as virtual field trips or the creation of galleries to display student-created media. The 7 Things You Should Know About Second Life, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Second Life lets educators easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different strategies for a physical space affect learning and how a similar approach can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

The full program is now available for the ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session, "Real-World and Technology Rich: Learning by Doing, Learning in Context," being held March 18–19 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Register by February 19 to save money with low, early-bird rates.

Some of the featured sessions and speakers will include:

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

The last year I've been teaching and conducting research in Second Life at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to share some of the feedback I've received from students regarding their experience. The information is coming directly from 19 students that participated in a focus group where they created 214 note cards in a five-minute period after being led through a mental imagery exercise. Students were asked to "tell me about your experience in Second Life"; they were instructed to write one thought or phrase per card. Each card was then defined by the author and taped on the walls. Students then sorted the cards into similar clusters, named the clusters, and further defined each cluster in order to create a final affinity. The sorted note cards looked like this

The focus group was conducted in November of 2006 from students in a World Literature course. Second Life activites included building and roleplay on a private island owned by the University if Texas at austin. More later...

Podcast coverage of the closing general session from the 2007 Western Regional Conference in San Francisco, California. The panel consists of :

Peter Beyersdorf, Assistant Professor, San Jose State University

BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University

Nancy Mackin, Adjunct Professor, The University of British Columbia

Sandra Rotenberg, Access Services Librarian, Solano Community College

Our moderator is John C. Ittelson, Professor, Director, California State University, Monterey Bay

Social software has created exciting new dynamic possibilities for teaching and learning. What are the uses of wikis, blogs, podcasts, and the like, and how is academia incorporating them into teaching? This faculty panel will address social software and pedagogy while sharing their experiences from the point of choosing a software, implementing it, and assessing its value to the learning process.
This podcast runs

We're about a week from the ELI 2007 Spring Focus Session, Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths for Interaction and Engagement. As usual, I'm interviewing some of the presenters scheduled for the event to get an advanced sense for the issues they plan to address at the focus session.

In this interview, I talk with Sarah Robbins, a TA Instructor in English at Ball State University, about her experiences in teaching classes in the immersive learning environment Second Life. I ask her about the teaching and learning objectives that led her to try to teach in Second Life, as well as the level of technical expertise she feels is or isn't necessary to teach in that online space. We also discuss the benefits she has found that students derive from learning in Second Life, as well as the benefits she has realized as a developing faculty member by teaching in an immersive learning environment.