One day I was watching Judge Mathis and the plaintiff was suing the defendant for some money that was either stolen or taken during a virtual world interaction. As the judge asked questions regarding the virtual world it was amazing to see how serious the plaintiff was about her virtual world, her avatar, occupation, etc. As I mentioned in Oksana’s post it would be very time consuming to put a course like this together but I believe this would probably be the best experience of a student’s life, if designed and delivered properly.
One of the concerns with Second Life is that there is a lot of non academic activity going on which makes the learning process difficult at times(Young, 2010). Virtual worlds would serve best as an internship/capstone course where a student would have to apply the information they have learned through all the courses to complete their virtual world. I believe that if this is the case, courses for both virtual world and online learning should be available which would allow students to have a choice of the type of course they would like to participate.
Although some colleges are not happy with virtual life, it is still a growing technology that, in the future, will be very beneficial to the education field.
Interesting article:
Young, J. (2010, Feb 14) After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/After-Frustrations-in-Second/64137/
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CeCe,
ReplyDeleteI don't know if students will consider Second Life "the best experience" or not.
As busy as they are, I don't think that "mastering" Second Life will fit well into their tight schedule.
This is just my personal (student) opinion,
Oksana
I agree, it may be difficult for some students. Maybe the university could offer a non-credit tutorial course as a prerequisite for the class.
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