A couple of weeks ago Linden Lab blogged : Share Your Educational Success Stories. The idea was, as the blog post suggests, for educators to share their educational success stories. A forum thread was created for these stories to be shared and some educators have been happy to share their stories.
One thing that stands out straight away about these stories is the global appeal of Second Life, and therefore other virtual worlds. People have posted their stories from countries including : Austria, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Scotland and United States Of America.
There also appears to be a diverse list of reasons for using Second Life. Quite a few are for learning English, but there are also use cases cited for stage design, Business studies, machinima and even graduations.
Moni Duettmann who has been teaching at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria writes:
For starters I built a model of the actual hall, where the stage would be built in real life, a convention room of the university. Now everybody could get a realistic idea, where things would really happen, once they were developed in Second Life. The purpose of the stage was defined as a presentation for other works the students had made in that semester.
They developed a theme with a steampunkish design and started working on it online in Second Life. The big advantage of the method was, that not only everybody could practically work on the objects simultaneously and communicate about it, but it was visible how it would really look, before efforts to build it would be carried out. The result was a virtual model that looked exactly as the later built with cardboards and prints. Even some simple animations were included in the design, later translated into electrical fan action.
Whereas some educators use Second Life for distance learning, others use Second Life due to the nature of Second Life having a virtual world economy. These concepts are well emphasised by a post from Linda Sautereau of Indiana University’s Kelley School Of Business :
At Indiana University, I teach undergraduates and they have managed businesses as well as researched the differences between virtual and real businesses. They also present their findings in-world. I’ve made the exercises more “fun” for them in that I give them 10 sites to visit and report on. This assignment allows them to become familiar with the space prior to working on the main assignment. The feedback from students has been positive. One student told me that took my section because he had heard about the assignment.
SL has allowed me to assist a colleague at Tuskegee University to expose his e-commerce students to virtual worlds. Each year, his students and mine conduct a virtual negotiation. My purchasing students would normally have to be the sellers as well as the buyers. This way, my students can experience virtual negotiations as the purchasers, while my colleagues students role play the sellers. I’ve also done this with a professor who was teaching a sales management class at Indiana State University, which is 1.5 hours from our campus. It has helped all of our students to understand and experience that business can be transacted at a distance.
What we also see in the thread is the power of collaboration whereby different educational institutions can work together within a virtual world environment such as Second Life.
