Blog Entry Overview
Return to your blog and make a new post. As best you can, please answer the questions below in this new blog entry. If your writing takes you somewhere else and you leave these questions behind, that’s ok too. Just try to capture some of your current thinking in your blog as you write. Remember, your blog doesn’t have to be perfect. Your blog’s main purpose is to serve as a technological tool to aid your thinking.
Blog Subject: Second Life
Write a blog entry focusing on these questions:
- What was your general reaction to using Second Life?
- Most online courses are very text heavy. Second Life and other virtual worlds software relies on a more visual experience. How do you think teaching an online course using Second Life or something similar might change the nature of the course.
- Even if you wouldn’t use Second Life for a whole course, how might using it for a unit or a few lessons impact the nature of the course?
- Some of the people in our class changed their genders when they went into Second Life. How do you think this might impact an online course discussion?
- We toured different sims (virtual simulations) in which one could hold a class discussion. How do you think having a discussion of a Shakespeare play in castle or similar setting would impact/change the discussion, if at all?
- Gibson talks about cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination.” In other words, we have to agree together to believe the game is real. Is this what we do in regular classes, agree to play a kind of educational game in a particular way? And if so, might Second Life offer us new ways to play that game? Or, is Second Life too much like a game and therefore too different from the other ways we try to teach people?
- Some of the people in our class changed their genders when they went into Second Life. How do you think this might impact an online course discussion?
- Some people in the class had technical problems which interfered with their ability to use Second Life. Does this sort of issue mean the technology is too complicated to use and simpler solution, like D2L, might be better? Why do you think this?
- What sort of research project might be worth conducting in Second Life?