Contents contributed and discussions participated by James OReilly - Education in Second Life

e-Learning & Consumer Protection - Immersive Worlds Tool Ranking - 12 views

immersive-worlds-tool-ranking.grouply.com/...421

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'The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching' - Knowledge@Wharton - 19 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm

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Second Life for Businesses, Second Life Business Orientation - 9 views

www.designingdigitally.com/...orientation-training

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Second Life - The Long Goodbye « That'SLife - 18 views

slife.dudeney.com/?p=446

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There comes a time when you have to admit you were wrong, or perhaps misguided, or simply that you were a little bit ‘out of time’, or perhaps – better said – that somebody let you down and maybe it wasn’t your fault. And this is one of those times, because it’s goodbye to Second Life for me, at least in its current incarnation – in terms of teaching and training – and I’d like to try and explain why…
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the reason I did all this is not because I was convinced that SL was the future of education, but rather that I thought it was the future of the web (not SL, you’ll understand, more the notion of 3D)
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here was still one thing that didn’t change – it was cripplingly difficult to get started with SL for the casual visitor (unlike, say, Skype or Adobe Connect) and the ‘first hour experience’ was terrible.
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you get a system which doesn’t lend itself to much use over and above the committed
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On a scale of 1-100 I’d put SL at the 100 end of the scale in terms of people being willing to invest the time and effort…
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The period in which I found myself having less time to invest in SL also coincided with the new viewer which brought HTML on a prim to SL and made a lot of tools (mine included) largely redundant. And I’m very happy about that – media is now much easier to use in SL, as is any web content, and this has changed the lives of many educators who now don’t have to fudge solutions in-world.
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Of all the improvements (the changes to the forums, the blogs, the bloody shopping site and all the rest) why is it that the overall experience isn´t really that much better than it was two years ago?
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I can’t help thinking I get more out of blogs and Twitter (in terms of professional development), and more out of other social platforms (and I’d include Elluminate and Adobe Connect in there too) than I can see myself getting out of SL these days.
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“Second Life: Overcoming the Entry Barriers in Hogher and Further Education”
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Looking back at that chapter now I can’t see a great deal of change, and those entry barriers are, at best, a real detractor in terms of getting educators in, but – at worst – they are very good reasons not to even start.
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SL is too  demanding and too unreliable for most educators. It pains me to say this, but I just don’t think it’s improved enough, or become easy enough for most people to bother. There are better ways of doing most things you can do in SL in terms of education, and – almost five years down the line – as far as I’m concerend SL hasn’t delivered enough to make it worthwhile.
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I still think the future of web interactions is 3D, and I still think avatars are a grand idea, and I still love the concept of a vast space to be wandered and enjoyed… but I have to conclude that in pure terms of investment (time and money) SL doesn’t make much sense, at least for most educators.
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I think mobile has come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, and the possibilities are very exciting. Plus, you don’t need high-end equipment and shedloads of patience with mobile, most of the time.
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