Education in Second Life

Role-playing doctor inside Second Life? Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London has developed a region in Second Life that aims to design game-based learning activities for delivery of virtual patients that can drive experiential, diagnostic, and role-play learning activities supporting patients’ diagnoses, investigations and treatment. One of my Twitter friends, Andrea Vascellari, thinks this is a “terrific example that demonstrates the value of virtual worlds like Second Life” and is interested in other folk’s thoughts after watching this video:

Techniques for grading student performance in a simulation In most cases, professors need to grade the performance of a student in a simulation for the experience to be considered official. While ultimately this grading is probably just as arbitrary as grading a paper, at least grading a paper has the benefit of history on its side.

Write a paper about the experience in the simulation.

Keep a journal during the experience.

Videocasting classroom lectures works. No, it does not.

osting lecture notes is pretty much good enough. Not really. There is an insane amount of details making up a course, beyond pedagogically correct notes.

Online teaching is mostly good for introductory or low-level courses. Actually, online learning requires a lot of maturity from the students. For this reason, it works better with advanced topics or with more mature students.

“People who work within SL will find it not a lot of fun, to work in an area where you can’t create the content yourself,” Andrews said.  Andrews did state frequently that Lively is a good introduction to a virtual world for someone very new to this experience.More information about ASU's use of Lively is available at http://beta.asu.edu/myworld/

He closes with a discussion about the choice of technology for a remote presentation with colleagues from the UK to an audience in Kuala Lumpur. In short, Elluminate was chosen over Second Life:Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate.

here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel.

I agree that the whiteboard is missing and as I've argued elsewhere, this highlights SL's fundamental problem with handling text-like documents in any collaborative sense.