Education in Second Life

From next year, lectures at Glasgow Caledonian University will encourage the student nurses to test their knowledge and skills by entering the virtual world of Second Life and create their own online character, known as an avatar. The student nurses can then assess a range of virtual patients which lecturers have programmed in advance with a variety of ailments. Nursing lecturers hope students will use an avatar to explore the virtual hospital in Second Life and treating the virtual patients. This will allow the student nurses to practice their theory in a safe environment without fear of making mistakes.

'Avatars have been created to represent typical patients and they can interact with our nursing students' avatars to allow them to carry out patient assessments. Each patient can be controlled by a tutor or by artificial intelligence and has a different history and reason for being admitted to hospital, as well as the ability to respond to a broad range of questions. The assessments are recorded and can be analysed later with the student's tutor.'

Two British researchers have just completed a study of undergraduate students that found "many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning."

Instead, the study found that students use a limited range of technologies for both formal and informal learning and that there is a "very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies."

The study included a questionnaire survey of 160 students, followed up by in-depth interviews with 8 students and 8 staff members at both institutions. The findings show that many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning. Students use a limited range of technologies for formal and informal learning. These are mainly established ICTs - institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking. Findings point to a very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies.

Some weeks back, the short course I ran with our third year students in SL drew to a close. How did it go? It went. Not nearly so well as I should have liked but lessons were learned. Like:

In Q3, Residents spent 102.8 million hours in Second Life, up 8% from Q2 and 45% from the same quarter last year.  Peak concurrent users of 71,000

in Q3 to just under 2 billion square meters

measure of the gross domestic product in Second Life, grew 21% from the prior quarter to $102M -