Is Second Life in Education Worth It?
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TechCrunch published an interesting article a couple of days ago “Will The Last Corporation Leaving Second Life Please Turn Off The Light?” This article explores the cost of running a second life business and it’s relative small audience. Granted there are lots of things you can do in second life that you couldn’t do in a traditional webpage, but for most it wasn’t worth the amount invested? That led me to question… is Second Life really worth it in Education?
There was certainly a large hype surrounding Second life several months ago and lots of Universities were jumping on the bandwagon. I myself wrote an article that received some attention from folks as to the potential in Second Life, but where does it stand now. Are we closer to reaching that potential, or has it fizzled? I hear increasingly less from the mobs. Was this just a passing fad that some Universities invested in or is the educational second life folks still thriving?
Just a couple of thought to throw out there. What about you? When was the last time you logged into second life? What was the last educational activity you held in Second Life?
SuezanneC Baskerville
I logged in to Second Life in the past 24 hours.
I held an educational event in Second Life over 3 years ago, the topic of which was “What Can You Do For SuezanneC Baskerville?”, which apparently confused some of the audience.
Second Life will be popular with government school systems because government school systems are notorious for using expensive and ineffective methods of teaching. What could be nicer than to get paid to play video games?
If zoho, with it’s shared spreadsheets and word files and notebooks and wikis would add a 3D virtual world to it’s mixture of multi-user online applications, that might be useful.
Jul 18th, 2007 7:51 am
Jeff VanDrimmelen
Haha… that’s funny Suezanne. I work for a government school… perhaps that is why we have an island. And yes… I’m sure Zoho needs one more product. Thanks for the laugh this morning.
Jul 18th, 2007 8:19 am
Jeff VanDrimmelen
Right on the heels of my doubt yesterday I saw these two posts on Educause this morning:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/HiredEd/somefoundationsforse/44785
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/joesanchez/aresidentialcommunit/44786
Guess I spoke too soon. But these article’s do bring up some long standing concerns with SL.
Jul 19th, 2007 10:24 am
Charlie Morris
Hey, glad you are talking about this question of “is it really worth it?” my thoughts exactly. I think we are light years away from something like this being universally adaptable to the education scene, but it certainly has applications in certain instances and it does have some nice benefits. You might want to check out this link to some notes of a discussion we held at State:
http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/blern?entry=meet_up_reminder#comments
Jul 23rd, 2007 3:47 pm