Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life

(**Note: one of the suggested SL sites, EduIsland, was not accessible from either the FSO link or the Discovery Education blog.)

I should first come clean about my Second Life bias. I'm sorry to admit, I have yet to be sincerely impressed by SL. My first experiences with it were in previous Full Sail classes, and I found it to be confusing, clumsy, awkward and hard to navigate. During my first experience, I was very taken by the graphical interface, and how much work had gone into many of the "worlds" we visited. As someone who considers herself to be an early adopter and advocate of any new, interactive and social web tools, I had a very hard time controlling my SL avatar. I walked into things, almost drowned a few times, and then at one point I somehow lost my hair and have never been able to get it back.

While one could consider these to be minor annoyances that are part of the learning curve, my deeper exploration of Second Life was still a disappointment. Some of my classmates had worse luck than I trying to function as SL avatars, and I would often invite people to visit me in a world only to find they couldn't get there, didn't know how to use the chat function, etc. We had a class meeting once in SL that was complete chaos. While I was avoiding awkward conversations with non-FS Second Life visitors who had limited English skills or were otherwise incapable of appropriate communication, I found myself in lands that had appealing, promising names but the content would range from just interesting, nothing more, to downright silly and frivolous. I'm sure it had some meaning to someone, but I seldom found what I was looking for. Again, prompted by our assignment to visit SL lands for educators, I traveled to Second Life, and again I felt the same disappointment.

"joannamkay"'s MindMap of Second Life in Education (Wollongong 2009) was very encouraging; looking at the very thoughtfully planned and crafted locations, it gave me hope that there are valid arguments in favor of using SL in education. For me, however, I don't see how SL does anything that other web tools do better: CMS/LMS systems, social networks, social media sharing sites, and so on. Perhaps my resistance stems from being a learner with a low-ranking preference (a "non-preference", if you will) for interpersonal learning. Patricia Glogowski states,
"...using Second Life for educational or other purposes involves a steep learning curve that involves learning how to function in the environment and how to build the physical content. In addition to basic skills, building educational spaces and bringing learners into Second Life requires creativity, time, patience, and innovation. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the content created by residents will be educationally valuable. A further criticism of teaching in Second Life is the misguided pedagogy of using Second Life and other newest technologies to teach in old ways; often it’s the traditional, teacher-centered, unidirectional teaching transferred into a new environment." (2009)

I haven't given up on Second Life yet. Perhaps this is a good challenge: the tables have turned on me, and now I need a good technical guide to help me navigate a frustrating, but nonetheless worthwhile, universe.

Glogowski, P. (n.d.). Digital Technology in Education/Second Life. Wikibooks. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Issues_in_Digital_Technology_in_Education/Second_Life

Wollongong, J. (2009, January). Educational Uses of Second Life 09 [Slides for use in SL and RL]. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jokay/sets/72157612171568581/show