Education in Virtual Worlds, Second Life

Summary of Journal on Online Education’s lastest issue

Kerrie Smith, who writes about online communites in Australia for You Are Never Alone, recently summed up the latest issue of the Journal of Online Education.

Smith is taken with the idea that older technologies need not be discarded or ignored in the face of shiny new technologies. One of the articles compares MOOs (MUD object oriented text-based games) to newer MUVEs (Multiuser Virtual Environments) and how the later-era MVUEs are using the lessons from earlier versions. She quotes from one of the articles in the issue (available here; registration required, but free) that talks about Second Life. The authors, Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan, write:

The structure of Second Life allows us to forget that communication is itself part of the constructed space. Rather than merely building a classroom space in Second Life, consider building an environment that reacts directly to student activity in a fun or surprising way. For example, a recent build called “Cancerland: A Thyroid Cancer Narrative by Hilde Hullabaloo” (Mazar 2008) uses transparent objects that visitors walk through to initiate the various phases that move the narrative forward. Walking through these veil-like objects triggers audio clips that become layered voices, situating the visitor more intimately within the personal, medical experience described than merely walking through an exhibit or clicking on objects would allow. Cancerland is alive, as it were, with these voices, each located within its own object, in a way that offers a more rich experience, one that is different for every visitor who moves through the narrative as each moves on her own path.

Smith then quotes the conclusion to this article that reiterates a similar point:

What is perhaps most surprising about working first in the text-based virtual world of MOOs and then in the highly visual, three-dimensional Second Life is how remarkably similar they are; Second Life represents an important step in the development of virtual spaces used for learning, but it is not the first of its kind nor are its problems and constraints unique. While the technologies driving MOOs and Second Life are different, the challenges for educators remain the same.

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