Peer post comment on Second Life

This comment is in response to Diane's blog at http://sdriggsbee.wordpress.com/.

I liked reading Diane’s blog about the merits and the problems of Second Life. I also found her description of the residents and avatars interesting because they are the ones that create the environment of the Second Life. As someone who has not had an opportunity to use or participate in Second Life, I find my knowledge is limited to this week’s readings and the links posted in Digital Learning Environment website. The concept of Second Life, to me, is both exciting and overwhelming. It is exciting because of the synchronous interaction with others in the same environment, and it is overwhelming because of the amount of preparation that seems to be associated with using this program, both by the students and the instructor. At its very core, for the purpose of educational value, the idea is to foster an online community; the virtual counterpart of a real, traditional, classroom. In order to create this community, Palloff and Pratt (2007) point out that students and instructors are required to establish a presence and that the importance of creating a social connection online “almost supersedes the content-oriented goals for the course” (p.14). One of my main concerns with creating an avatar or an online persona is whether the creation is a true creation of the user’s personality, or is it a creation of how the user would wish he or she to be. Can the creation of an online persona become problematic especially if the role playing supersedes the academic exploration? What if an avatar does not “behave” like its “real-world counterparts” as Warbuton characterizes it would do (2009, p.418)? This could also be a hindrance in “building trust and authenticity” which Warburton points out, is “critical to interact successfully as a group (2009, p.422).

 Another concern is that not all students will automatically want to, or feel comfortable creating and using an avatar in a virtual world. Someone like myself who is naturally suspicious of putting myself “out there” in any form, I would not be able to make full use of all the features on Second Life. Like you, I too like to use power points with some animation in both face-to-face and in the online component. I think video-taping a lecture and putting it up as part of the instruction method could also be an important part of online instruction.

On the flip side of these concerns, I do like the use of Second Life in instructor training workshops as discussed on the website http://www.guide2digitallearning.com/teaching_learning/10_ways_use_avatars_education. While I think that Second Life does offer many possibilities to further online instruction, I find that this method requires an inordinate amount of preparation and practice prior to its actual implementation.

References

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online communities: Effective strategies for the

virtual classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Warburton, S. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the

barriers  to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3), 414-426. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535,2009.00952.x