Second Life experiments

Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which you can move around freely with your Avatar, a figure that represents you in this world, interact with others and build complex three dimensional objects. It is called a serious game and there has been a lot of hype about it. So, last year, I signed up to find out for myself what it was all about, after hearing that educators had discovered it for teaching and learning purposes.

I have to say, I was rather disappointed because of the poor graphics, the empty places and the steep learning curve. I had also no idea how to find those educational places. Most places I managed to find were deserted. The first conversations I had with “residents” were also not very promising. 

It took a couple of months for me to give it another try. I learned how to move around watching some Second Life tutorials. And after attending a life guided demonstration during a six-week EVO BAW08 course, I finally started to understand its significance for education. I was intrigued by the possibilities it offered for distance and language learning.

I started to collect teaching tools and to learn more basic SL skills. An online teacher friend from Mexico, Maru suggested to meet once a week to learn and share our experiences. This was a great motivator for me. Shortly afterwards, we were joined by Alicia, a teacher friend from Uruguay. 

Then, in May 2008, I created the Wiki as a logical consequence to have a repository for all the ideas, news, links and tools that we talked about in the meetings. The core of the Wiki, however, is the “lesson plans and ideas” section. During the SLanguages 2008 conference, many SL teachers pointed out that lesson planning for SL takes much more time than in Real Life and participants were also asking whether there was a platform to share these. So, we decided to open the Wiki to more educators.

Since then, it has generated a lot of interest among SL newbies as well as experienced SL educators, also from researcher at some universities who are interest in SL’s role in education.

The life in-world meetings take place every week at SLT/PDT 11 am (GMT 6 pm). If you are a language teacher interested in Second Life and would like to join, contract me.

Here is a slideshow which Maru created with the text I had written to demonstrate one of the educational tools in SL, the SpeakEasy HUD: