EDUC486, Fall 2007: University of Delaware
A Day in Second Life
Seeking out educational experiences in a virtual world
What did we find?
During fall semester, 2007, 47 senior educational technology students from the University of Delaware entered Second Life as "newbies" to visit islands of educational use. To prepare for our adventure, we spent one hour-long session creating our avatars and learning how to navigate and interact safely in-world. We then spent a second hour-long session experiencing various islands, each avatar visiting one of the following: Genome Island, Info Island, ISTE Island, NOAA Island and ROMA Island. This page summarizes what we saw and thought. Use the tabs above to learn more!
Second Life: What is it?
Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment run by San Francisco-based Linden Labs. The 10 million+ users of Second Life log in as personalized avatars that navigate and interact on the 10,000+ islands. Island content is entirely developed by users, some of whom have made tremendous efforts to develop educationally-valuable spaces.
Why we visited. . .
As future teachers learning about educational technologies, it is good to look toward the future. K-12 students of today and tomorrow will have vastly different understandings and expectations of technology use than we did at the same age. Learning about online environments that future "Digital Natives" may crave will help us prepare for our professional lives.
What we thought . . .
As newbies, we thought Second Life was fun, frustrating, facsinating, confusing, cool and weird at the same time. It is an online environment you really have to experience to understand what it is "good for", and even then, it takes time to figure that out! Once we understood how SL worked, we found many educationally useful aspects of these islands.