We had a Medical Education Day at work, and I was perusing some posters and saw that someone has done a project on using Second Life as an educational tool.
We've heard a lot about the exciting potential here, but I was interested to see an attempt to evaluate the success. The poster presented a study in which an educational module was presented in Second Life and a survey assessed how well the material was learned and how well the participants liked the format.
They got positive results for both measures.
The way in which this study was presented made me realize that I may have been thinking about Second Life in a limiting way.
I've remained interested in it, but have kind of written it off as something I'm personally thinking about at the moment since I haven't signed in in a long time. I've been thinking of it something like a game or social network, where if you're not at least semi-regularly involved, you're not really taking full advantage of the medium.
But you could also think of it as a platform for education, like a course management program or a web conferencing site. You don't have to log into an online classroom or a web conference site on a regular basis--you only sign in when you've got a conference. And that's perfectly fine.
Maybe Second Life makes a good online environment for teaching and learning, without participants needing to be involved with it outside of that context.
Hmm.
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