Second Life

Using Second Life as a learning environment

Educating Faculty to Teach in Second Educating Faculty to Teach in Second LifeLife

Who is in Second Life?

• Individual “Players”• Educators• Small Businesses• Large Businesses• Non-profit organizations• Political actors

Why Use Immersive Why Use Immersive Education?Education?

Because in-person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable

Because educators and students need the ability to connect & communicate

Because the learning experience will benefit greatly

Because it simulates BEING THERE.

•Second Life (SL) is a world that tries to reproducethe real one, including the development of rules and even its own economy.

Second Life

•People are represented by their avatars (their 3D representations) and they communicate through chat (voice or written text), notecards, their profiles or Instant Messages (IM).

Heart Murmur Sim aims to providea place for cardiac training where the participants

can visit virtual patients, listen to their cardiacrhythms and make a diagnosis.

The goals of this island are to stimulate scientificdiscussion and reflection upon climate issues and, at the same time, allow participants to engage insimulations that wouldn’t be possible in the realworld.

Figure

National Oceanographic and AtmosphericAdministration (NOAA) island

Educational Institutions

• Harvard University,• Leicester University, • Universidade de Aveiro, Porto, and• Open University (UK), among others,

Have their own educational spaces in SL where they deliver some courses in several fields.

Main subject areas

• Health and medicine• Nursing training• Health and safety training• Physics simulations e.g.

wind turbines• Information science

theory• Art and fashion

• Legal training• Theatre and drama• Computer science

programming• Crime scene training• Languages, esp. Spanish• Midwifery

Webber, 2010

Educational Institutions

The Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society delivers a course to create and present:

• Internet and Web 2.0 tools such as Wikis e blogs.

• The students also meet in-world at Berkman Island.

Education

Virtual Hajj

Muinjij native American island

Teeside Virtual factory

Uncle D story quest on HIV/AIDS

FSU Holocaust

Entrepreneurship and Second Life

• Why Second Life and entrepreneurship?– Second Life is designed with rules that allow an

economy to operate– Players own the items they create; that is, they

have property rights– This has resulted in the development of a vibrant

economy with a large number of entrepreneurs

•With the help of building tools and scripting, shebuilt laboratories where the students can participate in virtual experiences and produce data for analysis.•The students can also interact with experts inGENETICS to broaden their knowledge.

The Texas Wesleyan University has got the GenomeIsland

•Develops professional training inICTs, management, sales and customer support.

•It uses SL for synchronous classes and on-demandtraining through audio, video or podcasts resources

Thomson Netg Training

Co-surfed side by side

Answered a lot of questions.

Traveled to a nursing sim, participated in a conversation, befriended other nursing educators, and JOINED A GROUP!

Webber 2010

Students present their conference highlights, in their Second Life homes in the Educational Informatics village

Second Life is a valuable as one of the environments that can be used

for teaching & learning

and (if you want) you can also have

fun!