Sage Adams

“[Second Life] experiences can provide opportunities for teachers to observe and assess students’ understanding of concepts based on their performance.” – Weusijana, Svihla, Gawel, and Bransford.

There seems to me three major obstacles to using Second Life successfully for education:

1. Administrators (and many faculty) think the virtual environment should ‘resemble’ the classroom environment.

2. Most people who are new to the medium believe Second Life is ‘just a game’ and do not take educational opportunities that occur in the environment seriously.

3. Second Life is technologically inaccessible for many users.

The first two obstacles are ‘merely’ misperceptions of the technology and how digital learning can or should take place. These misperceptions are why research happens and why instructional designers have jobs.

More specifically, administrators and faculty who think virtual environments should resemble classroom environments are lacking in imagination and possibly direction from others who know better. In addition they are confusing Second Life with a simulation of real life; which it is not, or at least should not be. Of course it’s name ‘Second Life’ does make it sound like a simulation and won’t help instructional designers sell it to administrators and faculty. Maybe the creators of Second Life thought it WOULD be a simulation and had no idea of its educational value – that’s ok, it still has been proven to HAVE educational value is used correctly. So instructional designers will just have to work harder to persuade.

The second misperception is that Second Life is just a game and is not to be taken seriously. This, I think, is a completely natural reaction. If all you’ve seen or heard about Second Life are pretty screenshots or flying around naked, what else are you to think?

This, again, is a misperception that instructional designers simply need to correct by SHOWING application of learning in Second Life. We need to dig into repositories of examples of educational use of Second Life for applications of learning showing students using the book and lecture knowledge they have gained to form connections and create new understandings. I am convinced that once they see this happening educators will mostly have gestalt moments of understanding about this technology.

Of course once we’ve educated our constituents on the perceptions they should have about Second Life we have to help them actually create useful virtual environments for their students and that is time-consuming; which leads me to the final obstacle, which, I believe is the most significant and has nothing to do with instructional designers.

Second Life is a massive program. Not only does it take awhile to download, install, and setup, but the process of creating an avatar you are happy with is time-consuming and requires some getting-used-to. Many students will not have a computer capable of running Second Life or the bandwidth to make running it enjoyable. For this reason, occasionally, having an expert run a Second Life demonstration IN A REAL CLASSROOM while students give directions is often the best approach. This is great where it is possible, but as a distance education instructional designer I have to say this dismays me because I don’t see how it would be possible to actually use Second Life in a distance-based course at this time, unless of course, you were willing to invest a great sum of money for development only to have a smattering of students occasionally use the virtual environment. I think we can all agree that is not going to happen.