Reflection on “Second Life: K-20 Educators Exploring Virtual Worlds by Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez (K12Online07)

Reflection on “Second Life: K-20 Educators Exploring Virtual Worlds by Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez (K12Online07)

What an incredible and thorough presentation by Kevin Jarrett, Sylvia Martinez and other contributors. I really appreciated that Kevin and Sylvia presented using VoiceThread and will add my own comments to the posting soon. The presentation discusses with balance the positives and negatives of the virtual world and serves as an excellent primer for beginners.

I haven’t really spent much time in SL, and haven’t been there in a while. In the beginning of my discovery I was enthusiastic about the possibilities and still have hope for its future as a platform for learning and teaching. So far, however, I must admit that SL seems more cumbersome than other tools I use for professional development, and at present, there really is no way to bring my elementary students into such an environment. I am hopeful and have been keeping an eye on alternatives such as Edusim.

Annette Lamb’s examples towards the end of the presentation are exactly what I pine for with such an environment: involving students in the creation and visualizing books they read, visiting different cultures, engaging in historical simulations and reenactments.

Sylvia brings up an excellent point in the presentation that SL is indeed a company to make money and because it is a company, we really have no control over the future that SL will take. What we really want from this virtual environment for students and teachers to interact, may not be from Second Life but from some other platform. Many people believe the Web 3.0 will be carried out in virtual worlds and perhaps SL is a rough draft of better possibilities to come.

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