UK Education in Second Life
July 26, 2007 — Daniel LivingstoneJohn Kirriemuir compiled a snapshot report detailing the use of Second Life across UK further and higher educational institutions, on behalf of Eduserv. You can get the report here.
As I was out of the country when John was collecting the data, I believe that I have Scott Chase from Strathclyde University to thank for mentioning me to John - and thus ensuring that Paisley got a mention in the report.
This relates a little to recent comments in the SL Educators mailing list about the incompleteness of the list of educational institutions in Second Life. I think I’ll add looking at that to my to-do list…
July 27, 2007 at 3:22 pm
It appears that the only way this report could be ‘sexed up’ to make 2nd Life look good was to say the results were “inconclusive” (and use a hard to read font).
When will people finally admit that this Elephant is somewhat anaemic?
July 27, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Lots of “plans”, not much “doing” here.
July 28, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Andy - is it Second Life in particular or virtual worlds in general that you are objecting too? If you don’t think that virtual worlds have a future in education, I’d be interested in knowing why you think that.
John’s report was a snapshot view. Didn’t look like he was trying to come to strong conclusions.
Sylvia - yes, lots of plans, not huge amounts of doing. I’d say that is a fair assessment.
There are many institutions and individuals interested in exploring, evaluating and researching the use of Second Life and/or other virtual environments for education. Only a small number have made significant headway to date. It does all take time, and John’s report does highlight in particular some of the institutional & other barriers that exist that can further slow down work in Second Life.
Some of the earlier/ongoing projects have already published reports - Schome in particular is worth a look. See http://www.schome.ac.uk
July 28, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Hi Daniel,
I did write a blog about my take on Second Life used for K-12 teacher professional development. http://tinyurl.com/2dujj7
Some of this is relevant to higher ed, some not. I think higher ed is much more likely to do interesting things in SL, but the current state of the platform is going to hinder progress. As everyone has pointed out, it suffers from interface and technical problems that may or may not be solved in the near future. It’s much more likely that some other platform will come along and be the new darling of the media. So it’s hard for me to see why institutions would put a lot of money into this proprietary system, especially when the system is owned by a company whose interests are not aligned with educational goals. I hope that the work being done is transferable and generalizable as much as possible.
July 30, 2007 at 2:59 pm
In general, I dont think organisations are spending large amounts - taken together, yes, but individually no. There are exceptions. I know of one university at least which has used Second Life primarily for marketing - and spent on the order of $30,000 for their island. At the other extreme, I know of some who’ve taught several classes and still don’t own any land.
I also hope that as much work as possible is transferable and generalizable.