Grauniad feature on digital students. Includes a piece on education in Second Life, and comes not that long after a piece in the same paper claiming that Second Life was kind of dead in a piece titled “Why’s it called Second Life when there’s nothing alive there?” – which annoyed many of the UK education community active in SL.
Also just out, JISC report on Serious Virtual Worlds… More on this below.
I spotted a couple of typos (that isn’t the correct meaning of MOO – See Bartle’s ‘Designing Virtual Worlds’ for the definitive acronyms) and a frustratingly broken link – just where is http://leducation.wikispaces.com supposed to point? But I nit-pick. And someone who accidentally creates two copies of his profile when registering at the Coventry Serious Games Institute is hardly in position to nit-pick… and then to discover that there isn’t a button to delete the profile. Oops. :-0
Sara de Freitas clearly thinks that virtual worlds have a big potential as an enabler of change in higher education:
This implied inversion of the norms of education does of course at its heart offer a direct challenge to our understanding of how we learn. Structure for learning is no longer posited through knowledge acquisition. Instead we have the real capability to offer very practical engagement and social interactions with realistic contexts, to offer conceptual experimentation and to create role plays that facilitate for example different interpretations of historical events and more textured use of information (eg overlay of data and images) to scaffold learning.
The report is 2MB, and certainly worth reading – if you’ve been actively working with virtual worlds for a while, you’ll probably find a lot of familiar information and resources, but you’ll almost certainly find some worthwhile new nuggets, ideas, references and resources.
