If you completed the survey to the left, I would love your comments and elaboration here.
I learned about Second Life from, of all people my spin teacher. Now Biray is an amazing teacher and very, very adept at staying current with instructional technology so I thought I should find out about this social network. So I rushed out and 6 months later, here are my thoughts and questions. I would love to hear what you all have to say.
In addition to the recommendation by Biray, I learned about social networking in the Graduate Certificate Program in E Learning and Online Teaching. Den, Susan, Datta Kaur, Kay and Lisa are accomplished facilitators and online mentors and, in one form or another, they have all pointed out the possibilities of social networks in the evolution of learning communities.
So, as an economics instructor, I became intrigued by the costs and benefits of these social networks and the impact that they may have on teaching and learning. Below find a representative sample of what my indepth use of google revealed.
I would say that, in order to build effective learning communities educators need to be aware of the boundaries of their discipline, some learning theory, some instructional design, a bit of assessment and some awareness of how their students interact and in what environments their students interact. All of these will inform how we develop and delivery instruction and what approach we use to facilitate our classes.
Further, if we see any value in constructivism, we need to be aware of, to quote Biray, "where our students are". If they are in social networks - Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, then perhaps we need to know a bit about these networks.
After all, our learning communities are not about us, they are not about our disciplines, they should be about how learners access and integrate content in an authentic and relevant manner. We should remember that authenticity and relevance are jointly defined.
So, here they are, a few sources about Second Life.
My next post may be about teaching economics on youTube.
University of Cincinnati Second Life Learning Community (UCSLLC)
The University of Cincinnati Second Life Learning Community will evaluate the feasibility of using Second Life, a 3D multi-user virtual online platform (3DMUVE), in online instruction for the purpose of distance learning and to enhance traditional face-to-face courses. Our major goals are to share and develop resources as we examine the use of the Second Life virtual environment for instruction, pool our talents to build reusable learning objects and spaces in Second Life, and ultimately create a web-based resource for other educators that describes our process, the results of our experience, and our recommendations for its future use as an instructional tool.
At colleges, real learning in a virtual world
They may be college teachers and students, but they're also pioneers — exploring strange new worlds that exist nowhere on Earth. That's because their classes and field trips take place only on computers, using an online digital world called Second Life.
Some 60 schools and universities have set up shop inside Second Life — most in the past year. They join a population that includes real-world business people, politicians, entertainers, and more than 800,000 other "residents" of the virtual world.
Getting an Academic Life in Second Life from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Colleges around the world are opening virtual campuses in Second Life, a three-dimensional, colorful environment that can be accessed via a computer. One of those campuses is New Orleans Island, which was built by Merrill L. Johnson, an administrator at the University of New Orleans. What is the appeal of Second Life, and what kind of classes does the university hold there? Is Second Life a useful distance-education platform or just frivolous entertainment? Mr. Johnson will answer those and other questions.
Unintended Consequences
Doug Simpson's weblog of research on the collision of law, networks and disruptive technologies.
Virtual worlds are increasingly becoming subjects of serious research by law and economics scholars as well entrepreneurs. Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a virtual world called Second Life, with the help of several embedded "avatars" living there, and comparing their reports with the thoughts of leading scholars in this emerging field.
Academic research on Second Life
Although you may not realise it, Second Life has a huge group of educators active within it, many of whom have been active for some time. The process of writing academic papers however, is long and sometimes painful. We are starting to see these papers appearing dotted around the place:
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2 comments:
Greg,
I’m first going to say you didn’t have the option…I’ve used a social network as a LMS in a class (last spring, Contemporary Cinema, MySpace…it was interesting). But poll aside, I’m going to say that I don’t think combining SL and social networks is an appropriate move at this point in time. Or…in the textbook that Susan and I are writing, I’ve just made the splitting point between synchronous online communities (MUDs, MOOs, SL, WoW, etc.) and social networks (which tend to be asynchronous). Yes, they both do the “networking” and “community” thing, but let’s at least acknowledge that one set is primarily async and the other synch and when it comes to teaching and learning those differences matter.
As for the folks who say “social networking is useless to education,” they’ve clearly never spent time in a social networking site (surprise, surprise, right?). Ultimately the “good” social networks are the ones that allow
1. individuals to construct a robust virtual identity, and
2. multiple types of communication.
Once you realize that social networks basically break down to robust multi-modal communication tools, how can you say they are not useful for education?
Finally, I think many educators hear “MySpace” and “Facebook” when someone says social networking. However, many of the other “big” sites that we talk about are also social networking sites: delicious, flickr, youtube, etc. I’m currently enamored with Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/) as a social bookmarking site because it not only does all the stuff delicious does; but it is even more social with groups (can you say “class” = “group”?).
Do I have an overall point to this ramble? I guess just that social networking is much more complex than the naysayers want to give it credit. But again, surprise, surprise!
Shelley
From 26econ
Social networking traffic growth model
Examining the empirical evidence on social network traffic, I have formulated a new theory: Social network traffic grows exponentially for about two years, and then follows a random walk.
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