How do virtual 3D Second Life classrooms compare to WebEx for distance learning?
I don't know if this educational topic is allowed on this but here goes... I do online math classes with video conferencing and a shared whiteboard. I'm trying to find out if doing virtual classes in Second Life with avatars offers any benefits. I've read up on this topic and the reports vary. Anyone have any experience going to a "class" in Second Life? cs
On 4/14/2010 9:58 PM, chris@seberino.org wrote:
I don't know if this educational topic is allowed on this but here goes...
I do online math classes with video conferencing and a shared whiteboard.
I'm trying to find out if doing virtual classes in Second Life with avatars offers any benefits. I've read up on this topic and the reports vary.
Anyone have any experience going to a "class" in Second Life?
Disclaimer: I work for Teleplace (www.teleplace.com). In my experience the biggest difference between giving a class in an immersive environment vs. WebEx or similar is that "you're there". An immersive environment takes you full attention, between navigation, pointing, voice chat, webcam and interactions there's no way to "hide" or to distract yourself playing Freecell without the others noticing. An immersive environment like Second Life or Teleplace also gives you multiple focus points. People can look at and work with different content in the same space; as the teacher/coordinator you get a good feel for where people are at, just by looking at the clusters of participants, and you can direct attention by asking people to look/interact with a particular part of the environment. And when they're there they're there, and if they're not coming you'll know, too. If you haven't tried it, invite a few friends and just run an experiment. Use Second Life or if you want to get a notch up use the 30 days free trial at Teleplace. It's worth trying it with people you have regular remote meetings with to see if it makes a difference for what you're intending to use it for. ObPython plug: The Teleplace extension API uses Python and we've given Python classes to customers with an interest in extending Teleplace. Cheers, - Andreas
Before 2nd Life there was Active Worlds, including some set aside for education. Friends and I built a virtual world and held conferences there. Bonnie de Varco built a virtual high school. We sent in our avatars at appointed times, looked around and talked. You'll find a screen shot here, plus links that still work, even after a decade: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/lsystems.html (no avatars shown -- a point of view shot, facing north. Bonnie and I overlapped when she was chief archivist for the Buckminster Fuller Institute. A lot of our content was related to polyhedra, which made a virtual world in some ways ideal, as we could move amidst the very subject matter we were yakking about. Gerald de Jong was developing his Elastic Interval Geometry and we'd meet about that as well (meeting in person was more satisfying though -- for all its bells and whistles, 2nd Life etc. are no more than a multi-user doll houses). Having attended a Howard Rheingold lecture recently (he's made studying Cyberia (i.e. 2nd world i.e. cyberspace) a lifetime focus, starting with The Well) I am sensitive to the fact that many people just stumble around in Second Life and find it far from intuitive. I think one needs to provide a strong use case up front, to recruit willing participants. My example, of wanting to make Polyhedra a focus, or L-systems, or other art, and of wanting to pioneer the shared doll house experience with a virtual worlds anthropologist (Bonnie), might serve as a basis for future meetups along these lines. Kirby Citations / annotations: http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/portfolio.htm (mentions Virtual High School) http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-mobs.html (see 3rd from last paragraph) On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 9:58 PM, <chris@seberino.org> wrote:
I don't know if this educational topic is allowed on this but here goes...
I do online math classes with video conferencing and a shared whiteboard.
I'm trying to find out if doing virtual classes in Second Life with avatars offers any benefits. I've read up on this topic and the reports vary.
Anyone have any experience going to a "class" in Second Life?
cs _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
participants (3)
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Andreas Raab -
chris＠seberino.org -
kirby urner