Response to Jerry Helms Posting on Second Life

This post is in response to my classmate, Jerry Helms blog post [http://jerryhelms.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/tutorial-review/].

I too like using Facebook for connecting with family and friends.  However, I too am on the fence about using it for an academic environment.  Also, Facebook uses information posted on profiles and group pages to determine what ads are displayed for specific users.  There is a great article on this published by Simonite (2012)  about how Facebook is data mining our activity and posts for advertisers.


With regards to Second Life, I agree with Jerry's assertion that technology issues are widespread for Second Life users.  In addition, we both agree with Petrakou (2010) that Second Life is not capable of hosting an online course because of the both the technical issues of the virtual environment and the skill level of the students would be problematic.  Moreover, there needs to a primary source/location for the online course (i.e., LMS) because the Second Life virtual environment does have the faculties available to be the primary source/location (Petrakou, 2010; Warburton, 2009.  In most universities, a learning management system (LMS) like Moodle, Blackboard, ANGEL, or Drupal are used as the primary hosting location for online courses.  In my professional experiences, instructors are allowed to link to those external resources but all the primary course information (e.g., syllabus, assignments, discussion/blog postings, and quantitative based assessments that employ multiple-choice, true/fase, and fill-in-the-blank questions).  However, I disagree with Jerry's statement that the undergraduate population would be the population that benefits the most from Second Life.  In my professional experience, Second Life has been employed by professors that teach graduate course and they use Second Life for a specific synchronous learning actvity.  Moreover, Second Life is being employed for problem-based learning in Medical education (c.f. Spooner, Cregan, & Khadra, 2011) at universities in Austrailia,

References

Petrakou, A. (2010). Interacting through avatars: Virtual worlds as a context for online education.
                  Computers and Education: An International Journal, 54, 1020-1027. Retrieved from
                  http://www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu


Simonite., T. (2012). What Facebook knows. Masschusetts Institute of Technology-Technology
                  Review. Retrieved from
                  http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/


Spooner,. N., Cregan,. P., & Khadra,. M. (2011). Second Life for medical education. ACM eLearn 
                maginzine: Education and technology in perspective. Retrieved from
                http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=2035934


Warburton, S. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers
                 to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational
                Technology, 40, 414-426. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00952.x

Second Life's Strengths and Limitations

When it comes to Second Life, I love/hate relationship with it.  I love the ability to upload presentations and the fact that the real-time virtual environment makes synchronous learning activities easy to facilitate.  However, I agree with Petrakou (2010) that a virtual environment such as Second Life does not have the capacity to be its own learning environment.  Also, virtual worlds have design barriers that need to be addressed before K-12 and postsecondary educators can employ their full capacity in the classroom (Warburton, 2009).  In my experience with Second Life, it is great for having graduate students and faculty to meet online in a dedicated virtual space restricted just to those individuals or to guest lecturers.  Using Second Life can replace the need for a physical location for a meeting or conference.  My last love for Second Life is its access restrictions for people under the age of 18.  For a while, they were some concerns about people under the age of 18 accessing boards labeled as 'Moderate' or 'Adult Only'.  More information is available from the Second Life web site.

Now for what I hate (dislike is probably a better term for it) about Second Life.  First is the cost(both financially and time) to build these dedicated worlds.  For example, is one of creating a replica of campus buildings, it can take up significant amount of time.  Also, I do not like the exchange rate for Linden Dollars.  Linden Dollars are used for creating buildings & landscapes as well as for buying clothes and skins for your virtual avatar.  The last thing I do not care for is how slow the virtual environment can be when there are several avatars in the same area or a lot of people are logged in in to Second Life at the same time.  This lag-time can be really frustrating.

References

 

Petrakou, A. (2010). Interacting through avatars: Virtual worlds as a context for online education.
                  Computers and Education: An International Journal, 54, 1020-1027. Retrieved from
                  http://www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu

 

Warburton, S. (2009).  Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers
                    to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational
                    Technology,  40,  414-426. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00952.x



My Reflections on the Tutorials

First let me start by saying that I am a big fan of blogs. I have always encouraged instructors to use in their courses. Blogging tools like Blogger and Muzy are great alternatives for discussion boards. In addition to blogging for academic purposes, I developed a blog to post my journey to earning my doctorate. Not only did I find it helpful as means to really state what was on my mind (similar to a journal), but I believe my blog would help others who are on the road to earning their doctorate. Here is the URL for my doctoral blog: http://bostonirishdave.blogspot.com/ 

The tutorials I have found most useful were Jing, Google Bookmarks, and Wikis. These tools have usefulness in both higher education and private industry. Google Bookmark is a great way to build a list of URLs/references for an online course. Then the exporting feature allows the user to save it as a webpage. From this webpage, you can view the source code and 'copy and paste' it to the HTML editor within a learning management system or Dreamweaver.

Jing is great! Its Camtasia without all the 'bells and whistles'. Also, I found Jing excellent for recording screen shots and recording step-by-step procedures. I have used Camtasia for years in developing online courses. Though to be honest, I have a preference for Camtasia's competitor, Adobe Captivate. I have been using Wikis for several years. I like wikis they allow users to work together in groups. Also, wikis have a history fucntion so you can see what group members have been contributiing to the wiki and who has not.

As far as the other tutorials, I really do not see how they could be used in an online course. Muzy is a great blogging tool for K-12 teachers and maybe for first year college students. However, I do not see how effective this tool is for adult learners. In addition, this tool would too much time and it would be too specific for use in private industry. I found aMap to be difficult to use from the view of instructor and instructional designer. Also, one can accomplish the same thing using shapes feature in Word and PowerPoint or by using Visio. Fotobable is nice for sharing photos for being personal use. With the exception of Art History and History/Archeology classes, I do not see this tool being used on a larger scale for online learning.The one question I have is when do we focus too much on the technology and not enough on the instructional design of an online or hybrid course? That question has been posed to me by private industry instructional designers when they are talking about higher education instructional design. That is, higher education is allegedlly too focused on the technology and not enough on the the instructional design process of developing an online or hybrid course.