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
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