Second Life and the Nature of Economics in a Social Environment
Dialogue Spaces
Rad’s picked up on an idea that’s been echoing around — the use of SL as a dialogue space.
The Educator’s Coop group is filled with people who obsess over trying to find ways to “teach” in SL. What they mean by that is “deliver instruction.” In most cases that’s “display a PowerPoint”, “show a video”, or even just, “display some text.”
My problem is that SL is the wrong environment for all those.
In the first place, PowerPoints are almost universally the wrong choice of medium to “deliver instruction” despite their endemic application.
In the second place, the power of SL is, at least in part, in the shared experience of a 3d environment — whether synchronously (together) or asynchronously (one at a time). Reading or watching a video is a two-dimensional activity and there are much better environments for delivering text, audio, and video than SL.
The fundamental issue, for me, is what I’ve dubbed the Tyranny of Synchrony. It comes from the classroom mndset that says, “We can instruct people better in a group setting where I can bring them altogether, tell them all at the same time, answer all their questions as we go.” The fundamental flaw here is that, while that might be an efficient application of instructional resource, it’s not necessarily the application that yields the best learning outcomes.
Myself, I’m getting more than a little tired of the focus on Education in SL, and I think maybe it’s time we shifted to a focus on Learning.
Hey Chade – I’m with you on the Learning part!
its the difference between viewing getting on SL as an act of “digital literacy” vs using what there is there as social communicative (and community) environment to develop understandings of concepts we develop IRL and can engage in at the interface.
So while digital skills and literacies have to happen (like you have to learn the Japanese language and meaning-making within a community of Japanese living their everyday life – to see how concepts you are learning in class play out in a Japanese contexts for instance -but you are not going there TO learn the grammar and the alphabet – neither do you expect that that is what will be presented to you when you get there or at the airport on a billboard…well you know what I mean – I’ll clean up that articulation sometime…)
what is important is what can be LEARNED through engaging secondlife…