Week 5 – Class In Review (26/03)
Mucking around in Second Life is quite fun. Went to class today and the teacher gave a presentation purely in the Second Life environment. I had the chance of using one of the Macs to join in and follow the group of e-learning teachers that were available in the afternoon to give the classroom and any users a tour of the place. It was a very simple process to sign up and open up the application, however, once I entered the world, I found the learning curve to be somewhat very high for the first half hour or so until I eventually figured out how to transport to different virtual lands.
I could see the potential in using a virtual world to develop many different sorts of interactive content or objects, which would enrich a user’s learning experience. However, the initial learning curve may put some learners off and I believe that this sort of virtual environment mightn’t be for everybody. There’s also the issue of having to wait for content/objects/environments to download first before they would function or show correctly. This was the case especially at home despite being on a cable connection where content might take up to a minute or longer to load up.
At the same time, I felt very distracted during my experience in the tour, which was given in class. The reason is because of the figuring out of keyboard/movement functions an at the same time, there is so much to see outside of the lands that was shown to the class. Overall, I enjoyed the presentation and experience, however, I don’t feel as interested in learning about using the platform more for e-learning purposes.
Filed under: ELD
