Week 4 - Blog Posting #7 -Second Life

My personal experience with second life is much like that of Taylor who said in her blog, "I don't see the awesome." I agree with most of what Taylor said, I to found myself very frustrated by the platform and the difficulty with both navigation, as well as communication in this collaborative environment. I have not spent a great deal of time in second life, maybe about 6-8 hours, I feel this should be enough time with a well designed collaborative tool to get through some of the learning curve and see some productive use of the tool. This is not even close to enough time in second life for me to even figure out the basics. With this month’s course I have used quite a few new web 2.0 tools, with many different collaborative uses and I have found all of them useable with the first couple hours of playing with the tool. I feel that students have far too many demands on their time to spend hours and hours just getting started in second life. I have difficulty getting my students to try new things that are very simple to use and second life is anything but simple. To be honest most of my time in second life is spent standing around wondering what to do next.


I want to add to my discuss for second life further by saying, that I see it as a dangerous place for students and even adults to spend time. The reason I use the words dangerous is second life has a huge amount of very sexually explicit avatars running around. Just last night while I was on second life for this assignment I ran in to a avatar that was completely nude. I understand that these are cartoonish character but this one did not look very cartoonish. She was very life like and very nude. As I continued to explorer, on Explorer Island (a PG location according to it's description), I kept running in to one after another of either partially nude or very scantily dress avatars. I feel with the growing problem of internet pornography, to expose my students to this kind of environment is at the least unprofessional/inappropriate and could be very dangerous. If as Bruner says, “Some concepts of social learning theory are applicable to education taking place in Second Life - observational learning, imitation, and behavior modeling (Bruner, 1990; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), then we should really be asking, is this the kind of behavior that we want our students imitating, and is second life the best place for our students to get good modeling, because what I saw was not good modeling.


http://academicwanderings.blogspot.com/2009/09/week-4-blog-post-7-second-life.html

Bruner, J. (1990). *Acts of Meaning*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campusin3D.com (2009). Second Life. Retrieved July, 2009 from http://www.campusin3d.com/en/second-life