Kathy Schrock produced this very nice video of Lighthouse Learning Island, an island in Second Life belonging to four school districts in southeastern Massachusetts.
Here’s Kathy’s blog post that goes with the video.
It’s quite amazing what they have done. They consider themselves newbies, but they’ve gone way beyond the avatar-bumping-into-walls stage!
Some day we may look back and say, “The first phase of using virtual worlds for learning was duplicating real-life buildings in the virtual world.” (Maybe kind of like, the first phase of using a personal computer is using it as a typewriter.)
But Second Life is, after all, a virtual geography and you have to start somehow and build some kind of structures… Lighthouse Learning Island is pretty impressive.
(Kathy used Fraps to make the video: $37.)
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Dear Tom,
Thanks for the kind words! I had the structures all created and stored in my inventory by spending lots of time in public “sandboxes” learning how to build and just needed the island to place things!
The reason the island looks so “traditional” was to easily get teachers to feel comfortable in the environment and practice what they know in real-life in Second Life. (We have been conducting real-life professional development sessions, not sessions on how to use Second Life.)
My professional learning community of teachers now knows how to teach and use the educational tools in Second Life, and I am about to teach them how to build. I have a feeling, once they start building on their own, their structures will not resemble the ones that my “terminally left-brained” mind developed!
Hopefully their alt-avatars will soon be on the Teen Grid Lighthouse Learning Island!
Kathy
Hi Kathy,
I think building SL structures that are similar to real-life structures makes perfect sense, as you say.
Lisa Dawley, a professor at Boise State University who teaches a college course in SL, makes the same point in this presentation https://admin.acrobat.com/_a768376479/p17101188/. She says that they started out building traditional-looking buildings and then later, as people got comfortable, they started building meeting rooms that float in the air and so forth.
That’s interesting that you built your structures in public sandboxes, kept them in inventory, and placed them when you got your island. That’s a good tip.
Cheers,
Tom
Tom,
Thanks for the encouragement. It has been fun getting teachers started exploring SL. We are now looking to find ways to use SL with our students next year and contemplating a lot of what ifs. Looking forward to continuing the project and seeing where it takes us.
Thanks for the kind words, Tom, about Lighthouse Learning. I am with the Plymouth School District and working in Second Life and on the Lighthouse Learning Project has been very exciting and a great learning experience. I feel very lucky to be a part of this adventure.
Julia Colby