Later today, the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference is kicking off in Second Life . So it is really rather ironic that we should have a situation crop up on the eve of it that really highlights some of the worst practices.
An unnamed educator showed up to one of the various user-run Second Life Question and Answer sessions for new users. Not a bad thing on the surface, Q&A sessions are really useful for people with all sorts of Second Life questions. Unfortunately it goes downhill from there.
Our educator showed up an hour before his class to find out where he could take his students, apparently in the expectation that he'd be able to quickly locate detailed, tailored and ready-to-consume information for them about teaching a very specific and technical set of subjects in virtual environments.
Partway through the 90 minute Q&A session, the educator vanishes, but returns in the last half hour, suddenly flooding the area with his whole class, who had so far had little actual experience with Second Life, no idea what they were doing, and little idea about their purpose in being there. The remaining 30 minutes of the session was a mish-mash of unproductive cross-talk and likely yielded little or no positive outcomes for anyone present.
This doesn't just constitute poor virtual environments education practice, but poor education practices generally. Our erstwhile educator had no plan, no preparation and didn't prepare his students for the materials they would be using. That's multiple major failures right there. It's like rushing to prepare for an English class at the last minute, and grabbing a stack of books in Tagalog.
Whatever the eventual fate of commercial and non-commercial virtual environments are likely to be, there seems to be no doubt that they will remain a tool of educators, well, for the foreseeable forever, pretty much -- but at the end of the day, they are still a tool like any other, and no educational tool constitutes a magic-bullet for learning on its own.
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