I work in adult education genre in an institution that is one of the biggest in its class in the Europe. I belong, among several others, in the team that deals with
- open and flexible learning
including self and group studies in the open learning places and platforms with the aid of technological innovations of eLearning - new possibilities of using eLearning tools
collaborative, interactive, immersive, edutainable, ...
Once upon a time there was...
So, how it all begun. Well, I had red something about the Second Life virtual world in some articles beforehands, but when the particlar one was published in the leading newspaper of Finland I really got involved with SL. It happened in November 2006.
The article was nicely written and it surely influenced me a lot. I wanted to try the system personally so that I could see if it would be for any use in my work or leisure time. I must say I found it quite fascinating and, as its immersivity, a bit addictive also. It was easy to meet other users, get friends, and chat with them in visual and functional three dimensional virtual world.
Breaking out from the world...
After six months use lots of my best SL friends had to stop logging because of several reasons; mainly because of real life issues such as getting marriage, giving a birth, lack of time, sickness and so on. I tried to continue my journey in the world for a while. It just did not feel so interesting anymore without my network, avatars and real friends also. Of course I continued "meeting" some of them by online messaging tools and by e-mail but there was not that same cohesion between us anymore after we once left the world. Well, one of them, a wonderful portuguese lady, I met in Spain in the spring 2007...in real world! So it is not always only virtual. Sometimes SL meets reality.
The gap
I think I found the gap: virtual world is not just the world itself but the social interaction. In my case it was much about social collaboration with other users. So without that social network I used to deal with I found it meaningless. So I quitted.
...and rebooting in world again
After five months total break I got involved again. There were quite much articles in all over the newspapers and online magazines: other people had found SL too. And not just poeple, also some institutes ie. universities that had started to use SL as a tool to achieve better their goals that needed high level collaboration but the face-to-face meetings could not be possible.
Mr Gartner made us floating
Among other reasons our librarian brang out her growing interests after she had heard about the Gartner's research. I decided to open my mouth and told about my experiences in SL. We decided to get some more information about SL for future purposes. We have always been interested in new ways of learning in our institution...here was one that waited to feed our hunger.
About this blog
So here we are: in the blog typing something about SL and it's educational possibilities. I decided to start one so that other people could also get involved (if they ever wanted) easier without going through the same difficulties in the first few steps.
Goals
There are some goals in the research work (project). The main goal is to get known of Second Life (SL) virtual world platform for possible future purposes. Sub goals are:
- To make an easy-way description of SL and its nature
- To solve out how does SL work:
- Is there any rules of conduction
- What kind of interaction there is between users - How SL could be used as educational purposes
- To search and get to known of the educationally qualified learning areas in SL
- Is there any
- Why learning areas are good or bad
- What does it need to create one - To be prepared if there might be really any value of using SL in our institution or in my own carrier
- What are the ways to prepare to the future of using avatars in education
- What does it need to get involved with a group
- How much does it cost; Is there any possibilites to get fundation - To write this blog as documentation and later on use it when writing a report about the research work for possible future purposes
