We may see some institutional buy-in for professional networking before passing the second life environment onto the students. The social networking opportunities, collaboration and building tools make SL a viable work environment for educational developers. (101 Uses for SL in a College Classroom) Getting students in there will be more difficult. Reflecting on my own experience, educational institutions are very concerned about unsupervised chat between students. In our schools, even the separate student-directed Elluminate rooms not allowed. Full voice where there is no log of activity will be difficult. Further, the we don’t want to cut the students off at the web. Global kids (Global Kids: Best Practices for Using Second Life for Real World Education) describes some networking techniques that extend into internet that go beyond the bounds of the grid into the web. I think the argument needs to be made that while many aspects of technology allow us to log and supervise chat conversations, this doesn’t need to be done. In brick and mortar schools there are long spans of unsupervised time between teachers in RL.
Week 9
October 31st, 2007 · 2 Comments
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1
Lisa
// Nov 3, 2007 at 11:31 am
I’ve heard of other virtual K-12 schools where unmoderated chat is an issue–why? Don’t kids get to talk unmoderated in real life at school. When I asked this question of an administrator once, she told me there were issues regarding kids talking suicide, etc., and a teacher not being aware.
2
jpitcher
// Nov 7, 2007 at 3:02 am
I know. It seems very silly, to be brief. I think few things are at work here:
1. Because it is possible to moderate, the schools feel accountable.
2. The students have been in a bubble for two long and there is a lot of fear concerning breaking into the bubble w/ unmoderated chat
3. Nobody really knows who the “kid” is. It could be an adult in the house w/ the account. Unlikely, but when your goal is 35,000 students, the law of averages makes me think its a possibility.
Still – these kids are talking. They have an underground. Just one email address has to sneak through and then the kids have a point of contact. They have their mySpace pages and etc, etc. The teen grid could provide a much safer forum. I think it will happen but it will be slow. Language studies have a lot of potential to get the ball rolling because its so easy to see the benefits and its an easy sell.
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