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Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching.
British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3): 414--426 (2009)
Аннотация
Second Life (SL) is currently the most mature and popular multi-user
virtual world platform being used in education. Through an in-depth
examination of SL, this article explores its potential and the barriers
that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting
to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching. The context is set
by tracing the history of virtual worlds back to early multi-user
online computer gaming environments and describing the current trends
in the development of 3-D immersive spaces. A typology for virtual
worlds is developed and the key features that have made unstructured
3-D spaces so attractive to educators are described. The popularity
in use of SL is examined through three critical components of the
virtual environment experience: technical, immersive and social.
From here, the paper discusses the affordances that SL offers for
educational activities and the types of teaching approaches that
are being explored by institutions. The work concludes with a critical
analysis of the barriers to successful implementation of SL as an
educational tool and maps a number of developments that are underway
to address these issues across virtual worlds more broadly.
