Intro to Education in SL

Fresh from our coverage of the Mary Washington University Faculty Academy, and in anticipation of the first International Education Conference in SL on May 25, we are looking at education in SL this week, beginning with the current Terra Nova post on teaching and learning, and an earlier Terra Nova post on the Trinity University student-designed SLeuth.

Ian Lamont interviews Rebecca Nesson, of the Harvard university father/daughter team of Charles and Rebecca Nesson who taught CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, a joint Harvard Law School/Harvard Extension School course that was presented jointly in Second Life.

Mike Sellers points to a recurring issue for the use of virtual worlds as teaching and learning tools:

In many virtual worlds its possible to get a hundred or more people together in the same place, which creates great dynamics for chatting, trading, fighting, etc. In SL, it’s all but impossible to get more than a dozen or so people together unless they ... disable their more intricate user-created content. What this means is ... the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.

The MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Grants list is an interesting context for education in virtual worlds.