I keep seeing this demand for proof that SL works for education, for distance learning, etc. It’s a perfectly valid and absolutely necessary demand. I just don’t think it is one that can be met yet, it’s getting the cart before the horse. When so many educators are just wrapping their minds around the medium, so many IT staff are evaluating the kinds of skillsets needed, software applications, hardware needs, and how to support faculty and students using it, and administrators are trying to understand how this is different from the media portrayal of shoot-em-up-video games..

There’s constructive criticism and then there’s just plain criticism. The truth is, IMO, we just don’t know yet. No one knows. We won’t know until all of the pieces come together, until the early adopters make guinea pigs of their students, until we systematize metrics and validation criteria, and until we can conduct research over a period of time.

9 out of 10 educators I know in SL are still in Phase 1: Moving In mode. One or two or a handful of people at their institution are just looking, learning, exploring, experimenting. They are struggling to get support from department heads, deans, and admins. They are learning about the limitations and possibilities of this particular platform. They are starting to write grants, attend presentations, and gather the resources necessary to just get started.

So give us a break. Some of us are doing our best to give you the hard data you’re demanding – we want it too! It just takes time.

Thank you for your comments and questions. Yes, I agree, I too want to know whether SL works to teach things that we normally have in a classroom or web learning site, or professional development, for that matter. However, I think that question itself is clearly under-operationalized. That is why we need to have learning content developed for Second Life before we can say anything.

I accept your criticism of my emphasis on the adopter profile of universities, but you yourself ask “did any universities do it?” (provide compelling learning content in SL). We cannot have this both ways. Either we are looking at a technology problem or a people problem here (of course, we are looking at both). Right now we have a predominant people problem, not so much a technology problem, though that is there as well.

The questions I was trying to answer for my student had to do with what is coming next and what can we expect from distance learning. Well, our next step is to build that educational content. Only then can we measure the degree to which learning will have achieved.

I also agree with your emphasis on the question as to whether (and to what degree) we can measure learning in Second Life, whether virtual worlds work for education. I take learning to be “transfer” which is the basic model in much of the research.

I do like the question of synchronous or asynchronous use of SL due to technological (and psychological) factors. These are the type of question which could be operationalized, and measured.

Yes, yes, you are correct, we need data. But first we need content. There are reasons we don’t have content just yet, but that content is being developed. Time for me to get back to that content development!

Cheers, Jeff McNeill aka Donnagh McDonnagh

And…I’m disappointed. I hardly think the problem is lack of mandatory retirement and old fogies. I think there are a lot of young people and not-so-old people who might question what the value-add is for virtual worlds and teaching.

It’s hard enough organizing metrics for learning in real life, of course, although there are things like “the Regent’s exams” or “the state-wide curriculum” or “the Iowa test” in the US, for grade schools.

How do you measure whether people actually learn (or teach) anything in SL? You don’t seem terribly interested in that question, but only interested in various software and hardware discussions — talking about, learning about, teaching about the technology itself. It’s very redundant and recursive.

I’d like to know whether SL works to teach physics. Or literature. Or geography. Or social studies. Or psychiatry (and please, spare me the usual memes about that sim where you can see what it’s like to live in “the world of the schizophrenic” — we need to get beyond that). In other words, do virtual worlds work?

Are they too distractable? Does the facility with which people can IM each other or go AFK to other windows undermine the effort of teaching? Can people learn in real time given the difficulties of sim performance, lag, hearing distances, Wednesday patches, etc. or is this medium perhaps better for asynchronous learning?

If you can’t get much text mounted on the notecards before the lag or can’t even hold text, if there isn’t any real functional whiteboarding (there really isn’t, not like a RL whiteboard with real easy collaboration), then…what CAN you show? I mean, we imagine all these replicating DNA or flood waters and emergency scenarious possible to make visualized in SL in 3-D streaming colour but…does anybody do this? (No fair mentioning Svarga or NASA — did any universities do it?)

I guess I’m looking for a lot more data about this, and not finding answers. Most importantly, has the virtual world of distance learning reduced the high cost of education and increased accessibility for those without means?