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Are you an educator seeing positive results from using Second Life? We’d love to hear from you! Please join us in this Education Forum thread to share your answers to the following questions:

  1. What educational organization do you represent?
  2. How do you use SL in your educational endeavors?
  3. Most importantly, what positive results have you seen from using SL?

From direct conversations, press coverage, and the like, we’ve heard of a number of organizations seeing positive results using Second Life for education, but we’re always eager to hear more and we hope you’ll add your voice to the thread.


Thanks!

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I started researching 2nd life, while I was in grad school.  Although I did write articles regrading it, I wanted to research it more.  Thus, I am now a professor of technology and am working towards 2nd life and its online collaboration being a part of my doctoral research/dissertation.

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I have been teaching stage design at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. In 2008 I decided to include Second Life in the student's experience as a developer tool. So I asked them to all join, which they gladly did. They had no difficulties learning how to use it within less than a day. My idea was to develop a stage design based on objects built with cardboard covered with printed surfaces, which I thought would offer a good way to combine Second Life and the real stage later. 

 

For starters I built a model of the actual hall, where the stage would be built in real life, a convention room of the university. Now everybody could get a realistic idea, where things would really happen, once they were developed in Second Life. The purpose of the stage was defined as a presentation for other works the students had made in that semester. 

 

They developed a theme with a steampunkish design and started working on it online in Second Life. The big advantage of the method was, that not only everybody could practically work on the objects simultaneously and communicate about it, but it was visible how it would really look, before efforts to build it would be carried out. The result was a virtual model that looked exactly as the later built with cardboards and prints. Even some simple animations were included in the design, later translated into electrical fan action. 

 

The other big advantage of Second Life was that the textures the students used in the virtual model could be used directly for the prints later. So once the model was finished, all that had to be done was calculating the real sizes and start a lot of printing. Then the prints were glued on cardboard, cut out accordingly and put together exactly as planned in Second Life. 

 

The result was stunning: The real stage looked exactly as the model in Second Life. The students even added some rotating parts and real steam, illuminated with green light, that made it seem almost virtual. 

 

They also developed a presentation show, where they included the Second Life theme. The moderators started as real persons on stage, then vanished in the steampunk machine they had built and appeared on a big screen as their avatars to continue the show with a prefabricated video, made in Second Life. There also was a virtual interview with their professor. It was all very well done and the presentation counted as one of the best ever performed on that university.

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  • What educational organization do you represent?

The Learn English Network 

 

  • How do you use SL in your educational endeavors?

Many different ways.  We run several sessions in SL for ESL / EFL learners.  

When reading with students we are able to immerse them in the world of the book.  (So far we have read Dracula in a castle  / 20,000 Leagues Under the sea in the Nautilus wearing diving suits / The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a ship (with an albatross) / The Ballad of Reading Jail in a jail (with a rat and a gallows) / Wind in the Willows along the river bank / Jane Eyre in a classroom and mansion house)

When teaching lower level vocabulary we utilise the holodecks / animations and scripts and have taught - crime vocabulary by running a scripted murder mystery session / restaurants in restaurants / banking in a bank /  cookery in a kitchen (the list is endless)

We take trips to other sims too - The Jungle - The Zoo - The Theatre - The Nightclub etc. etc. etc.

We run drama sessions that utilise all of the above, and allow the students to play with their identity and appearance.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Unfortunately we have to run our sessions on someone else's land (I wish SL were cheaper).  

 

  • Most importantly, what positive results have you seen from using SL?

As a teacher, I have lots of fun.  Teaching about pizza? Be the pizza.  

More importantly, our students tell us that they have gained confidence.  They are able to remember what they have learnt more easily, because they are able to interact with rich materials, and I'm able to show them why a cook isn't the same as a cooker.  :)

We actively encourage them to go exploring and meet some of the interesting people around SL, which stimulates conversation and often results in them writing about their adventures (with no prompting from us).

In a series of interviews we conducted, no one had a negative thing to say, apart from the occasional technological glitch, and the odd griefer. 

 

 

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Greets Xiola Linden, 
first let me say sorry, for my poor english. Native language is german.

I am a educationalist.
In Second Life I am since the middle of 2008 the owner and founder of the "Freie Bibliothek Pegasus", a free library with now about 500 books in german language and about 30 in english language. 

It is the really biggest uncommercial library in the "german language community".
My whole SIM is uncommercial, only art, creativity- and charity - projects are there.  

The books are of different genre. Novels, fairy tales, philosophy, psychology, and much more.
It is no "mainstream project", sure.
But "Books are friends - books are teachers!"  :-)

Only in SL - marketplace I "selled" 12240 books until now. Free and full perm. 
And several more in other ways. 
I am happy about it and I enjoy to enrich Second Life with my activities. 

German Universitys and Gary Zabel, PhD teaching in the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, holded lectures at the "Freie Bibliothek Pegasus" in SL.

And some similar activitys happened.
SL ist great- really!
:-) 

Much luck in all worlds!

Greets
BukTom Bloch
aka
Burkhard Tomm-Bub, M.A. 
- Educationalist, germany -

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I've had the pleasure of participating in a wide variety of projects utilizing SL for education, sometimes going to extreme, impractical lengths to pull it off. :)

I first used it to design a space called Biome (special shout out to Carolyn Lowe!), a rather sci-fi meets modern art build whose white exterior  would reflect the color of the sky as the day progressed. It served as the online meeting space for graduate students who were scattered across the midwest as they were teaching science to high school students (I think).

I later designed an interactive model of the human larynx (and eventually inner ear) under the guidance of Jim Zeigler. The models negated the need to have students risk taking the real life replicas home and breaking them or never returning them, or the course being too large with not enough resources to be shared among all of the students in an efficient manner. Virtual objects are easily replicated and customized, and we eventually implemented an interactive quiz system, as well as a model that showed how all of the cartilage and muscle components of the throat interact as you breath, swallow, adjust the tone of your voice, etc.

The project also used some fancy textures to mimic a photorealistic clinic with bots whose responses to questions were tied to a podcast server. This allowed students to interview virtual patients and hear different speech disfluencies, with which they diagnosed the client and developed a strategy for helping them overcome their disfluency. We also received permission to use Dr. Joseph Sheehan's concept of an Iceberg of Stuttering to transform a metaphorical concept into a literal learning space, with various platforms and cues that allowed you to know a lot about a subject just by its visual structure, without needing any prior knowledge of the subject that that visual was conveying.

I've also designed a lab safety simulation template with Brant Knutzen of Hong Kong University. The scenarios allow students to take a quiz that familiarizes themselves with the surrounding environment and key objects, activates a problem, and then forces (and grades) the participant's ability to work through the safety issue they are suddenly dealing with.

Now, I primarily design highly interactive, fully customized virtual labs for biology and chemistry to bring real-time science labs to students spread out across rural Alaska.

I've also used SL to teach computer programming concepts to people totally green to the discipline.

Aside from some rather onboxious limitations, I find that allowing students to interact in a virtual world where every object is "hot" so to speak allows for an unprecidented level of interaction and collaboration. We take full advantage of virtual reality, and occasionally even change some of our lab processes in reality after designing a better workflow for our virtual labs.

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Cypris Chat

 

cypris-logo-small.jpgWhat educational organization do you represent?
I am an adjunct English professor at a few universities in Japan.

How do you use SL in your educational endeavors?
Originally I thought this environment would be good for my students to be able to practice speaking in English with people from around the world. Since their motivation was focused more on their phones than in playing in a virtual world, I decided to turn it into a research project. Over the years I have recorded dozens of successful activities and learning experiences. For me personally it also helped me to become a better teacher by giving me the opportunity to teach outside of Japan as well as to try new materials.

Most importantly, what positive results have you seen from using SL?
In 2008, I started a group in SL called Cypris Chat (Wellston region.) It’s an English learning community with hundreds of members coming and going from all over the world. Over the years we have seen total beginners become fluent English speakers simply by being active in our free community. It has been amazing to observe. We have also heard countless compliments and even many who say that this experience has changed their lives.

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To answer your questions:

1.  In the past, I have used SL with my RL students in one way or another at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan.  However, I have been most active in the SL Cypris Chat EFL community.

2.  I started bringing in my RL students for some simple task based learning activities in 2008, but firewalls made this difficult to do on campus.  So I had students use SL for interview projects and presentations.  However,  most of my "educational endeavors" in SL are related to my volunteer work in the free Cypris Chat language learning group.  As part of my doctoral dissertation research, I have been a member of this group (and now Cypris Chat Japan) since December 2008, teaching lifelong and independent learners English in SL.  Although I have conducted various activities (all primarily in voice chat, btw), I now currently teach/write "typical" English lessons (vocab, dialog, comprehension check, discussion - the usual) and lead field trips in different sims (which are basically giving directions activities) weekly.  I also now lead a "common mistakes for Japanese learners of English" activity in Cypris Chat Japan.  You can find a link to a paper I wrote on a reading circle activity in Cypris here: http://journal.jaltcall.org/articles/7_1_DuQuette.pdf

3.  Though I have yet to complete my research, preliminary and/or anecdotal findings related to positive results include:
  a.  The benefits of a community center like social group to maintain interest and motivation to study
  b.  The benefits of using an avatar (once familiar with the interface) include increased confidence
  c.  Several students who came in false beginners and now speak at an advanced level, with Cypris their primary mode of spoken English practice
  d.  Acceptance of students with physical or mental disabilities
  e.  An environment in which EFL learners can practice their English with both native and other non-native speakers from around the world
  f.  Cost free education

I could go on and on.  You can check out Cypris Chat on Facebook or in SL (just to be clear, I am a volunteer teacher and researcher there, not the owner/manager).
https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyprischat/?fref=ts

Jean-Paul DuQuette
SL: DukeVan Acker

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I an a private teacher in Second Life. My husband and I have been working on our teaching business on and off since the fall of 2009. We curate the Alvarado Zingrone Institute for Research and Education in Madhupak on the mainland at the east end of the Chilbo Education Village.

We have recently been running a MOOC on the WizIQ classroom about our field, and hosted a students' discussion group every Sunday for six weeks, now the group meets once a month in our Learning Center. I am also involved with two colleagues Pionia Destiny and Nellie Homewood and we ran a MOOC about teaching in Second Life and other virtual worlds. We will be doing that again in April. I manage the building for Nellie's teaching business, Integrating Technology for Active Life Long Learning (www.integrating-technology.org) which trains folks in English as a Second Language, in Moodle skills, and in the use of the WizIQ teaching platform. This year I'm also a member of the social committee for VWBPE and we're expanding our freebies for educators in the Chilbo Education Village.

Second Life has been a huge part of my online teaching professional development through ISTE and VSTE and through the example of Fleep Tuque who was one of the founders of the Chilbo Community on the mainland. I also took Spanish from Eugenia Calderon at the Institute Espanol in Second Life from 2009 through 2014, and am hoping to be able to take that up again.

I make money as a small landlord and from donations from the discussion groups I lead, and am planning to expand into one on one SL skills, especially those related to teaching. SL has been very important for me in a number of ways and has helped me work in online teaching for the last five years or so through communities, conferneces, and professional development opportunities inworld.

It's been an extremely good experience for me, and my intention is to expand my educaitonal activities as I go along.

 

Maggie Larimore

 

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From what I have read here, it sounds like there would be a significant interest in a forum section for those using/learning English as a second language. Are you listening, Xiola?

I would also recommend to participants the use of a great free browser plug-in called After The Deadline, which is compatible with the forums rich text editor (at least on my own setup: Firefox and Chrome  but not IE) and not only identifies spelling errors, but has an excellent non-Microsoft attitude to grammar and style recommendations

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This is Asst. Prof. Tuncer CAN from Istnbul University, Turkey. The Faculty of Education, English Language Teaching Department and Computer Education and Instructional Technologies Department have been using SL for online lessons so far. In addition last term we used it as ground for Machinima. We came out with the idea as we did our SIM on SL. www.teacheranima.com reflects our work. We trained our pre-service language teachers to train them with 21. Century digital skills of editing, material design.

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Forgive me for a related question, if your educational institution uses mainly Apple computers- do they work as seamlessly as using a PC ?

 

I ask as there have been some issues recently where , for many users on macs performance has suffered ( chat lag bug etc).

 

SL has brought so many educators together from all over the world. Just hoping all can use this platform equally , regardless of hardware.

 

 

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We discussed education in Second Life with RL educator & Miss Virtual Puerto Rico in SL, Silly Avro, on the Drax Files Radio Hour today. Interview starts at around 23 minutes in. Yes, the show title is provocative for a reason but please take note of the great depth and practicality Silly approaches the matter: http://draxfiles.com/2015/02/27/show-57-dancing-with-the-power-points/

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We have been conferencing on this topic for almost 5 years now. Link below. Lots of good international discussion and some very inetresting papers in our archives.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/education/experiential-learning-in-virtual-worlds/

Imprtant to note, our call for poposals is still open if you have interest. IM me in-world - Dirk Grantly.

 

1. I represent Athabasca University in Canada

2. I do use SL as noted above.

3. I have been examining the platform and the people in SL, not so much as using it as a medium.

Dirk

 

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The history of education in Second Life is a very long one having roots in the earliest days of the platform after it was first launched. In the peak period of second life educational usage (2007-2008), there were more than 800 universities, colleges, and other schools represented in Second Life on both the main and the teen grid.

There are numerous sources of first-hand peer-reviewed research that have been directly attributable to professors and universities that have used the platform, not only for the basis of delivering educational programs, but also for researching the effects that virtual environments have on subjects as varied as psychology, law, medicine, architecture, arts, culture, agriculture, border security, business, economics, project management. The list is very long and very varied.

In the early days, many of these types of histories were documented as part of the Second Life Communities Conference. This real-life conference ran for about 4-5 years, the last one being in 2011, and brought together people from the worlds of education, business, law, music, fashion, design, and machinima to celebrate their creative endeavors. The conference included opportunities to discuss issues directly with the people that were responsible for developing much of the in-world content, especially educators.

In 2007, the first Second Life Best Practices in Education Conference took place during a 24 hour period which left a resounding mark on the educational community and the approximately 1200 people that attended.

In 2009, the conference was rebranded as the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference which has run every year since. It has been part of our VWBPE mandate to document as many key success stories as possible through lectures, video, workshops, exhibits (posters), and journal publications.

The conference itself is supported by a number of sponsors and in-kind supporters. In addition, there is a small army of somewhere between 80-120 volunteers which help support an equal number of presenters, artists, machinima directors, and, of course, educators, by putting on a 4 day conference followed by a 3 week series of follow-on explorations and workshops.

Each year the conference attracts between 2500 to 3500 people, from over 60 countries, interested in the use of virtual environments for teaching, collaboration, art, science, music, and design. A collection of our archives is maintained on our website at http://vwbpe.org/vwbpe-archives where people can find links to our publications (2010-2014), video archives (over 160 hours), slideshare presentations (57), and various awards and credit acknowledgements. Further, many of these archives cross-link with other materials which showcase the diversity of the community as a whole through other social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and more.

It is not just about positive results for education, but what education does to enable people to be creative, innovative, and collaborative. Those tendrils extend well beyond the simple act of teaching in itself, and encourage all the subsequent content that is derived by the act of showing someone what they can do with a simple square prim.

Our conference this year runs from March 18-21 with a number of virtual explorations and tours in the weeks following. This conference isn't just for educators but for anyone interested in knowledge, community, and sharing. If you really want to see what the community, both education related and non-education related, is doing with Second Life, this is one of the core ‘go to’ resources to find out.

-- Kevin Feenan
SL: Phelan Corrimal

 

 

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For six years since 2009 the University of Edinburgh has offered its distance education and remote new graduates the option to graduate in Second Life, alongside the real world ceremony in the McEwan Hall on Edinburgh's campus. Such Virtual Graduations have taken places in several schools including Education and the Vet School. The facilities have won an EDUBlog Award and appeared in the media and press. Some new graduates have even graduated in real life and as avatars in Second Life simultaneously to join in the celebrations in both communities.The Principal of the University of Edinburgh, Prof. Sir Tim O�Shea, himself an educational technology innovator, properly introduces the virtual graduates to the McEwan Hall audience, who can see the virtual world Venue@Vue facility on a large screen in the hall, and the new virtual graduates involved in the ceremony appear in the official programme.

http://vue.ed.ac.uk/graduation.html

http://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2014/11/28/2014-virtual-university-of-edinburgh-graduation-school-of-education/

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The Rocca Sorrentina Project (2011 to present)

Since 2011, a community of educators and interested private individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds and locations have been involved in an ongoing immersive learning experiment on the Rocca Sorrentina sim and adjoining Bay of Naples, which is currently sponsored by Brown University.  

Initially, principal sponsorship of the project was provided by the Missouri Humanities Council (MHC), which had an opportunity to take over a high-quality historical 18th century environment that was conceptualized and largely built by CapabilityTodd Elswitt.  MHC staff and board leadership saw potential for developing this remarkable build into what would become a laboratory in which researchers from diverse disciplines could work together in exploring the ways platforms such as SL can be used by teachers and museum education staff.  By further developing and expanding the build, and generating associated learning activities, MHC hoped to engage with educators, students and life-long learners, to promote the humanities though virtual worlds, and to help us learn more about how people acquire, share and assimilate information and ideas in these new creative spaces. 

The island environment, under the name “Rocca Sorrentina,” is a composite, historically-plausible representation of a southern Italian coastal town on the Bay of Naples.  The build is set in the year 1785, when that part of Italy was a popular destination  for 18th century tourists on the “Grand Tour.” The project features a continually evolving historical environment with elements such as a re-creation of an Enlightenment-era “cabinet of curiosities,” fortifications, harbor, shops and homes, and a Palladian-style villa.  The sim also has an entry and orientation area with changing exhibit galleries that present temporary shows not just about history and literature topics, but also creativity and artistic self-expression in virtual worlds.

Over the course of the last four years,  the Rocca Sorrentina community has evolved under the co-leadership of museum consultant and former MHC Director Geoff Giglierano (SL: Aldo Stern), and Professor Kathryn Spoehr, Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences at Brown University (SL: Serenek Timeless).  With ongoing management and programming assistance from other residents and friends of the project – including groups such as the Alexandrian Free Library – the project has flourished and the build itself has grown in size and complexity.  Community members – some of whom are scholars and educators, as well as interested members of the general public – have used this virtual space as a platform for experiments with programming that focuses on the Enlightenment and the history, arts, and material culture of the 18th century, and the era of the Grand Tour in southern Italy's Kingdom of Naples.  These programmatic elements have contributed to one of the more interesting outcomes of the project: in effect, everyone engaged with Rocca Sorrentina -- including residents, visitors, and managers  – are both teachers and students.  

Each month, the galleries and historical environment, along with the associated programmatic activities, attract a diverse audience of both newcomers and regulars, some of whom are students enrolled in SL-based educational programs and many others not.  Some explore and enjoy  the island and then move on, while others are drawn in and become repeat visitors and active participants in what one community member has described as “collaborative self-directed learning.”  Through the discussions and programs on the history and literature of the era, historically-themed social events, exhibit projects, and  living history roleplay scenarios built on topics that have ranged from the beginnings of manned flight in balloon ascensions to a yellow fever epidemic, sim residents and visitors are encouraging and assisting each other in experiencing and considering life and ideas in another time and place.  Professor Spoehr has compared it to “Montessori for adults, in which there is learning through play, reinforced by lessons at teachable moments.” 

The project has proven extremely cost-effective, thanks, in part, to the education discount from LL, and  the fact that the community members and friends who create content and organize programming — including the community leaders —  do so as volunteers on their own time.  Furthermore, the community itself contributes to help underwrite expenses though donations, commissions on merchant sales, and inworld residential rentals.  

In 2104, MHC was making adjustments in its priorities and Brown University has stepped up to continue the project.  To date, the project has provided the participating educators with insights on how environments like Rocca Sorrentina have considerable potential for facilitating informal cooperative learning opportunities for both students and  life-long learners.  Members of the museum profession who have been involved in the project also have seen opportunities for training interpretive staff and prototyping exhibits.  There is however, more to be learned, and the community leaders hope to continue the experiment with the ultimate goal of sharing the outcomes with colleagues who have an interest in virtual worlds technology for educational purposes.

 

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I'm a professor at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.  I originally came to SL in March 2007 as part of a Virtual Worlds Faculty Initiative at Penn State University.  I teach operations management and procurement.  I was among two faculty and one librarian who participated in the pilot program on our campus.  I thought that SL would shorten the learning curve of my students in understanding a subject that most do not have an intuition about....unlike marketing, for example.  I was correct.  The use of SL improved students' understanding of Operations Management concepts because they experienced them.  

I taught evening Master of Business Administration students at Penn State.  The courses were compressed into 7 weeks, so I had to move up Bloom's taxonomy from acquisition of knowledge to application of knowledge in a very short time.  SL  has been extremely helpful in shortening that learning curve.  Students were able to be immersed in the economy of SL and learn Operations Management concepts by comparing and contrasting how those concepts manifest in a virtual environment vs. the real one.  They interviewed SL business owners and presented their findings in-world.

At Indiana University, I teach undergraduates and they have managed businesses as well as researched the differences between virtual and real businesses.  They also present their findings in-world.  I've made the exercises more "fun" for them in that I give them 10 sites to visit and report on.  This assignment allows them to become familiar with the space prior to working on the main assignment.  The feedback from students has been positive.  One student told me that took my section because he had heard about the assignment.  

SL has allowed me to assist a colleague at Tuskegee University to expose his e-commerce students to virtual worlds. Each year, his students and mine conduct a virtual negotiation.  My purchasing students would normally have to be the sellers as well as the buyers.  This way, my students can experience virtual negotiations as the purchasers, while my colleagues students role play the sellers.  I've also done this with a professor who was teaching a sales management class at Indiana State University, which is 1.5 hours from our campus. It has helped all of our students to understand and experience that business can be transacted at a distance.  

I've presented on virtual worlds in higher education and business at academic conferences  nationally and internationally and at the SLCC in 2010. I wrote one of the first articles on teaching in SL for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.  

Positive results are not always readily apparent.  In the short term, my students learned Operations Management at a deeper level because they learned by doing.  They learned how to collaborate in teams with people they did not know. They learned to express themselves in writing so that they are understood.  And, more importantly, they learned that learning never stops.  In the long run, my hope is that their view of what "education" is will broaden and that they will embrace different modes of content delivery.   

For me and my students, the existence of a virtual economy to use as a laboratory for studying operations and other business disciplines is what makes SL the place for us.  I know many educators left when the discount was removed.  We did a "back of the envelope" make vs. buy and decided that we couldn't afford to hire a system administrator to manage a server and sim-on-a-stick wasn't robust enough for what we need.  The support we get for the cost of the island would cost us 3-5 times as much to provde on our own.  Our in-house IT folks would have to come up to speed on VW and it's not a high priority item for them.  More importantly, the economy would be non-existent.  I do take students to other VWs, but their economies are not as robust as SL's.  I can also teach them first hand what it's like to run a business in SL since I also have my own island with a jazz club.  

SL has many vibrant and active communities, the education community being one of the largest.  I am very happy to see the renewed interest in educators as an important Linden Labs customer. 

Linda Sautereau

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:) i don't represent any orgnization in RL by the way but i want to share my Sl experince and how Sl Fixed my RL

As english is not my first language and i joined SL since 2009 i didn't know any thing about english just abc , I was talking with my sis and she said say any word in english i said ok your husband died lol she said omg i said what died means loving u right she said don't talk in english again , well SL teaches me how to speak english and am learning Spanish now in SL by the way :) SL gave me work and income in RL Sl fixed my shy personality now i love to talk with PPL without being shy or any thing ... first Sl was a game for me i didn't respect it and said come on ppl it just a game now SL for me is Life a great life SL gives me "Life , Hope , fun , education "what my RL schoole didn't gave me " SL built my RL .. Thx for creating great life for less luck RL person Hugsss

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Dream Realizations, an educational support services nonprofit, has been designing far-reaching mathematical remediation content corroborated by recent independent neurological findings and immersive educational research. Traditionally, the numeric symbols are introduced along with the alphabet. We believe that the introduction of numeric symbols is premature and prevents children from seeing the patterns that various numbers make. Furthermore, this early introduction prevents seeing the beautiful metapatterns of polynomials, which are easily recognized when various quantities are represented in different base systems: subQuanned. Our own research is showing that 100% of all participants are capable of subQuanning (the instantaneous perception of very large quantities). We also believe the metapatterns of recognizing polynomial structures, enhanced by subQuanning, will also occur in 100% of all participants.

We are currently in the design and programming phase of novel math curriculum required to facilitate in-depth, rapid learning via 3D visualization in virtual worlds. Our world is Second Life. Although traditional methods of math instruction are just as viable virtually as they are physically, there is a plethora of innovative methods only possible in a virtual world. Second Life allows us to bypass the constrictions of space, time, materials, and gravity in physical space. Can you imagine a classroom of students building numbers with thousands of centimeter cubes each? We teach and examine very large quantities in subQuan as Segs, Squares, Cubes, Segs of Cubes, etc. This ability to recognize metapatterns instantly in multiple large quantities lays the foundation for polynomials and calculus. That's the forest before the trees or math at the 10,000 foot level interconnecting recognizing numbers (pre-school) to seeing metapatterns (Algebra) to deriving equations (Calculus) all in a very short span of time. Only in Second Life!

Right now:

We also use this space for the prototyping of many other programming possibilities like iApps, web designs, and we are currently developing a fully immersive environment that allows a learner to walk through our whole curriculum taught by sQ's in an alien environment. Second Life rocks!

In development:

 

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  • 1 year later...

As an instructor for the Arizona Maricopa Commity college district I jumped at the chance to attend a SEcondlife use in education lecture at the college.  One of our instructors demonstrated SL to other teachers.  He was a language instructor and created a Spanish village in world.  Here the students would speak to spanish speaking SL residents to practice and talk to each other. 

Myself I have been active in SL since 2004.  Mainly social with my Scifi group  here is a machinama about us.

http://www.youtube.com/user/IshelwoodStudios#p/a/u​/1/L0decTQwS50

In game we have a wonderful Academy.  We teach our recruites, about our divisions, sim rules and basic Fleet command policies.  they even graduate, only after passing their, courses.  Each course including a role play course has a interactive quiz that is automatically scored with our orbs. 

The members has made our group using their talents in scripting, building and organizaing.  The machinama above was done by one of our members.  Not to mention we are all from around the world, many of them I have worked with for over 10 years.

 

Fleet Admiral Katrina Bixby of GalaxyFleetCommand  at www.galaxyfleetcommand.com/blog

 

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