Module 9

Whilst there are a multitude of ideas presented in Module 9 I am going to focus on the emergence of 'online worlds' such as second life.

In 2008 I attended a conference at ACU Strathfield where a German University professor presented the idea of using online worlds in an educational setting and showed some amazing videos of how his university was using Second Life to teach its students. I feel that online worlds have a great potential for certain subjects however, there are a number of issues firstly such as cost, Internet speeds and security that schools need to take into account. Moving away from these issues for a moment though, what was shown at this conference amazed me. This university ran its entire Engineering class in Second Life. The university had purchased an island where they built a virtual replica of their university and lectures were presented online using the Professors avatar whilst students 'attended' classes with their avatars (they may have been at home, school or anywhere with the net). They completed all of there assessments in Second Life as well, creating dockyards and the mechanics needed to allow effective unloading of shipping containers as an example shown.

Now whilst this is a high end example I am excited by the possibilities this allows for teachers in the classroom. Unfortunately when my school looked at getting Second Life the cost was simply to much however, in the future this will hopefully become less of a problem. Being able to teach virtually and have students accomplish work in a virtual world is something that I look forward to implementing in the future.