Second Life

www.secondlife.com
Well, I'm still trying to get my head around this 'second life" bizzo. I had never heard of it until today, and I am still trying to figure it out. This is what wikipedia has to say:


Education in Second Life
Second Life has recently emerged as one of the cutting-edge virtual classrooms for major colleges and universities, including Harvard, Pepperdine, Ball State, New York University, Delft University of Technology[32] and AFEKA Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering [33]. Second Life fosters a welcoming atmosphere for administrators to host lectures and projects online, selling more than 100 islands for educational purposes, according to a New York Times article.[34] The article quoted Rebecca Nesson, an instructor at Harvard who brought her Legal Studies class to Second Life in the second half of 2006. "Normally, no matter how good a distance-learning class is, an inherent distance does still exist between you and your students," she says. "Second Life has really bridged that gap. There is just more unofficial time that we spend together outside of the typical class session." Joe Sanchez, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin evaluated the use of Second Life in education in an interactive qualitative analysis, finding that once students overcome the technical and interface difficulties with Second Life, they "indicate a preference to social learning activites and find it enjoyable to interact with other avatars while learning in this space".[35]

So basically this is using the principals of Vygotsky (learning through social interaction) to enhance/create/promote learning through ICT.