2nd Life: Perhaps Not.

Dear Parents,

I don't think I would use second life for pedagogical purposes. A major reason is for digital safety. That there's no telling what kind of people are on second life from the outside world, and I'd want to prevent my students from both cyberbullying and cyberpredation. This might sound like a silly reason to not use it in the classroom, but both of these are very serious issues, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for putting my students in either situation.

Another more practical reason as to why I wouldn't use second life in the classroom is that it is a sandbox game, an open-world game. While exploration is a great thing, especially for learning something, it must be acknowledged that open-world games consume A LOT of time from a player. Just look at anything from Warcraft to Runescape to Oblivion and you will see what sort of time these games consume. Pair this up with students' attention spans (which I hate to admit, but it's true: they often have difficulty paying attention), and you've got an activity on your hands which will literally take weeks to complete.

Now, I myself am (or at least have been for years, if not at the present moment) an avid player of various kinds of video games. I know that some games would be more useful and realistic to use as pedagogical tools than second life (for example, Myst). The issue that comes into play, however, is student control. The point of using second life would be for students to explore a virtual world, choosing where their education takes them. This works similarly to the task system in Oblivion, or any sandbox rpg (or morpg); you have various tasks which you (or your character/ avatar) could work towards, and it is up to you to either accomplish or ignore them. This poses a problem, as for a classroom, all tasks must be accomplished.

Another problem arises with the task system as well: suppose your students have a main task (or a few) which they have to accomplish. Suppose they put off the main task in favor of a plethora of minor tasks (side-quests). As a gamer, I would always follow the route of side-quests, which is why it would always take my forever to complete a game (I'm looking at you, FFIX). It is probably more fruitful to follow a side-quest than to ignore it, because side-quests often give you rewards which make the main quest more easily accomplished. So if students have a main task to follow and are easily distracted from it in favor of accomplishing minor tasks, they may be right to do so, as it would ultimately give them a more meaningful experience in terms of learning. The problem with this is that there wouldn't be enough time in the classroom.

Sincerely,
Daniel de Sa',
ELA Teacher