The Exciting Conclusion

This was our last week in ETEC 648D and final projects came to a dramatic conclusion. Class met one final time in SL to present our final projects (instructional design module in SL). I must say I was very impressed with the projects the other three teams came up with.

My personal favorite of the bunch? Tuy, Lisa and Nadine's Spanish language fashion showcase project! One of MY personal things I love about SL is the fact that it is worldwide and you get to see, meet and see things from all over the world. During my time in SL I was just fascinated all how world-spanning it is as I met and befriended folks from as far away as Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Germany in Europe, Peru and Brazil in South America and Australia. The potential of the tool to connect and learn more about others different from us is something so key to our ever evolving global economy.

As an educator the implications of this for usage in teaching of foreign languages become very apparent. I was just blown away at how the girls set-up their SIM. It was such a cool experience to be able to walk through the fashion gallery they made, click on a piece of clothing and hear the Spanish word for it said out loud. It was VERY impressive, or as we say en Espanol, "muy bien!"

And that basically sums up my time here in ETEC 648D revisiting the fascinating world of Second Life, "es muy bien!"

Fin

Second Life FAIL?

Probably the biggest observation to come out of this week's adventures in ETEC 648D was the big audio problem we had in SL during Wednesday night's class.

I will always tout SL's power and potential in education for use in simulations, experiential learning and as a potential DE platform, but Wednesday's episode highlights one of the major problems with SL at this point in time: as an "outsourced" solution you are at the mercy of Linden Labs network problems.

Unlike an in-house hosted system for delivering content such as a Sakai, Moodle or self-hosted instance of a tool like Elluminate or a Wimba, Linden Labs is hosted and run purely by Linden Labs so if Linden has a network problem or schedule maintenance on your parcel during your class time you are completely at their mercy and have no control whatsoever. This is in contrast to hosting your own services on your own servers in which case you still retain some control over things.

Fortunately for us, Peter is a very tech savvy individual (as you'd expect from a guy with a PhD in CIS) so we had a back-up contingency lined up and implemented very quickly. For instructors who are less tech savvy and had nothing else to fall back on I shudder to think of what a waste and frustration a night like Wednesday would have been.

I suppose Wednesday can best be summed up by the old adage of technology, "Technology makes our lives easier -- when it works."

Final post next week :)