Second Life has many things going for it and contains limitations as well. Among the most important is the opportunity given to the visitors to experiment at being not themselves, without imaginative restrictions, thus giving that way a boost to morale that many times exist in regular social routine. Another positive aspect is the variety of content available to visit, see, and hear for many areas of interest. In addition, provides a level ground for all citizens to create, built, and grow through experience in individual interests. Last but not least, educational application for younger citizens, a couple more advantages are the creation of an area reserved for teens and provision to them with an opportunity to do tasks to which their participation is limited due to gender as written by Sanchez, J. in the Library Technology Reports:
Fifty high school girls from the Austin area were
asked to design and build a project in Teen Second Life
to examine gender equity in gaming and computer science.
The girls formed teams of four and were tasked with
creating a project that addressed gender equity in games
within three and a half days. None of girls had ever used
Life before, but following a curriculum we created
for them based on my college-level course, they were able
to quickly develop building skills in order to complete
projects.
Personally I am still learning to use SL and with practice and cooperatively experience will eventually become a user of SL and apply the knowledge in the foreign language classroom.
As I am about to start listing negative aspects of SL, I found Global Kids virtual worlds and I read the following statement from Henry Jenkins an MIT professor:
We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality. And I think that is the exciting things about the kind of work you are doing at Global Kids. It is both grounded in the virtual space and the real space. You are talking about real things, that touch real people. And you are asking people to bring what they learn here back into their own communities to make a difference. That is one of the reasons why I really believe in what Global Kids is trying to accomplish.
http://www.globalkids.org/?id=30
Speaking about negative aspects in general it provides a false sense of being someone you are not, ask for donations more than anything else, not mentioning the speaking limitations that exist when in public. Regarding educational cons can be listed in no particular order: technical difficulties, time consumption, and world expectations pose as serious problems for students using SL as a class tool. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=8&hid=102&sid=dece778d-938f-4641-a915-a57008f176c7%40sessionmgr4
Like everything else in this world that has to do with technology it can only get better, more efficient, and upgraded to serve its purpose for digital natives and digital immigrants alike.
Games like World of Warcraft show us that you can have MMO software that allows for large groups of people to use a single program together, but still have the program run reasonably smoothly. Only when (if?) SEcond Life gets to that point can it be truly useful.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't believe this will be accomplished by Second Life and suspect it will be done instead by a competitor, possibly using some sort of monthly subscription fee to pay for continued development.