An Inital Proposal

I have some serious reservations about “Games” such as Second Life. In Bangkok in 1994 I used a game with students called The Oregon Trail. This proved to be extremely popular with the students, less so with the administrative staff and probably the parents. By and large Thais are extremely conservative. I would imagine that many parents might object to “games” being played by their children. To be truthful regarding Second Life I have only had a brief glimpse of it. Judging by some of my peers comments on their blogs they got a lot further with it than I did. A trip around the Globe Theatre for instance really intrigued me. If it fired my imagination, I wonder if it would fire a student’s imagination. Judging by my experience in Bangkok in 1994 I would have said that students would be fascinated by it. Perhaps field trips could be organized with trips around the world without ever having left the classroom. Maybe students could keep blogs about their travels.

My guess is my generation is probably the last generation that has not had constant exposure to computers. Things have changed a lot with computers. In 1990 I helped a woman buy a PC. It had a large hard disk by the standards of those days, 20Mb. Nowadays computers are far smaller, far quicker and with massive capacities by comparison. Further in a few more years they will have improved further.

In the past I have given ex students my e mail and Windows Live Messenger and SKYPE name. Very few students bother to keep in touch. With hind sight keeping a history of conversations would be a really good idea. http://thefoomeister.blogspot.com/ has a suitable caution about online behavior on dated 31 January 2010. I wonder if SL allows you to speak and listen to other players you meet. If anybody has information on that please let me know.

What I would propose is taking a more in depth look at SL, particularly with a view to being able to talk and listen, (maybe this could be done with another programme like SKYPE running in a different window. One thing that I think was very relevant was SL is not the sort of game (?) that you would be able to spend 20 minutes with and be able to do anything useful. I would imagine it would take many sessions just to master the controls. Then again maybe the students would be able to lead their teacher around and show them how to do things. The question then would be who was helping who ? The answer might just be does it matter ?