This was a new one on me. It did cross my mind that a history lesson might just become far more interesting if the students could actually visit any sites of study. March with the Roman army maybe ? A biology lesson where the student goes into the pond to study the life cycle of a frog? This has a lot of potential. A geography lesson where the student could go into an active volcano? What ever next ? Years ago I had a Land Rover, I worked on it but did not really understand how the engine worked until I stripped out an engine and took it apart. Now, if I had the opportunity of wandering around inside a working engine, I would have understood it a lot better. It took me a long time to figure out how a differential worked, it would have been quicker if had been able to clamber inside a virtual differential. In the end I would rebuild differentials that the Land Rover specialists would not touch.
These are great ideas for exploiting Second Life. In effect, it seems like a topic-based, inquiry-based approach is called for, where students explore topics that are of interest to them, and then construct texts (oral or written) describing what they have learned. Some of the language learning probably happens in-world at the site of engagement (because much of the text that they encounter in SL is in English), and some in the real world, when they write up and describe their experiences.
ReplyDeleteI would love to have some time to explore Second Life more.
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