Re: [school-discuss] Massive Multiplayer Worlds as Classrooms

[Bill Kendrick <nbs@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 07:49:31PM -0700, Jamey Osborne wrote:
> As a platform for education, the possibilities offered by virtual  
> worlds are enormous. The possibilities for collaboration are equally  
> rich and I encourage other educators to take a look at virtual worlds  
> with open eyes.

I'm one of those old-school gamer geeks (Atari 2600, Nintendo NES, etc.)
who doesn't yet 'get' Second Life.

I keep seeing articles about big business using SL as a means for holding
'virtual meetings', but still don't understand how something like SL helps
with that, or what people get out of it.

I haven't yet looked at the blog link you posted, but wondered if you could
summarize:  how exactly do students and teachers benefit from a 3D virtual
environment such as SL?

I could imagine a tool kind of like this could be cool for teaching physics
or astronomy or something, but then the MMPORPG aspect of it just seems
gimmicky, and I would probably end up saying:  "just give me a dedicated
learning tool for this." :^)

-bill!