Secondary Education in a Second Life

The Winter 2007 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery’s student publication Crossroads has an article on the educational capabilities of the online game of Second Life.As the article says:“There are dozens of current classes and educational uses of Second Life. One example is Harvard’s ground-breaking class, Law in the Court of Public Opinion. This unusual course is an attempt to create a class that includes Harvard law students, extension students, and the general public, all with different expectations and degrees of involvement. The multimedia nature of Second Life is used both to teach the class more effectively for students of all types, and to provide a number of easily available media through which to use the class techniques.”The article suggests that Second Life offers opportunities that traditional forms of communication can’t. The game is a platform that presents a experience that more closely mirrors a classroom than other digital learning tools.It kind of seems like a “You know you really are a slacker when. . . “ kind of thing. It’s one thing to miss a class in real life, but it seems like it takes an extreme lack of effort in order to miss a virtual class.