From June 20 through yesterday, June 29, I've been participating in an online workshop offered by the Sloan Consortium titled "Learning Online 2.0: Engaging, Interacting and Syndicating Applications." I was actually surprised at how much I already know about web 2.0 applications.
As part of the workshop, each participant had to review a web 2.0 application and post the review in a wiki. I reviewed Second Life since I've been spending a lot of time there lately.
I'm going to include part of my review here because these are things I've been thinking about a lot lately:
Educational Potential
As many people are realizing, SL has a lot of potential for educational uses. (Dozens of colleges, universities, libraries, and professional organizations are currently using SL.) Some of the ways SL can be used have been documented on the SLEducation (Second Life in Education) wiki. For me the greatest potential of SL is for networking and my own professional development.
Cautions
The lack of web access is a definite disadvantage for students who do not own computers and depend on a school's computer labs, even if the institution is fully supporting the educational use of SL and permits the software to be downloaded to all computers on campus. The software is also frequently updated, which would make maintenance on campus more time consuming.
. . . As I mentioned, SL has a lot of potential, but we need to be careful not to try to do things in SL that can be done better with other tools or in other venues.
