Yunong-Article review Week 1

Source: British journal of educational technology Volume: 40 Issue 3 (2009) ISSN: 0007-1013

I am interested in the education of Second Life, so I searched “second life in education” on google scholar. I find an article “Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching.” I think maybe this article can help me to know more knowledge about how people teach different things through Second Life and what are the potential abilities and possible limits for educating in Second Life.
The aim of this article is to “explore Second Life’s potential and the barriers that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching.”
Method
First of all, the author introduced the history of the definition of “virtual world” from different writers, academics, and industry professionals. Then the author gave his opinion on the definition “a virtual world provides an experience set within a technological environment that gives the user a strong sense of being there.” After giving the concept of “virtual world,” the articles explored the common features of different virtual world’s forms and the typology of 3-D virtual worlds. By claiming the simple backgrounds above, this article wrote that SL is the most popular educational MUVE (the multi-user virtual environments). The technical infrastructure, immersion and socialisation are the three components of SL that explored in this article in order to understand the potential and the barriers of using virtual worlds in educational settings. From exploring the affordances of SL and analysing the resources that collected from other scholars, the article concluded some benefits and barriers of studying in SL. Technically, SL can create different settings for teachers and student to learn, but with limited resources. With the introduction of audio, educators could find more teaching activities inside virtual worlds, so that avatars may learn things easier than before. However, sometimes, it is hard for educator to create more effective learning scenarios within SL. The article also provided a survey of newsgroups, blog posts and the extant literature reveals eight broad categories under which reported issues in relation to the use of SL to examine the potentials and barriers of virtual worlds from technics, identity, culture, collaboration, time, economy and so on.
Conclusion and findings
The article concluded that virtual worlds are attractive spaces for education. Educators could design their own teaching spaces by using of virtual worlds constructively in a positive way. The author assumed that people need to manage their virtual identities, improve their digital and cultural literacies and develop design skills to understand the links between immersion, empathy and learning.