Where does teaching stop and learning start in SL?

Some very useful discussion going on in SLED mailing list about the suitability or otherwise of Second Life for education. I will try and summarize some of the key ideas here to keep a note for future reference. This one from Paul of Language Lab:

"There isn’t one size fits all approach so to what extent this applies to your area is for you to judge. When we built Language lab we were unsure exactly what role the formal classroom would play. However we thought we should include a few and they formed the starting point for our systematic (learning about what is appropriate for our type of) teaching 8 months ago. Here is what happened…

Within about a month of classes meeting twice a week we had exhausted what the virtual classroom could offer:

• tutor led discussion? Tick
• pair and group work before reporting back to whole class? Tick
• presentations using whiteboards? Tick
• break out groups coming back to lead presentations? Tick
• reading, listening comprehension? Tick
• excursions and then back to the classroom? Tick
• video? Tick

Then we said – fine, we’ve done that but aren’t we restricting ourselves unnecessarily? Students said – this is great but why don’t we ‘get out’ more? Since then we have hardly had anyone in a formal classroom. Our classes which are either context specific speaking skills or functional / situational orientated have been in park, art gallery, museum, hotel, wine bar, cafe, nightclub etc etc etc. Usually a combination: start in the cafe (reflective / chat / introduce topic) and move to the clinic or the hotel depending on the class aim.

A classroom is only a convention for a RL gathering place. It can be deconstructed into a collection of functions and the teacher can carry around a projector (yes, they have their uses of course), chairs, board etc in their virtual pocket to take advantage of where they happen to be if that isn’t already allowed for. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to build whole neighbourhoods with specific functions so use holodecking. The same approach applies though…

For our purposes it has also been our experience that some places are clearly more functional / transactional , some are purely social and some work happily as both. Main thing for us is not to get hung up on absolutes. Rather see what works and doesn’t and take note."

Many thanks to Paul for this useful insight.