Building a Collaborative Learning Community in Second Life

Rationale Essay

Second Life (SL) , an Internet-based virtual world, has increasingly been embraced by educators, world-wide. SL has features that educators are enthusiastic about because of their ability to tap multiple intelligences and which support creativity and collaborative learning. Many of these features can be found in other virtual world platforms, but the degree to which SL users can customize the environment with built-in building tools, and its large, global user base, combined, make it a powerful platform for educational experiences. With its unique set of features, SL promotes community building and enables collaboration. These features include: chat and instant messaging, voice, streaming media, groups, land and estate tools, scripted objects and building.

Communication is essential to collaboration and community building. Second Life supports communication in several ways. Users can text chat, openly, or privately through instant message to other avatars that are in the same space. Users can instant message other avatars and groups that are not in the same space as their avatar. Users can chat with voice in the same way, openly or privately, or with groups. It is useful having these options that can be used based on personal preferences or depending on the needs of the users and of the groups involved.

Groups are used as a way to communicate, and Group formation in SL helps communities of people to come together based on common interests or goals. The group management tools enable users to have certain rights to land or objects and to communicate with the group as a whole in various ways. These tools play an important part in organizing people in SL.

Streaming media in SL is used in various ways that help support learning. Videos and audio can be streamed from a URL into SL. Even live events, audio or video, can be streamed into SL. This helps connect users in SL with physical/real world meetings, and offers opportunities such as live music performances, which are very popular in SL. Land ownership, or rights, are needed to stream media into SL.

Land and estate management tools aid collaboration in SL. Land owners can give whole groups of people rights to the land, and they can lock out others. This gives educators certain abilities that help support community building. If you own or have rights to land then you can leave your 3D creations out for people to experience. Having a space for collaborative building, and for simply a meeting space, helps support the development of a community.

SL's built-in building tools promote creativity and support active learning. People can envision a project and bring it to fruition with just basic skills that are easily learned in SL. Creations in SL can be scripted with programs to provide dynamic features like interactivity, movement, sound and more. Scripted objects are helpful in a collaborative learing environment because they are useful for presentations, as well as feedback, assessment and modeling. As an example, a scripted object can keep track of the attendees' names and if they grant permission to have their chat recorded.

Realism, presence and a broad and diverse user base also add to the value provided by SL to educators. Realism is a motivational quality that adds to the feeling of immersion in the environment. The sense of actually being present in the space with other people is also motivating, and it deepens engagement through immersion. These qualities are prominent in SL, and SL has a broad user base of people from around the world with which to connect and form communities of practice, socialize with and learn from. The strong sense of presence in the the space encourages users to interact much more than, for instance, text-only based Web 2.0 networking sites.

With SL's many features, its realism and its well-established user-base educators can create powerful learning experiences and/or facilitate these opportunities for students. These experiences of creating together and building a virtual space provide many opportunities for situated and collaborative learning and help build community among learners.

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