How to Teach Students to Use Second Life for Education in 30 Minutes (Which Still Seems Too Long and Too Short to Me)

HyperGrid Business has a good post on how to teach students to use Second Life for educational purposes in 30 minutes, as opposed to the 2 hours it may usually take. Definitely handy, but even 30 minutes seems way too time-consuming in today's technology environment. You can teach someone the basics of using an iPad in under 30 seconds, and since Internet time is like dog years, 30 minutes to a student will probably feel like 3 hours. Which might be worthwhile, if SL was a software tool the student would need in other educational and real world contexts, but that's far from certain.

That said, I'd look at Second Life's high learning curve for learning in another direction: It's only worth the training time if you're teaching them to take advantage of SL's unique affordances which they can apply to real world projects. Specifically, 3D content creation for architecture, filmmaking, game development, graphics art, fashion design prototyping, and so on. Then it's much more likely worth the 30 minutes learning curve, or even the 3 hours.

Comments

[Mike McKay]

Here is a very quick introduction to Second Life I use to show students and colleagues how they can begin speaking to the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7SFMppfPDo&sns=em

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Hamlet, you are correct about advanced content-creation skills.

At the same time, you ignore how many faculty would use SWIFT. In saying "since Internet time is like dog years, 30 minutes to a student will probably feel like 3 hours," remember that many of us would book at lab for such training during required class time.

For 20 students, I'd ask they set up their accounts before class, then get a helper in, and BOOM! the students have their orientation in 30 minutes.

I've done one-to-one sessions or one-to-three sessions for my students, and it takes 45 minutes. They are not bored and "get it" fast. They won't be experts, but they know most everything they need to continue with course tasks. If SWIFT makes it easier...all the better.