RL education in SL.

By Pelton Darkstone

No matter what you think your purpose in life is about if you'd tell me anything different than 'to learn', I know for certain that you are wrong. We are here in this life for only one thing and one thing only.... to learn ! In Real Life or Second Life or whatever life you think you are leading... On your way along life's highs and lows the answer will always be: to learn.

Having this said, I would like to add that most of learning comes in a playful way or you learn things you need to know in order to have more fun doing the things you really like to do. You learn to know what people think while learning to read and write. Or you learn how to operate your computer because you really want to play a game or two and so on... but for most of us, the place where you learn most is probably at the schools you attended. Of course you receive a lot of education from your parents, but it is in school this educational process is most structured and therefore easiest in subjecting it to measuring its effectiveness.

The previous brings me to the question if you can learn from, or being in, Second Life and if there are ways to measure this. Maybe it is no coincidence that I, in one of my other lives, work for a school in higher education and work on their administrative systems to keep things nicely organized. And as such, when I came to Second Life, I naturally had to pay a visit to the island my employer has here in Second Life.

So it happened, I came into contact with one of the people who spend a lot of his working hours being busy with Second Life or Second Life related activities. I am talking here with Paulus Munro from Fontys University of Applied Sciences. They have been working on this since 2005 in order to provide new ways of supplying knowledge to students. Or to put it differently: providing new way of education.

It didn't have to be Second Life especially... they started of by exploring virtual worlds in general and first worked with 'Active Worlds'. A number of educational games have been set up in the time they have been active in Second Life. One of their latest training games is 'The Knowledge Survival Game'. With this quiz, The Knowledge Survival Game, students will be able to test their knowledge, alone or with others, by flying. During the game they receive questions which they have to try to answer by flying to the right platform within a certain time. When the students answers a question right, he or she will continue to the next question. And when the student answers the question wrong, he or she has to wait for the next round to get in the game again. The student who out-flies his contenders will be the big winner. The game is based upon a dutch television quiz from the 80's.

Between creating the educational games they also find time to setup stuff like the virtual rabbit called 'nabaztag', which, by means of a php script, operates as their doorbell. Students can leave messages with questions they have about their Second Life activities or activities they want to explore.

The digital content in the form of land or cyberspace is rented to different departments within the organisation, which in their turn use the space to educate students in the specific fields that is covered by them. But these new forms of education are not only used for 'in house'. The people involved with Fontys on Second Life also get request from external bureau's or companies to develop special trainings or creations on Second Life. For example, a museum for experiences from Nijmegen (Netherlands) has asked Fontys to realise a virtual museum island where avatars can experience the effects of seeing and blindness. It will be a trip through the human eye and someone taking part on these educational trips can experience how it feels to be colorblind. There also will be an absolutely dark surrounding were avatars can experience how it feels to be blind.

I think it is fairly obvious that Second Life offers a wide range of possibilities to develop education which results in knowledge that is useful in Real Life tasks. And with accompanying tests the students can take to test their level of knowledge, there is also a means to measure if education given in an environment like Second Life is more or less effective than traditional means of education.

On a somewhat personal level, Paulus Munro gave me a an argument why education and other social services will keep on growing in Second Life. He quoted: 'Tech consultancy Gartner, whose "Hype Cycle" has been used to gauge Second Life adoption, thinks that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011 — a huge increase from current levels.' Source: http://secondlife.reuters.com