Feeling more confident about Second Life

The majority of today was spent learning about Second Life and working on our final group project. Before today, I had figured out how to walk, fly, and change my appearance. I now have friends, know how to communicate, know how to find other places, and teleport myself or others to name a few. I even have found new outfits and even know how to change my clothes. We had the opportunity to have Dan Powers tell us a bit about his company and show us his the Iowa Island he has developed in Second Life.

I agree completely with Karen C's blog posting about Second Life. Using Second Life does make you consider the possibilities available for education and business. Second Life, along with many other "new" technologies has opened my eyes this week and I am looking forward to using them in my classroom and/or personal life.

Our final group project is going to be about digital citizenship. Some of the concepts we will cover are copyright, plagiarism, fair use, cyberbulling, creative comments. I think this is very important for students to be aware of and also something many adults need to be aware of.

This morning we did spend some time discussing nings. We used Skype to have an interview with Steve Hargadon, the creator of the classroom2.0 and the ning in education. I liked how he explained how social networking differs from other web 2.0 tools, such as wikis. He described a ning being more about conversation than web production. He gave ways to use nings in classrooms and also explained that there are settings to set up whether the ning will be private or public and whether postings need to be approved. I look forward to becoming more involved in the classroom 2.0 ning and the ning in education.

Emerging Technology Experiences

Last Thursday evening I had the opportunity to chat with my class while sitting on the floor in Charlotte’s airport. This truly was an accomplishment since I was having nothing but problems with my internet the rest of the week while on vacation. Thankfully, remembering what tech support had done on my computer and from the help of the digital native sitting on the floor next to me in the airport and my little brother over my phone, I was finally able to reset my LAN settings so I could connect to the internet.

I really enjoyed the numerous conversations regarding both the excitement and challenges of being in a chat room, conferencing over MeBeam, and also exploring Second Life. I am looking forward to these experiences also. The conversations I heard and from the blogs of fellow students got me thinking about digital natives and immigrants. I think eventually most of us will become immigrants, even if we are natives today. Technology changes so quickly and it is hard to keep up. I think we can postpone our change into an immigrant by attempting to stay current and by actively trying the new technologies in our life and our career. Ultimately, we will all need to help of natives, whether they are today’s natives or the natives of the future, to help us keep current.

I did a small amount of researching on Second Life today before I downloaded it and created my aviator. The wiki, http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/, gave me a quick way to look at some of the places you can go in Second Life, the educational uses, and resources for starting Second Life. One fact that I found very interesting was that $5 million USD are transacted each month in Second Life – Wow, I had no idea the uses of this virtual world.

The technical requirements of Second Life are going to be an issue when wanting to implement this in any classroom in my district. After downloading Second Life on my district laptop, I received the message that my system did not meet the minimum requirements of memory or the graphic card. I also got the message for my home computer about the memory, although it should be fine. I am hoping anyway. I know my district laptop is much better than any of the student computers in my building. I will continue to look for the educational opportunities available with Second Life, but unfortunately, my district would need to update their technology before I could use this in my classroom.