Colgs Innovation

Today Hayley and Jess did a presentation on virtual worlds, in particular Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual world that you can join and download for free. Once you have joined you create a character and begin to make friends and explore. As we have restrictions at uni on what we can download we were unable to download this program to see it frist hand. The girls did show us their Second Life but I think to have a better understanding I would need to join and explore it myself.

There is also Teen Second Life that was created for thirteen to seventeen year olds. The girls were unable to explore this, as the website stated that you must be within these ages to join ad they didn’t want to lie. Teen Second Life is marketed towards teens and it is meant to be for ONLY TEENS but I do wonder how many adults have joined it and just lied about their age. Is this really a safe environment that teachers should encourage their students to join?

I beleive that I as an educator that I would not use Teen Second Life in my classroom because of the safety issues and I would worry that maybe my students were spending too much time on it when they are away from the classroom. As we didn’t really get to explore Teen Second Life, I do wonder how teachers would monitor their students on it.