ALG Learning Outcomes (for me)

I entered the Action Learning Group for a number of reasons, one being to meet other educators and share ideas, another to see how presentations are made in Second Life. My focus in my own role as an educator has now been very much clarified and I now also have a much better idea of the capabilities, limitations and opportunities in Second Life. Over the next few blogs I'll detail these more, but in brief:

• Many other educators are not comfortable with technology in general, and Second Life is probably too 'edgy' for many educators and potential students at this time. This will obviously change over time, but right now it represents both an obstacle and an opportunity for me.
• Second Life is itself rather immature as an educational medium. It's basic nature is interesting enough to overcome its limitations for now but the system must keep moving forward and tools must become available for it to eclipse other online virtual classroom types. Teachers need presentation tools and means to give handouts and SL does not do this as easily or elegantly as even a simple email/weblog group combination. Again this represents obstacles and opportunities for tech savvy educators.
• The monetary system within SL is excellent, as is the way in which Intellectual Property (IP) can be controlled on objects created within SL, so that an educator/businessperson could actually generate some income via SL activities. The value of an hour's work in SL pays well in terms of what you can buy in SL, however when converted back to real currency it pays very poorly. As the services and products mature in SL this may not remain a problem, but for now I can't allow myself to be paid around $3/hr for teaching activities.
  
• At present the best business model in SL would be a form of mass production combined with extremely low overheads. Make something very cheaply and sell thousands. Applying this to education this may be possible, but the educator will need some very efficient tools.
• The recent addition of voice-capability is a great step forward - providing the users' bandwidth can support it. An interesting sidebar will be seeing if avatars use it in favour of text chat. I predict that mostly text chat will prevail in groups because it is easier in allowing multiple inputs (and sometimes conversation threads). For one-on-one and groups between close friends and educators/learners voice will be a valuable additional option.
• The need to frequently re-download the software client for SL is a real pain. I hope that a general purpose client, perhaps with lesser capability, can be made available that doesn't need updating every week. Many learners don't have privileges for software installation and this is a real problem for English students operating from school PC labs (often very poorly maintained in my experience). I have recently discovered how to install and run SL from a USB key, but I have yet to actually try it. That may fix the issue somewhat.