Second Life Future Salon: Globalizing Education Via Virtual Worlds

A book that I have been recommending to nearly every person I've recently come into contact with is The World is Flat. Written by New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, it describes the causes of our increasing movement towards globalization as well as some of the challenges we will be facing in the upcoming decades.

He calls the causes of globalization 'Flattening Forces.' These forces are a combination of historical events and social trends; however there is a common thread between them. The overall flattening of the world has been catalyzed by our increasing ability to communicate and process information. Virtual worlds continue this trend by increasing the quantity of information that can be communicated as well as the quality. By involving more of our senses and taking advantage of our innate ability to process spatial information, virtual worlds are quickly becoming a medium that allows us to express ourselves to an extent only previously possible in the physical world. As such, I fully expect virtual worlds to be included in a future edition of The World is Flat as a flattening force.

I'd like to take this moment to make a public service announcement. If you have not read this book yet, do so. Click on this link, or this one, and order it. If you feel like making a trip to your local bookstore, you can find directions here and here. Reading this book will give you the information and perspective necessary to teach your children how to compete in the twenty-first century. Please, think of the children.

Sometime between State of Play and the Second Life Community Convention, I began to think about what virtual worlds as a globalizing force has to do with education. There are currently more then ten educational groups in Second Life. Like many of us, they are early adopters of the platform. They recognize the potential that virtual worlds hold for the world of education, and are exploring the current boundaries of the platform to try and reach this potential. But how far does this potential extend? We can't say for certain yet, but this is what I believe:

Virtual worlds will do for education what the Internet has done for business and commerce in the past decade.

What does this mean exactly? I'm not entirely sure, but I can make some short term extrapolations based on current practices in academia. For those who have taken distance learning courses, I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say they suck. Students thrive best in a fully immersive learning environment, not in a text box. Distance learning is no substitute for the traditional classroom. Virtual worlds offer the chance to create a traditional classroom setting in conjunction with a distance learning program. There is also be the opportunity to create simulations on the fly, and bring in outside content from the web to enrich the learning experience. Learning will also be a more collaborative experience. When a virtual world platform such as Second Life matures, this is the direction that academia will go in adopting the technology. This isn't revolutionary however, just the natural next step. It is what Linden Lab has brought to the table that makes the difference.

Distance learning courses are currently held in isolated pockets on the web. There's no sense of larger community. The idea of having a virtual world composed of a single continuous grid like in Second Life means that students will be in the same common space as the rest of the academic world. This will enable cross pollination to occur between students and professors from all over the world. The world wide web could potentially give way to the world wide classroom.

Extend this paradigm shift to primary education, and we may have something even more revolutionary on our hands. A group that has been on my radar for awhile and gaining momentum is the homeschool movement. Imagine a program that enabled homeschoolers to reconstitute fully functional school systems within virtual worlds. Students could be put into classrooms with others from around the world. As homeschoolers, parents would be directly involved in this scenario. They might be hard at work somewhere else in the Metaverse, or perhaps in a virtual classroom themselves updating the skills that their jobs require. Besides, children who's parents are involved in their education are generally more successful. Perhaps it may be possible to make this model work for a larger audience. The potential for students in public education and in schools across the world having a shared learning experience regardless of educational level, socioeconomic background, or ethnicity, could lead to flattening out of many of the social problems that exist in the world today.

What I'm proposing is that virtual worlds may be an avenue for radical education and social reform. This process wouldn't occur from the top down, but from the bottom up, enabled by our current efforts in expanding the technology. Perhaps this should be the goal that we try and build towards as we continue to explore what virtual worlds have to offer us.

Second Life Future Salon

Exploring the metaverse with monthly meetings in Second Life

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Globalizing Education Via Virtual Worlds

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