I have decided to focus for a while on my area of research, which is Second Life. I have always believed in the potential of SL for education and have read pretty much everything that has been written about SL in general, and SL in education specifically.
My boss bought me a couple of new books, however, that I am excited about reading. The one I have decided to start with is Learning and Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life, edited by Judith Molka-Danielsen and Mats Deutschmann. The first chapter, by Judith Molka-Danielsen, is entitled "The New Learning and Teaching Environment."
The article or chapter is interesting and basically just sets up the rest of the book. One thing that Molka-Danielsen does mention that I find interesting is the concept that SL fits Vygotsky's theory of Social Constructivist learning. She also brings up Benjamin Bloom's "taxonomy of learning", but focuses on the Affective Domain, rather than the Cognitive Domain (which is usually the focus).
Molka-Danielsen validates what I argued in my last post, however, about the pedagogy and the technology needing to progress hand-in-hand, alternating the lead. When discussing one of her assignments, she says that "we reflect on the feedback of some of the things that went wrong in the case. We will suggest ways to avoid these mistakes, and ourselves redesign our learning modules for the next learning cycle, hopefully following an Action Learning approach" (20). As teachers, we have to be willing to use the technology with a pedagogy in mind, but be willing to adjust as we need too.
I'm sure the other chapters in this book will give me some fresh insights into using SL in the classroom. The first four chapters (including tonight's) are about pedagogy, so it will be interesting to see what they say.
My boss bought me a couple of new books, however, that I am excited about reading. The one I have decided to start with is Learning and Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life, edited by Judith Molka-Danielsen and Mats Deutschmann. The first chapter, by Judith Molka-Danielsen, is entitled "The New Learning and Teaching Environment."
The article or chapter is interesting and basically just sets up the rest of the book. One thing that Molka-Danielsen does mention that I find interesting is the concept that SL fits Vygotsky's theory of Social Constructivist learning. She also brings up Benjamin Bloom's "taxonomy of learning", but focuses on the Affective Domain, rather than the Cognitive Domain (which is usually the focus).
Molka-Danielsen validates what I argued in my last post, however, about the pedagogy and the technology needing to progress hand-in-hand, alternating the lead. When discussing one of her assignments, she says that "we reflect on the feedback of some of the things that went wrong in the case. We will suggest ways to avoid these mistakes, and ourselves redesign our learning modules for the next learning cycle, hopefully following an Action Learning approach" (20). As teachers, we have to be willing to use the technology with a pedagogy in mind, but be willing to adjust as we need too.
I'm sure the other chapters in this book will give me some fresh insights into using SL in the classroom. The first four chapters (including tonight's) are about pedagogy, so it will be interesting to see what they say.
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