Is Second Life a whole new world? The answer is yes. Doe it have a place in my classroom? The answer is yes. Will I use it anytime soon? The answer is no.
I feel like I went through many emotional stages while exploring VR and the 3D web's place in my classroom. At first I found it laughable and denied its usage in a classroom...I mean come on... students are in "another world" enough, why purposefully send them to an alternative existence? Then I kept reading. I saw info on self-paced tutorials and thought...this could be amazing for differentiated instruction. I started imagining the guided tours of places we study in class and got really excited about using this.....
Then reality struck and I realized that I would need to actually create an avatar....and the virtual world for my students to explore. Yikes....just finding an avatar that doesn't play on an Angelina Jolie fantasy is hard enough, now I gotta set up a tour of Tienanmen Square? No thanks, I don;t think I have the time.
To be honest I would like to see where this goes. I'd love to chat with a Social Studies teacher and student who used Second Life and learn from their experiences before I jump into it.
My biggest concern is the marginalized student who I fear could get seriously lost in another world. I have never been apart of this kind of thing, but I've seen an episode of Law and Order SVU (ripped form the headlines of course) where people became obsessed with this virtual world and met other crazies online... someone got killed. Now I jest, yet I think it could be dangerous... But I guess having a facebook account isn't all that much different.
You hit on some barriers that I encountered when I started. Just creating your own avatar to your liking could take hours. Seriously. Sure, a teacher could walk folks through an initial set up much more quickly, but I think a lot of students would waste much time customizing outside of class. And, as you noted, a person could easily lose track of time and waste bunches of it if not monitored. But Facebook is also a huge time waster for many, as you note, so 6 of one and a half dozen of the other, eh?
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