One more anecdote before I make my point.

I have a sister who works as a teacher in primary education (4 - 12 yo). I have a daughter who works in secondary education (12 - 18 yo). I have spent the past 35 years of my life in universities, as a student, as a teacher, as a student counselor, as a librarian, and now as a student again. If there is one thing I've learned, it is how deeply conservative all these three teaching / learning environments are, and maybe for a good reason, but that's not the point I am / was trying to make here.

>I don’t think I would necessarily see SL as a ‘gaming world’ but more as an alternate, virtual world.  I wonder - are you making an assumption that gaming and learning worlds are different?  Are they?  If we are thinking about learning as collaborative, and thus relying on the social, aren’t there lessons from the one that could be applicable to the other?<

Maybe. Maybe. Yes.

But anyway, I was not making that assumption, I was wondering why the texts we got, notably Boellstorff and Taylor, only dealt with how people experience online worlds as a gaming / interaction platform, and not at all with what I would expect from an introductory course in e-learning, that is, what the relevance of these worlds for learning is in the conservative environments that I know. I also have the impression that SL is quite beyond its peak use, I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore in the past two years in the 50+ blogs that I follow, just to keep up with trends in 'net culture and higher education. As with the net generation theme, I wonder whether the IDEL course is running behind on what's happening on the 'net at large, and maybe not connecting enough to the world of practitioning teachers.

I also observed that much of the literature was quite old and, because the texts deal with internet phenomena, most probably outdated. It made me wonder when this part of the course was renewed for the last time. Please challenge that assumption ;-).

>As for immersion – is it worth contrasting this with the idea of authentic learning?  It might also be useful to think about how immersion in specific social practices might relate to learning as immersion in particularly communities (a la http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm ).<

You're missing the point I was trying to make. Before you can make SL work as a tool in the practical learning environments that I know, teachers and students would need to immerse themselves in SL as a tool for quite some hours before they can actually see how it could help them achieve their educational goals. Not to mention the support disaster with SL viewers not running on outdated hardware or for whatever stupid reason, I've seen enough of that, even with the tech savvy students in this course in the past two weeks (praise to Fiona who was, I think, responsible for handling that shit). I have no problem with the IDEL educational goal of getting students acquainted with the many possibilities, including SL.

I will dig deeper into this point in week 6, when it comes to the actual use that is being made in universities of LMSs or VLEs. Most is simple file upload of presentation slides. And now we see an enormous growth in canned video lectures being uploaded to these systems and to iTunesU (for marketing purposes, maybe?). Wow, really innovative.

Addendum, added October 27, 2010

Just came across this very interesting review study of educational uses of SL:

Hew, K.F. & Cheung, W.S. (2010). Use of three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual worldsin K-12 and higher education settings. A review of the research. British Journal of Educational Technology 41(1), 33–55

Worth a read. A literature search yielded 470 articles, only 15 of them where about empirical research into the use and effects of SL on teaching and learning. The single most prevalent research method was descriptive, only one study had an experimental setup using control groups. This final study failed to show a significant difference between three test groups in terms of test scores.

Other results mainly confirm the upsides and downsides already noted. Conclusion: we know next to nothing about the usefulness of SL for learning.