Second Life Ruminations Week 5

week 5 reflection

summary thoughts
article on leatchers leaving profession

current and future potential

So as we were in the last two weeks of the class, I keep coming back to how virtual worlds and in particular Second Life can be forces to support and improve education. I still am convinced, as I have been for many years, math the best parts of Second Life offer opportunities for education that may yet prove to be powerful and pervasive In the next five years.
and it’s happening, perhaps, at a moment not too soon. I read this past weekend and article from the Washington Post written by a teacher who after less than five years was leaving the profession. Her story of lack of recognition, problems with the system, evaluation that rewarded playing it safe instead of taking risks alliance with many of the stories I hear from teachers long in the profession and just at the beginning of their careers. Her story is here:
http://bit.ly/AstBI
at the same time, Robert Witt, who is the head of Hawaii Independent schools, spoke to our faculty on Friday and encouraged us to find ways to reinvent our institution, for the children, and for the sake of trying to keep education from sliding into an irrelevant institution. He shared a video from the national commission on teaching and America’s future that explored the issue of teachers leaving the profession. The video is here:

So what does this have to do with Second Life? In some ways, Second Life is not yet ready for prime time, at least not in secondary education, and yet it offers an opportunity to reinvigorate and challenge the status quo for students and teachers. Whether it is taking advantage of adolescence and support of accepting nature of social media and online virtual realities, or possibility that virtual worlds opened up in time, space, connectedness, simulation the time needs to be right pretty soon if it is to have any impact in helping education from sliding further into decline.
The opportunity for students in Second Life to link up with peers and mentors, which is part of the new paradigm of 21st-century learning opens its potential and paints a possible future where we honor more of adolescents’ native abilities, energies and potential than we do right now. I’ve been teaching for 27 years and seen the potential and sometimes the fulfillment of the promise of technologies in education. With 15 to 20 more years education in front of me, I will be there and hopefully leading the charge to see tools like Second Life support dramatically different models of school transformation.

One thought on “Second Life Ruminations Week 5

  1. Thanks for sharing the enlightening video. It offers a very logical suggestion for solving a major crisis in this country.

    In my coaching of teachers who are leaving the profession, I find that many would love to remain in the profession if “things” were different. When searching for alternative careers for teachers, they still want to be teaching in one form or another because it is what drives them. Hopefully some creative solutions to the situation we have in education today will help keep many of them in the classroom

    Tony

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