Thursday, November 29, 2007

Second life in Org Comm

For the past week Stephanie Poole-Martinez's Organizational Communication class has been meeting in a virtual classroom in Secondlife during our scheduled class time. The classroom looks a lot like any other physical classroom does with desks a podium and even a place for you to upload power points in the virtual world.
Though this concept is new and exciting here are of course several kinks that need to be worked out. It is hard for Stephanie to get the classes attention at times because students are flying around and experimenting with gestures like dancing and bowing. Another issue associated with the virtual classroom is that the way to communicate with everyone is set up much like a chat room where there is one large conversation going on but you also have the capability to privately message people in the class one on one. Which at time makes the conversation hard to follow and easy to miss out on important information. One last thing that I found distracting was that if classmates "teleport" in late they land in the middle of the classroom disrupting the class.
There are also many benefits to the virtual classroom, for example being behind a computer I noticed that my classmates that are generally on the shyer side felt more comfortable speaking and contributing to the class discussion. Another upside to the virtual classroom is the freedom that you can accesses it anywhere. People who work or have a family or even disability or dont feel well wouldnt have to miss class because they can access it from their own home, office etc.

5 comments:

Shane said...

I think that it is cool that she has decided to experiment with Second Life. Like you said it does offer a lot of benefits and does allow for more people to get involved. Me personally I would rather stick to in class meetings because I think that I would learn more, but I am sure that a lot of people, if they had the choice would rather be at home with their computers relaxing while still learning.

Anonymous said...

hm... cognitively .

Anonymous said...

garet folkdrama kudu fatal vaibhav aprill fifteen promoted mcgraw daughters approacha
lolikneri havaqatsu

Anonymous said...

Genial brief and this fill someone in on helped me alot in my college assignement. Gratefulness you for your information.

Anonymous said...

и всё эе: неподражаемо... а82ч