Second Life

http://secondlife.com/

It is a good idea to have classes in Second Life world when I first heard of it. I always believe that it will be very effective to keep students' interests and motivation in learning, just like playing games on computer which is fun and challenging. 

According to the presentation of using 2nd life in education, many activity can become possible if being conducted in 2ne life world. Students can have the class with his/her avatars siting in the classroom and himself/herself personally siting at home. The lecture can be listened through earphone and they also can ask and answer questions through the microphone. All the homework and test can be done in 2nd life classroom, which is easy for students to do and good for teacher to collect the papers and tests and record the results. All the paper work can be transferred into paperless work online in 2nd life. By walking around in the "school", students can use all resources online freely. They also can go other places  to have fun in any parties and activities in 2nd life. A whole new world is waiting for them to explore while learning.

However, when I actually tried to log in as a resident of 2nd life, I found many problems. It took me some time to get to know how to navigate and how to walk on the map. I am still having troubles to change the view which is a little bit dizzy for me. I think it will be the same situation, if a teacher give students 2nd life to have class. It will take time to get used to the view and get to know how to manipulate the avatar. There is also a requirement of the setting of the computer to be able to show the 3D view in 2nd life. I tried on a rather old computer and I found sometimes the screen will get stuck. I have to wait about 30 seconds to let the view change and let my avatar move. It seems not an advantage to use this in teaching and learning when students lack of assess to the computer or assess to old and poor computers. 
Considering the situation that most of the Chinese students have been addicted to the computer games, most of the Chinese parents have the anti-games attitudes towards the websites like 2nd life. I don't think it will be a good idea to assign my Chinese students to use 2nd life to take the class at home when their parents are at home too. 

Personally, I like the idea of making teaching and learning  process online in 2nd life is wonderful; however, time that needs to getting familiar with the navigation and manipulation, the requirement and the assess to the devices, and the culture influence all make me hesitate to make the decision of using 2nd life in my future teaching.