Jess’ E-Learning Blog

I was just reading a post by Suemin about the negative aspects of virtual worlds and left the following comment  

“I agree with you about recruitment, how can you be sure that the applicant hasn’t hired someone to act as them in the interview? An interviewee always has to act a bit when in an interview, but the scope for ‘acting’ is so much larger in a virtual world. And what happens if a brother or sister hijacks your avatar and runs rampant: The actions of your brother or sister are going to be attributed to you.

I have to disagree with you, however, about the high cost. Sean mentioned that video conferencing is actually more expensive than buying and maintaining a place in a virtual world, like Second Life. And while training and upgrading soft/hardware costs are definently necessary while operating a virtual world, they are also necessary for things like videoconferencing. Same thing for the OH&S; if you’re in front of a computer all day, does it matter if you’re typing a report or talking to your boss in a virtual world?”

^_^ VICTORIA ^_^

In answer to your interest in the group assignment about our ‘blogging for learning’ companies all being IT companies… some IT companies don’t like it when their employees blog. According to Zawodny, an employee at Google was actually fired in 2005 – mere weeks after he was employed – because he was blogging about his work at the organisation.

Also, there are companies who are not in IT who use blogging as well. For instance, General Motors have blogs for each area of their products. While this is a purely corporate blog and therefore has less learning capability for the organisation, it is an excellent PR tool and can be applied as a learning tool for customers.

However, I think that in general, an IT company would be more open to using e-learning tools because they would have a greater understanding of and appreciation for technology.

There was a guest lecturer at my last e-learning class, Sean Fitzgerald, who discussed the use of virtual worlds as learning tools, particularly the virtual world of Second Life. Once I knew what Second Life was and saw some of the ways in which learning was occuring in Second Life, I realised something … … I had blogged about the possibility of this a few weeks ago!!! Okay, so Maple Story is an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, from memory…) not virtual world, but the concept of learning online in an interactive, social manner is the same.

Learning in Second Life is more advanced than I expected it to be. While I expected there to be social aspects to the learning, which there was, I did not expect the level of interactivity with the world itself. For instance, I did not expect to be able to view the creation and progression of a tsunami from under the water.