Entertainment or Education: SL and being distracted
I was reading a reflection made by a friend, Jason on the possible advantages and disadvantages of Second Life. In particular, his comment on bringing together entertainment and education interested me. So in response to the following text from Jason’s entry…
“However, not all of it are advantages, because I believe that educators will have just as much a challenge to create a virtual classroom that might need to aesthetically or graphically appeal to their group of learners, otherwise students may become distracted by the entertainment elements of the virtual worlds instead and end up skipping classes either ways. At the same time, not all students may enjoy the virtual element and might in fact prefer learning through more traditional methods.”
… I wrote the following reply …
“Yes, I agree with you about virtual worlds possibly being too entertaining. I spent probably a whole hour (maybe more) in Second Life designing my avatar for assessment three. And while it was a great experiential learning experience, it wasn’t really all that necessary. I think that it actually distracted me from going through the rest of the set learning stages as I would get stuck doing one part of the tutorial for ages, adjusting the avatar.”
