An existing narrative

However an educator entering this milieu already possesses a narrative to apply to their involvement. Teachers and students both have very strong preconceived ideas about how this narrative should be performed. Does this perhaps account for the proliferation of rather conventional lecture-theatre-style teaching spaces on SL campuses?

Livingstone and Kemp in their paper on the “Massively Multi-Learner” [19] make the analogy between current educational activity in SL and the early days of cinematography. Early filmmakers, like educators in Second Life, “translated their existing models directly and without concern for the new abilities of their equipment.”

A time and a place

In terms of online learning Second Life introduces real time face to face, or at least avatar to avatar, interaction. There is a clock in the corner of the SL interface, the in-world sun rises and sets, in order to meet with others you need to specify a time. This means that it is an environment that naturally promotes the event as a method of interaction. Whether this is a synchronous real and virtual world occasion or an entirely in-world encounter, the one-to-many presentation seems to be an obviously practical use of the technology. Acknowledging this facility it is easy to understand that some educators frustrated by the asynchronous nature of most online communication see an online outlet for their lectures in this virtual world.

As Ondrejka [20] observes “as a communication medium, the web has three significant disadvantages: it is generally asynchronous, it lacks place, and it is descriptive rather than experiential....the collaborative and synchronous nature of atomistic construction is a natural fit for teaching in digital worlds.”

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[19] Livingstone, D., & Kemp, J. (2006). Massively Multi-Learner: Recent Advances in 3D Social Environments, Computing and Information Systems Journal, 10(2).

[20] Ondrejka, Cory R., (19 January 2005) Changing Realities: User Creation, Communication, and Innovation in Digital Worlds. Social Science Research Network.

The Berkman Center at Harvard Law School

An outdoor lecture theatre

A room at SDSU