If you remember a while back I had posted on Virtual Learning and had mentioned Second Life as one of the less popular options, well...we gave it another go, as our lecturer was ill and we all attended from our own home.I'll start off by re-visiting something I had said in my earlier post, where I stated that you only get a chat box for communication. This isn't entirely true as I later discovered you can use audio. But this still didn't improve the experience a whole lot because instead we ended up having the lecturer continuously checking if we could hear him or not.
This all boils down to lack of non-verbal communication, because in second life you can't nod your head unintentionally or output a face expression. Without this non-verbal communication it is quite difficult for the person who is talking to determine whether his/her message is going across.
Apart from this, we also met with the same problem we had previously experienced of loosing focus quickly as everyone ended up flying around, attempting to build their own prims (which resulted to a mess of prims all over the place) and basically making a havoc out of the lecture.
Conclusion
Sometimes second life is advertised as a great place for education...well it's not! We tried it out and its not effective what so ever, a simple video conversation would be much simpler and would have done a better job as well.
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