Disruptive Tech: SL and its Potential as a Learning Medium

How do we reinvent the landscape of education? We limit ourselves as educators by relying on textbooks and other static technologies. To fully realize the learning power of collaboration and immersive environments educators at all levels can harness the disruptive technology inherent in Second Life (SL). Not only does SL enable a student to experience learning in exotic locales, it also provides a learning medium that is perfectly suited for connectivist pedagogy (Thomas, 2010). With a small investment of resources an interested educator could create a learning space for students throughout the world, thus opening their sphere of influence and developing cross-cultural exchanges.

Though not specifically created for education, SL is a world where individuals can effectively “live” beyond their physical self. Someone who has a disability that limits his or her movement in real life (IRL) can visit places in vivid detail that may otherwise be out of reach; or enable a person with hearing impairment to communicate without the need of an interpreter or any special applications. Artists and designers can create works of art and sell their wares in SL’s virtual economy. One can even have a job in SL and transfer their earnings IRL and make a decent living doing so. In the decade or so that SL has been in existence it has established a new frontier for virtual worlds and helped to create a place for Residents to shape in whatever way they choose (Linden Research, n.d.).

Second Life is not a perfect platform for education and much of its content is tailored towards adult audiences, though a separate “grid” exists for teens. Also, the educator who chooses to use SL has to have a fair amount of technical knowledge and SL is not nearly as stable as it needs to be for daily instructional events. Despite some of the drawbacks, SL is setting the standard for the way instructional design may look in the future and altering the way we think about developing the necessary skills for students to be successful in the Digital Age. SL still has a few years before it is outmoded by a more reliable platform combined with the functionality of realistic 3D technology.


References

Linden Research, Inc. (n.d.). About Linden Lab. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from, http://lindenlab.com/about

Thomas, H. (2010). Learning spaces, learning environments and the dis‘placement’ of learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(3), 502-511. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00974.x.

Rhyming and Sharing

I think back to the wonder of kindergarten show-and-tell and how sharing a new discovery not only made me feel proud, but also helped me to understand the world a little bit more. Sharing for me was more centralized and I could only reach a few other kids within my immediate sphere. Now, I could get on the phone and call someone (if I had their number) and talk about my new discovery, but it was hard for them to visualize its appeal without seeing it firsthand. As I got older, I was able to use a Polaroid camera to capture a picture and share it with my friends and mail it to some family members, which was handy even though it took a long time to get feedback. In the mid 1990s Technology began to advance to a degree that I could now email or text someone a message and receive a response in seconds, even while I lived in Germany. Asynchronously, I could visit a discussion board to ask or answer questions and receive a response from literally anyone in the world. I could chat with someone in real time about any topic that was of particular interest to me. After awhile, I could even take a picture, scan it, and then send it to anyone in the world—this revelation was amazing and enabled me to learn and share more with others than any other time in my life.

Now technology has advanced to the degree where we can share anything, from the banal to the revolutionary in split seconds and added to the world collective memory. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are simple tools that have provided a platform from which to connect with one another and communicate.

The recurring rhyme in technology that I connect most with is tools to share with others. From smart phones to 3-D video conferencing systems, we are constantly improving on how we share and collaborate with each other. As Kelly (2007) foresees an interconnected web that shares all information with any end user, I see a level of sharing that is unprecedented in scale. Regardless of the type of information, whether personal of commercial, the notion of separate countries will begin to dissolve and a renewed global community will emerge.

Reference
Kelly, K. (2007, December). The next 5,000 days of the Web [Speech]. Speech delivered at the EG 2007 Conference, Los Angeles. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

The Internet or An Amalgam of the Past

Long before Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the internet, or even the telephone a technology emerged that would revolutionize communication. The technology which clustered from the telephone and telegraph: the fax machine. A fax machine used existing telephone lines to transmit data constructed from a scanned document to a receiver which in turn created a copy or facsimile of the document. The telephone allowed people to verbally communicate over vast distances and the fax machine added the ability to share written documents or pictures. Fax machines were not without their limitations and eventually, after the advent of the computer, a method for sharing computerized documents as well as other forms of information was developed.

Fax Machine
Enhances: Communication
Obsoletes: Telegraph
Retrieves: Document sharing and collaboration
Reverses: a system that allows for sharing video

ARPANET was developed to allow multiple users to network computers and share information. What began as a military program (like many great innovations), slowly grew into a technology that revolutionized communication. ARPANET allowed for the quick access of research and data which enabled scientists to collaborate and arguably promulgated more thorough scientific inquiry. However, to be used as a tool to grow commerce and develop a global community, ARPANET needed to evolve into something that anyone could use to share and access information.

ARPANET
Enhances: Communication/collaboration
Obsoletes: University libraries
Rekindles: Collaborative inquiry, research, and experimentation
Reverses: a user-friendly, less cumbersome system for networking computers

The internet is the culmination of technologies that have been developed since the printing press. The average person through unrestricted access to the internet can obtain and share nearly any kind of information in real time. From the collected works of Aristotle to Lolcats, the internet is an emerged technology that has both promoted the sharing of knowledge and created a record for future posterity. Eventually, the internet will be replaced by a more reliable and less “cluttered” version that connects users to information without the aid of a computer.

Internet
Enhances: Communication/collaboration
Obsoletes: Telephone, television, fax machine
Rekindles: Exploration and knowledge generation
Reverses: a more reliable system that connects people without computers

After reflecting on these three tetrads, I can see that the current internet has only been possible by the development of many technologies dating back centuries. Chains and clusters can be drawn from innovations that I had not thought of before analyzing the precursors to the internet.