Second Life: A New Platform for Education

Abstract

Second Life supports rich communication, virtual collaboration, and 3-D content creation. The Second Life synthetic world has great potential for teaching and learning. There are hundreds of universities all over the world pay attention to the engaging teaching and learning aids and effective research tools in Second Life. For faculty members to adopt Second Life and take advantage of innovative features in their classes, however, they must first get to know Second Life and become familiar with features that are relevant to their own teaching. This is not a trivial process for many university educators. This paper provide not only guide to getting start in Second Life, but also the quality of it. First it gives an overview of the Second Life for educational purpose. Then it discusses the method to use Second Life for education by an educational case. Finally, it describes the barriers probably encountered in the process of using Second Life.