Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

Penn State Great Valley is using Second Life for several courses this fall. Read all about it!

I'm starting to believe for educators that SL works best when experiences are structured. Dumping students into SL and asking them to just poke around will not lead to a positive experience. For Great Valley, they are able to use one of  the the build in affordances (a virtual economy) to structure learning. For other disciplines, it's harder. You have to build the experience via scripting and careful planning. That's tough. It takes time and expertise that most educators just don't have.

One approach - for now - is to use students. Hire them to gather this expertise and use it to create what you need. In the future, I hope we'll have a library of things we can use and share to cut development time down. Keep your fingers crossed!