October 5, 2006
Text Messaging Student in "Second Life" and one million free phone minutes giveway for residents
They may be college teachers and students, but they're also pioneers - exploring strange new worlds that exist nowhere on Earth. Where students communicate by text messaging and take their classes and field trips take place only on computers, using an online digital world called Second Life. From The Christian Science Monitor.
"Some 60 schools and universities have set up shop inside Second Life - most in the past year. They join a population that includes real-world business people, politicians, entertainers, and more than 800,000 other "residents" of the virtual world.
... While virtual classrooms lack certain advantages of real ones, they are advancing online teaching methods, especially in the way they can make students thousands of miles apart feel like they've really gathered together for a class.
"The typical experience in a distance-education class is to go to a website, watch a video, [and] correspond by e-mail ... usually just with the instructor and even then only intermittently," says Rebecca Nesson, a Harvard law school graduate who is teaching the class along with her father, law school professor Charles Nesson. "Second Life gives us the capability to really have a classroom experience with the students."
The students, who communicate via text messaging, can even have private one-to-one asides, just as they might in real life. "
As a side note, I just read in Game Industry, that Vivox, a leader in integrated online voice communications, announced the start of its promotion to give away one million free phone minutes and enable live voice communication to the 835,000 residents of Second Life.
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