Second Life and Me

As we've gone through edtech 531 this semester, we've encountered several virtual worlds for us to explore and hypothesize how our lives (either personally of professionally) might be affected if these worlds were included in them. When considering my personal life, I just don't see it. I prefer my world in its real form, in fact I love it. These trips into the virtual worlds are fascinating, but only for short-term experiences, similar to watching a television show. Certainly not to replace bits of my life as I currently live it.
Minecraft was interesting, but the game part of it was frustrating, where I had to avoid creatures intending to 'kill' me. I just wanted it to end. Second Life, however, at first use, was far more pleasant. It had similar elements in that youtry to create, explore, and associate, but it had less of a feel of a video game, and more of a feel of a life experience. Will I forever use it? No, not for personal use. The experience in the class setting is definitely anticipated, but further use beyond the course, as I sit here now, seems far-fetched at the least. In my classroom, however, I can definitely see a further use. Minecraft would seem more likely because Second Life has too many 'adult' arenas, but integrating a virtual world seems a brilliant idea. Why would I implement something in my classroom that I personally wouldn't use? I guess I feel that life experiences are critical for high school students, and the more I can present, the more I can have students engaged with, the grerater their experiences will be, and therefore the greater their education is.

Mobile and Gaming Bridges into the Virtual World

I grew up in the 1980s, watching technology evolve rapidly from a unique anomaly in the world to the main driving force of everything economic and developmental. The Apple 2C was like we'd never seen, the Commodore 64's possibilities seemed endless, and Atari/Intellivision/Coleco grabbed our generation and glued us to our television screens. But we never viewed these technologies as any kind of "virtual world." They were fantasy experiences, board games we plugged in, or faster typewriters. As the years passed by, I personally sort of lost touch with the technological world. A stint in the military and several years of 50-hour work weeks of fairly hard labor kept me from diving back into the worlds that were being created in the '80s. I did see, however, others around me experiencing the rapid growth of the technological world. Video games got shockingly more realistic, people communicated with each other through electronic messages not letters, and professors were demanding I use something called a "word processor." And most interestingly, the younger the person was that I encountered, the more likely he or she was to be fairly fluent in the languages of these new-fangled technologies. These "youths" were doing more and more with these computers, and then suddenly they all carried around phones to connect each other immediately. I wondered why one would want such a thing at first, but it didn't take me long to see where the world had gone, and I needed to catch up quick. We all (basically) carry virtual worlds with us wherever we go, and the younger generation is fully immersed, deft with usage, and expecting us "elders" to understand it and adjust.
The classroom demands today that we bring the "virtual" inside it. The students demand it. It is the way of the world, and we as educators would be severely remiss if we ignored that reality. It isn't a matter of possibilities at this point, it is what directions within are we taking. The delivery of information needs to utilize modern technologies, and the processes of these technologies need to be understood as well.
My classroom is already using iPads on a daily basis. Lessons are done on them, student work is completed on them, and my textbooks are slowly being replaced by them. From here, I see the classroom becoming the device(s) as well. A student could ask me a 30-60-90 right triangle question virtually, with a real-world design in mind, on a Thursday night. Or a statistics student running a survey project through a Twitter account.
I feel caught up to technology right now, and now I want to be part of the further transformation. My students in geometry no longer watch me lecture at a whiteboard in front of them, they watch me use a virtual whiteboard on an iPad at their own desired pace. And soon, we'll develop within a virtual world simulations with the very topics we've used and learned since well before those magical 1980s.