A discussion took place yesterday on the Second Life Educator’s mailing list that quickly turned into a fairly heated argument with each side stating their positions. I truly got to the point where I just didn’t even read the emails anymore and deleted them immediately upon their arrival in my inbox.
The discussion began when a fairly new educator to Second Life asked how she might go about giving her students a quiz in-world. Someone responded back to her fairly quickly in what was, in my opinion, a judgmental tone asking why she’d want to do that in Second Life vs. just on the web. He talked about the use of the virtual space and how we should really just use the best tool for the job and maybe that’s the web instead of Second Life if you’re wanting to give a quiz.
In response, another educator called him out on that and referred to several comments he’d made before about these same things and who was he to judge what would be best?
Fast forward about 4 hours and about 30 emails later with an awful lot of unnecessary back-and-forth and now I’m deleting emails on the subject.
I see the point that it really is important to use the best tool for the job and maybe that means that giving a quiz inside Second Life is not the ‘best’ way to do something. However, things like Sloodle (from what I understand) were developed for this purpose. Believe me, I’m all about using the best tool for the job and I’m a firm believer in the fact that what might be the best thing for me to use, might very well NOT be the best tool for you. That being said, I also completely value the immersiveness of Second Life and virtual worlds and if we’re teaching students in that environment, then I think that sometimes it’s also beneficial to assess their learning in the same space without removing them and testing them on the web.
My frustration with the discussion stems from this - Why are we so quick to judge and tell people what they should be doing because *we* think that’s the best way. Why are we not recognizing that every person has different methods and goals they want to accomplish and why are we not helping them, unconditionally, to reach those goals?
2 responses so far ↓
Kip Yellowjacket // May 2, 2008 at 8:26 am
Hi Shannon,
That heated back and forth you experienced regarding in-world quizzing is familiar to me as well. I haven’t actually experienced heated discussion on the topic, but I have had discussions with educators who questioned the need or desire for in-world quizzing tools. I think that some educators like to one-up other educators by suggesting they know how to best make use of the SL platform. They see more traditional quizzing formats such as multiple choice as a an old-school approach and therefore an unnatural match with SL and other virtual worlds. While there may be some truth to this, I don’t quite see why some feel the need to debate it. It comes across as arrogant and non-constructive. A programmer friend of mine assisted me in making an LMS-integrated quizzing tool for use on the Second Life English SIM. We felt such a tool would be useful for basic (by no means thorough…just a snapshot) ESL assessment and general quizzing. We also welcomed the challenge of integrating a tool with an LMS (Claroline…similar to the Sloodle project). In my mind, such in-world quizzing solutions can be viewed as “SL extras”. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Thanks for the interesting post. See you in-world!
micala // May 2, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Thanks Kip! I completely agree. It really did feel like a “my way is better than your way” sort of argument and frankly, that’s not doing anyone any good. There are a million different ways to use all of these tools and I think sometimes people forget that their way might not work for someone else. Thanks for your comments!
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