Two such contexts (and there are many others) are the mode of delivery of a course and the location of the students:Ĭ) face-to-face and in a country where the target language is spokenĭ) face-to-face but in a country where the target language is not spoken I believe that what has been missing in all of these discussions is the context.īefore we can answer this question about “added value”, we have to know the context in which someone (teacher, learner, …) wants to use Second Life or any other virtual world (or any technology for that matter). One statement or question related to the one above that I keep hearing is “ why use SL if we replicate real life activities?” And usually there seems to be agreement among many educators that this certainly isn’t the best use of SL. After all, if we have been spending so much time in SL, there must be something that we find is worth our time and energy, right? This made it impossible to come to terms with the seemingly simple question. I have read through the discussion several times and there was always this feeling that everybody was talking about a different aspect of SL relating to their own context but without really saying it. Firstly, I should actually be working on something else rather than writing a blog post … and secondly, in this form, this question cannot be answered in my opinion. I’m not going to attempt to answer it in this post. The same question was asked by Wlodekzimierz Sobkowiak during the EVO Virtual Worlds and Language Teaching session and generated quite a lot of discussion (you can find a collation of all contributions here) and again in our EVO session Teaching Languages in a Virtual World this year.
But SL-/virtual world-experienced teachers are also asking themselves this question and rightly so. Often it is a question asked by teachers who are not in SL and want an answer to this before they decide whether it’s worth spending their time on SL or virtual worlds. This question (in a more general form not related to ELT) crops up every now and then on the various Second Life educational or research lists or other SL education platforms and among among individual teachers.
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