so i was thinking about our need to participate in an online professional development and i thought this would be an excellent opportunity to reflect on an experience i had earlier this year. I had the opportunity to participate in a test run of an online professional development community at Tufts university, where we used second life, the online community, as a location for professional development seminars and such.
i am going to start with the simple reality that after participating in this course i find that route of online professional development to be a little to clunky to effectively use. there were many things about the location in second life that were fabulous, the reality of being somewhere else, the selection of material, even the interactive method of grabbing resources was fabulous. there was even an outdoor ampitheater for avatars to attend online PD lectures.
the weaknesses though outweighed the positives, the simple fact that you have to install in essence a computer game limits the usefulness, in addition it completely forgoes including students in any part of the process because of the free and adult nature of the second life program. there just seems to be a multitude of almost as effective ways to accomplish the overall goals of the program without the second life software.
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