Social Networking and Education at EduComm

I recently attended a presentation led by Sarah Intelligirl Robbins called, "A Futurists View of Second Life in Education ", at the EduComm Conference in Las Vegas. Sarah spoke about the future of education and how Second Life can be a useful addition to the traditional classroom. She also shared student's opinions regarding the potential conflict between self-driven social networking and institutional education. Here is a comment to one of her blog postings from Will Boyd, a Goddard College undergraduate.

"I think there are ways that traditional educational institutions can harness the power of collaboration and social learning to not only accommodate social learners, but to encourage and capitalize on the power of social learning. I hope academia stops seeing social technologies as threats and begins to realize the educational value of collaboration."

Second Life is a multi user virtual environment that is being used my many college campuses as a place where students can interact as a group on the Internet. You can learn about some of the various ways Second Life has been used for research in higher education here.