Second Life: the good, bad, and the ugly

This week we were asked to examine the virtual reality tool known as Second Life sparing nothing looking at the good bad and the ugly.

So lets start off positive and look at the good. Second Life can be used as a good tool for education in the way that it allows a teacher to be able to set up real world examples of things that students could not see otherwise. For example Second Life can be used as tool to provide the teacher a way to set up a virtual tour for their students of Ancient Rome.

However Second Life has many negatives in the way that it would take an extraordinary amount of time to build the virtual world of Ancient Rome as well as the fact that everything that one does in Second Life costs money even though it is at a much reduced rate to what things would cost in the real world being around $1 of real money equaling 100 fake dollars on Second Life. Second life is also bad in the way that it is an obsessive thing that you pour your real hard-earned money into buy things in this virtual world such as going to a U2 concert instead of actually experiencing such things in real life.

Second Life can also be very ugly. Second Life can consume peoples life where they are spending all of their time building this virtual life instead of actually living their own life. On Second Life people get married and divorced and there has even been cases in which people have found out their spouse on second life was married in real life and considered them an adulterer because they should divorce their spouses in real life before they get married in Second Life

Although Second Life can be awful and used improperly it also can have some redeeming point in education such that it can be used to illustrate places that your students could not have been able to go or see before even places throughout history. However I believe that the little benefit that you can get from it as a teacher does not outweigh the horrible nature of the program as well as the time and money that you would have to put into making a project like this in which the educator would put way more time into then the educational advances that they would get out of it.