Roger sent this over to me and is an interesting direction for the BBC in the UK.
www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6290585.stm
“A virtual world which children can inhabit and interact with is being planned by the BBC.”
I am not sure what this ‘channel’ will allow children to actually do … even less clear are educational implications or spin offs, if any. I suppose it is big media trying to capture what people are already doing on the web and morphing it into another, familiar medium …
It does raise a question for me about capturing what people (e.g. undergrad students) are doing for entertainment purposes and harnessing them for educational purposes. What are the implications of taking social or entertainment-based activities (e.g. social networking, blogging) and importing them into more formal and structured educational environments. This is part of what we are thinking about in the Net Gen and Digital Natives projects.
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kgray
// Feb 5, 2007 at 12:03 am
Taking social or entertainment-based activities … and importing them into more formal and structured educational environments is one way of looking at the question. But let’s not overlook the possibility of turning the tables, and importing education into the other environment. For example, Nicholas Johnson suggests that “Second Life would be a wonderful environment for a professor or fellow students to have disease symptoms that the rest of the class must diagnose” in The Educational Possibilities of Second Life http://digitalunion.osu.edu/Research/CurrentProjects/EducationalGaming/Second_Life.pdf
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