Digital Urban Blog: Universities using Second Life? Don't believe the hype

In an interesting post, Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith in the Digital Urban Blog writes:

"To be honest its hard enough to get academics to write blogs – even by those in the realms of Internet based research – Second Life it seems is still a step too far for many."

I agree with this statement. As intellectually compelling as the concept of MMOW* teaching is, in my own minimal ventures into Second Life, I found that it took far too much effort for me, let along my far more technologically-challenged students, than it is currently worth. Reports from those using Second Life at my university (Northern Arizona University) are the same -- a lot of effort on the teacher's part, and a major challenge for their students. These barriers could change in the future, of course, but for most teachers in the trenches that future is quite a ways off.

*Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds

[Digital Urban is written by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, aimed at examining the latest techniques to visualise the city scape via digital media it covers a lot of the work going on at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London.]

Read/WriteWeb.com's list of Web 2.0 Apps for Students

The popular Read/WriteWeb Blog has posted a fairly long list of Web 2.0 tools for students. Many of them have been covered in Web 2.0 Teaching Tools in the past, but there are also quite a few that I have not reviewed. In particular, I have always been a bit skeptical of the value of online Notetaking and Mindmapping applications. But from the comments to the Read/Write Web blog, I guess there are students who use and like them.

Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students

University Librarians Emotionally Debate Web 2.0

From: The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: 'Everyone's Tripping and It's All Free':

Calling upon Mr. Lanier’s notion of “digital Maoism,” Michael Gorman, the former president of the American Library Association, depicts Web 2.0 as “an unholy brew made up of the digital utopianism that hailed the Internet as the second coming of Haight-Ashbury — everyone’s tripping and it’s all free.”

Mr. Gorman's stinging critique of the undermining of academic authority by user generated Web 2.0 (e.g., Wikipedia) is met by equally stinging responses and discussions by blogger librarians. Links can be found in the original article, or here:

• Two posts on Britannica Blog by Michael Gorman
• Jaron Lanier, who previously expressed similar concerns in a much-discussed essay
• Two Academic bloggers have challenge Mr. Gorman’s arguements