Posted Monday 15 March 2010
An invited audience will follow the "Learning Without Walls" lecture on March 17 in the online 3-D world while another group of students and experts will watch the lecture on a screen at the University's Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics. The speakers' presentations will be followed by a question and answer session. It is the first time a public lecture at Kingston University has been delivered through Second Life.
Dr Chris Hutchison said the lecture reflected the importance of Second Life in education; schools and academia currently make up the biggest non corporate group in Second Life. "There's a very vibrant virtual educational community," he said. "It makes sense that students, lecturers and researchers should be able to work with their counterparts around the world in Second Life, in a way that would be prohibitively expensive or impractical in real life."
Dr Hutchison, who has been teaching in virtual worlds since the late 1990s when he led the team that created the first international Master's degree course taught in this way, said the virtual classroom could have a positive impact on students' behaviour. "Students are less embarrassed about asking for help in a virtual world; they're more prepared to show me their work and ask advice," he said.
Dorette Steenkamp from Cape Town, South Africa, is the co-founder and executive director of a non-profit company called Uthango Social Investments which specialises in community and economic development projects. Uthango is the first African non-profit company with an active presence in Second Life.
The University's 2010 industrial lecture, "Learning Without Walls: Multi-User Virtual Environments For Training And Education", will begin at 6:15pm on 17 March at Kingston University's Penrhyn Road campus.
19 June 2024
17 June 2024