My reading for this week is Students' Attitudes in a Virtual Environment. It examines students' experience and their attitudes to using SL in language learning. The result shows that SL has a positive impact on students' motivation of learning language. However, some students do not prefer it over traditional ways of group working, because many of them perceive SL as an online entertainment environment which is not appropriate for formal teamwork. The article also reports students' advices for improvements of using virtual environment for formal groupwork. For instance, 1) Restricting the behaviours to make it more formal when doing group work and collaboration 2)combining other collaborative technology advantages with SL 3)Stoping flying for formal occasion or academic use. 4)more business gestures categories for users to control easier.
Yanlin,
Cheers
Hi Yanlin,
ReplyDeleteYour chosen article is interesting. I was reading some articles about how does human behave in virtual worlds as well. Yes, people do behave differently between in-world and out-world. As the article mentioned that even tutors put efforts to remind the students the code of conduct of SecondLife, still some students wouldnt follow the rules.
We could look further about the learning behavior in virtual world, it would help us to identify the benefits of virtual learning.