Second Life Essay

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Recommended: Influence of technology in education

1 Introduction There is no doubt that technology is playing a major role in our lives and this role is growing bigger each day. As for most aspects of life, technology has its effects on education through many ways like using computers and internet and other gadgets to facilitate the process of learning. This paper focuses on a specific field of implementing technology in language learning which is known as "Second Life" (also referred to as SL).
Second life is basically an online virtual world that provides interaction and communication between people through their avatars (Aydin, 2013). Second Life was founded by Philip Rosedale (a.k.a. Philip Linden) in 2003 and was hosted and operated by Linden Lab of Linden Research, Inc. Second life's virtual world is populated with content that is formed and possessed by its residents. The use of Second Life in education within the online virtual world increased in 2006, around 100 universities and more than 225 member universities, research centers and museums deal with Second Life (Calongne, Hiles, 2007).
This virtual world was not actually intended for language teaching or learning; however it has the environments that are parallel to the (real world) and can be manipulated by students for educational purposes (Carter & Elseth, 2009). In other words, second life offer learners opportunities …show more content…

But once the user overcome this, there will be worthy places to visit while more are being established day after day, some are educational sites, but it might take hundreds of hours to acquire the skills in scripting and it also takes a lot of time to build anything there. In other words, teachers and students in second life cannot achieve anything that they could not achieve in normal websites. And it is more difficult to use as

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