Educators Survey Noted in New World Notes
CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Dec 10, 2008 09:56pm
We can file this in the “self horn tootiing” department, but what the heck? This is our blog after all!
Thanks to the keen eye of Professor Beliveau (aka Ed Lamoreaux), we found that the NMC 2008 Educators in Second Life Survey has been mentioned in New World Notes in a story on If Second Life Educators Aren’t Talking In SL, Who Is?:
The story mostly hinges on what is observed as a relative low reported use of voice chat by educators, which contrast to larger numbers suggested by the company that provides the voice communication service in SL.
Most striking to me is the question above. When asked if they use VOIP communication in Second Life to teach, only 22% said “Often”, with 62% less frequently, and 16% not at all.
Assuming the survey is generally reflective of educators in SL, this is utterly odd.
The comment responses seem mostly speculative in responding; so we are curious to hear your ideas why voice chat might be used infrequently by educators.
but we are happy to see the quote:
Thanks NWN!
Story filed under: Campus Headlines
Tags: survey
See all
stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)
Feeds
2 Comments Add your own
1. Liam Fry | January 21st, 2009 at 1:47 pm
While voice in SL can be one-to-one or ad hoc groups, its more general use is as “open room speaking.” SL lacks the visual cues that come with real world speaking - so this makes such “open talking” a bit unnatural.
Visual cues aside, there are two major hurdles, IMHO, that impede fully embracing voice by users in a teaching/learning/group situation: 1) the lack of sufficient technical savvy which can often lead to poor sound quality or various feedback issues for an individual’s transmission, and 2) underdeveloped social etiquette in the context of hands-free VoIP. The latter tends to introduce such things as “back channel talking” (say, to someone else in the physical room), amplified eating/drinking noises, scrapes and scratches as the mic is scuffed across the face or mouth, … These sounds can be jarring to an in-progress discussion/presentation and often are very distracting.
I’m not surprised by the survey’s VoIP results. Depending on the situation, VoIP in SL can “get in the way” as much as cell phones and pagers do in a movie theater. But we’re learning.
2. Education | February 10th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Education
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed