Hi Math Bear!
> A good point, but the richness of the virtual enviroinment requires that > you invest a significant amount of time to learn its many features on even > a basic level. Still, the first time I got on Second Life I did invest > a significant amount of time doing the various erxercises on Orientation > Island and by the time I got to the MainLand I could get around and manage > the environment. Learning to master Second Life is pretty much identical to > learning to master an online video game such as World of Warcraft, an > environment which is fairly similar. It may be a little scary for mature > adults to > do this but kids will take to it as naturaly as ducks to water. They won't > need extra motivation. in practice, most > That may be true if they want to play, but once it becomes a "teaching environment" I think you'll find that the ones who wouldn't already be doing stuff like WoW or SL will be ... less inspired, shall we say. Along these lines, you may be interested in Keith Devlin's book, "Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games As a Medium for Learning" on this subject - I suspect you would resonate with a lot of what he says, though I think it would not work for all students, any more than current pedagogy does. the extra effort to help out the total newbie (or "noob"). Most young > people have no trouble socializing and are flexible and inquisitive anyway > and usually quickly get up to speed. Older people are more likely to be > standoffish and may experience great difficulties and frustration and are > likely to give up if they don't adequately pepare on Orientation and Help > Islands. I don't think you fully realize what a huge part of the whole > learning experiece the Second Life environment is. How long does it take > for a student to learn the in's and out's of a new school? I don't > Right, but again this is for the *motivated* student. Or faculty member. One does have limited time. One of the big shames about education is that one is often stuck in a local minimum with respect to (potentially useful or even ground-breaking) new ideas; the amount of time needed to not just get acquainted with Sage or IBL or Second Life or online grading systems or whatever, but also to become a truly excellent teacher in this new pedagogy (whichever it is) is often large enough that one would have to severely neglect one's current duties to do so. I could totally imagine someone taking a sabbatical to learn how to do a whole course in SL, but for most people that is probably not the wisest use of their time unless they are truly passionate about it (and at the university level, unless they can make at least a small pedagogical article out of it - which you may find interesting for a journal like PRIMUS). I have colleagues who will never use a computer in the classroom, not because it's not a good idea, but because they are extremely effective teachers who would likely suffer for many semesters until they grew accustomed to it. However, don't stop updating us, either! Perhaps with more paragraph breaks for readability, though :) There are lots of people who read these messages who never respond, but definitely read them nonetheless, and ideally we want someone *already using SL for teaching* (which there certainly are out there) who wants to use mathematics software in it to think of Sage, and to find these discussions; your experience will be extremely valuable for them. > most active in Second life) have full sims and virtual schools set up. > There are lots of educational institutions involved in one way or another > on Second Life. Sage Math works perfectly in Second Life with the sole > exception of interactive 3D JMOL graphics. But you can work around even > that easily by clicking on a gadget that opens > By the way, see some recent posts on sage-notebook for HTML5 versions - like https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/sage-notebook/kkkSIBDMpvs - kcrisman -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-edu/-/GSZwEx74RlcJ. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
