EDUCATION BLOG

It's nice to see a mainstream business outfit like Forbes - home of the annual Forbes 500, and a business person's bible - give some column inches (is that the term for it on the Web? Or should it be "scroll depth?") to SL education. This also shows that education in SL may actually be gaining some traction in the business establishment.

A co-leader of a school in Germany has set up "Second Life English" and since February, the site has had upwards of 75 visitors per day. The island is an ESL resource center for both students and teachers.

"The richness and multitudes of environments seemed to offer fantastic opportunities for exposure to language," said the teacher, Kip Boahn.

Boahn both creates holodecks with a variety of learnings within them, and also has used role-playing to teach ESL students new language skills - though the one example he cites does seem a tad silly:

"I once dressed up as a pirate, had a ship and everything. I was kind of rough on the students," he admits. "I put some of them in cages, and had them confront language in a shock-and-awe kind of way. They seemed to like it, and they learned all sorts of new words, like 'loot' and 'booty."

The article also includes a somewhat interesting sidebar that Forbes (it has to be a list at Forbes, doesn't it?) calls the Top 10 Life Lessons From Gaming.