Week 12 Evidence of Learning: My adventure into Open Access

I wanted to experience open access for myself, so went looking through the Directory of Open Access Journals. I found a very intriguing article on the role Second Life (SL)in distance learning. In A Second Life for Distance Learning, Jace Hargis discusses the virtual world of Second Life, a "three dimensional virtual world entirely built and owned by its resident" (2008). His argument is that as education once changed from oral to literacy, it is now changing to a form known as "electracy", which Wikipedia defines as "the kind of 'literacy' or skill and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds" (2007).

Though it sounds bizarre, Hargis's main point is that this is simply another facet in which learning may occur. His argument is that learning already takes place in many informal settings, such as correspondense, electronic, distributed, etcetera. Education through Second Life is yet another informal setting that allows people to learn. Indeed, numerous universities, one hundred and nineteen at the time that this article was written, have a presence in SL. More than one hundred islands have been sold in SL for educational purposes. Hargis also notes that there are issues to be developed in SL, such as assessment, how to maximize the positives of such an interactive learning environment, etcetera.

To not lose focus on why I read this article in the first place: I found it through a simple search on the Directory of Open Access Journals. I wanted to read about something related to distributed learning, and searching for those key words brought up a wealth of resources. It was incredibly easy to use and I will definitely continue to explore it as a resource.

Reference
Hargis, Jace. "A Second Life For Distance Learning." Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education 9.2 (2008): 57-63. Web. 9 Apr 2010. .

Wikipedia. (2007). Definition of electracy. Downloaded on January 15, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy .