Familiar classroom structures in Second Life offer a return on investment it takes to recreate them, particularly if they are modeled after RL structures. Those familiar buildings express identity; provide structure that’s inevitably needed on occasion in a formal learning arrangement; and at least establish a general and identifiable gathering place for faculty and learners.

Familiar classroom activities - like a lecture with an *effective* powerpoint - have a place in Second Life. Again, that activity provides structure when/as needed; it’s an effective way of communicating information when appropriate and necessary (talking with pictures is better than just talking); and, it’s a familiar activity that represents a good starting point. Those activities can also add value though through increased sense of identity and community for and among learners, and it can provide a jumping off point for other activities, and the backchannel communication in Second Life can always be fairly vibrant. It can *lead* to other things.

What I do have significant concerns about, as I expressed in a recent blog entry Stop Quizzing Students in Second Life, is requiring learners to use a drastically more complex tool that presents new challenges (for the learner and the hardware/infrastructure they’re using) to accomplish a task that can be much more efficiently and reliably achieved with an existing tool (LMS). A SL-based quiz will have a different interface that requires new knowledge and understanding of the new tool (SL) to successfully participate; that’s likely going to be true for the faculty as they learn to use a more cumbersome “backend” necessary to create and administer the quiz., and that will also be true for learners who will be seeing a new quiz interface.

Are there other benefits to using quizzes in Second Life? We learn to quiz in new ways? I just don’t see quizzes leading to other meaningful activities that will actually leverage the Second Life environment. Certainly there are exceptions, but generally, I expect that quizzes are an end point and a way of accruing grades; even if they aren’t I believe they are rarely used as meaningful formative assessment beyond a “reading check” type activity. Even if they are used in a really meaningful manner, there are other tools better for that job and better for learners to accomplish the task. I’ve always thought of it as an instructional technologist’s version of “Occam’s Razor” – use the simplest technology capable of accomplishing the desired effect and learning task.

In summary, I don’t believe that everything we’ve done in the past has to be abandoned; there’s value in transferring familiar spaces and activities from traditional environments into Second Life. I just don’t believe quizzing is one of them; the time spent by faculty to use the tool does not add much value to the learner experience; in fact, it’s very likely going to take away from the time faculty would spend exploring the unique capabilities of Second Life.