Virtual Worlds and Latin/Greek

[Andrew Reinhard]

Have any of you explored the potential of using virtual worlds like Second Life as a supplement to classroom instruction for Latin, Greek, or ancient history and culture? How would you describe your experience, and how could it have been improved? Are you like one professor friend of mine who says, "who has time for this stuff?" Perhaps the mission is to make the technology indispensable so that students expect to use it and their instructors have already used it themselves. We must never stop learning about tools that can help us learn AND teach.

[Kelli Renken]

Wow! What a thought. I was planning to steer clear of Second Life, but, yeah, what a great way to go to school.

[Shawn Graham]

At Robert Welch University (v. new school, fully online instruction in Classics and Liberal Arts; can only offer 2 year associate degree at the moment, but the BA Classics is coming!), where we use the Moodle system, we are planning a simulation in Second Life for teaching our Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic programmes. And of course, being completely online means that all of our students are by definition distance students - so Second Life offers us a means to allow our students to experience the collegiality students at bricks-and-mortar schools enjoy.

[Lisa St. Louis]

Shawn and I are with Robert Welch University. Our site is at http://www.robertwelchuniversity.org. We'd love to take anyone from this site on tour at our site and have you see our Latin, Greek and Classical Civ courses.

Best wishes,

Lisa St. Louis

[Shawn Graham]

By the way, I have taken faculty interested to see for themselves the educational possibilities of Second Life on safari into this world... if anyone's interested, I can organize some more.

[Andrew Reinhard]

Hi Shawn and Lisa -- Pick a date/time and we can post the "save the date" here along with a meet-up SLURL for the safari. A tour sounds great, especially for those who are new to virtual worlds and how they can relate to education.