Di’s E-learning Experience

Over the last couple of weeks I have been doing the online short course in Spanish as part of Assignment 3 for this subject.  At the same time I have been looking at some articles on virtual classrooms and their advantages.  It seems to me that the virtual class room lends its self the learning of languages.

I was interested to find that Second Life has recognised this and established a virtual language lab called Languagelab.com.  They are at present running this program for English language classes for free and asking for feedback.  There are future plans to run a similar program in Spanish.

I think that the development of virtual classrooms in an online virtual classroom is the next step in online language learning.  I am looking forward to when Second Life develops it’s Spanish site.  Learning a language in a virtual environment will give the learner a more realistic experience and a virtual immersion in the language.

Some interesting additional resources on this are:

Avatar English:  Language Classes in SL, http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/09/28/avatar-english-language-classes-in-sl/

Norman Cole, The Virtual Language School for university students, http://www.uoc.edu/humfil/articles/eng/coe0303/coe0303.html

Micheal Erard, A boon to Second Life Language Schools, http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18510/

Howard Vicars, Language Teaching Gains Second Life:Virtual Worlds Offer New Methods to Teach Languages, http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/secondlife.php

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