King's Corner on SL in ED

One of my colleagues in education has posted this excellent piece on SL in education.

Imagine some ancient Greeks sitting around drinking ouzo and talking about the new-fangled teaching innovation.

“I don’t know,” says one, “I just don’t see how having 20 people sitting in a classroom listening to a guy talk can possibly be as good as walking around the hills engaging in dialogue.”

“It’ll never catch on,” says the other. “I mean, can you see Socrates standing at the front of a room like that? He’d choke on an olive pit first.”

His point (if I may paraphrase) is that while SL is inferior to live one-on-one human interaction, so is the one-to-many classroom. So SL isn't perfect - that means we need to ignore it as a teaching tool? No. It has its uses - and I'll let you read the article to find out more.