The Affordances of Second Life for Education - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 98

the students as a way of making their ideas
visible and demonstrating understanding,
and can often help students “see” informa-
tion in new ways, and also can provide ac-
cess to authentic simulations of complex or
dangerous situations that would be other-
wise impossible to experience.

tion of the understandings of technology, effective
teaching, and subject matter content (Mishra &
Koehler, 2006).
TPACK understandings are not easy to gain,
requiring considerable attention to the professional
development of teachers, who need “opportuni-
ties for cycles of learning about new approaches;
developing strategies they can apply in their own
classrooms; trying out new practices, preferably
with coaching and feedback; assessing results; and
revising their practices in light of these analyses”
(Wiske, 2006; p. 37). Fortunately, technology
offers support for these critical needs, and so we
can add a fourth central affordance of technology
for teaching and learning:

• Scaffolds : technologies can be used to

support complex student activities by pro-
viding tools that can reduce the cognitive
load of certain aspects of a task so students
can concentrate on those aspects that are
most important for learning.

To fully appreciate the affordances of tech-
nologies for education, however, we need to go
back to Ashburn's (2006) summary of meaningful
learning and notice that in addition to the five
attributes described by Jonassen, Ashburn added
“content centrality” as a critical feature, draw-
ing attention to the importance of the big ideas,
essential questions, and methods of inquiry that
are important in each subject area and that “en-
able students to relate classroom learning to their
lives outside of school, to connect what they are
learning to what they already know, and to apply
their learning in other contexts” (p. 13). To use
technology to make significant differences in the
learning environment, it is necessary not only to
know how to use technology in general, but also
to understand the subject matter at a deep level
and, even beyond that, to understand how tech-
nology can be used in specific ways to support
the learning of a given subject matter (Wiske,
2006). For example, spreadsheet programs might
be useful in teaching the relationship between
equations, data, and graphs, but knowledge of
those mathematical concepts and how they can
be modeled is required to use the technology ef-
fectively in teaching. Teachers need, therefore,
not only understanding of subject-matter, and of
how to use technologies, but also what has been
called “Technological, Pedagogical, and Content
Knowledge” (TPACK), which lies at the intersec-

• Professional Development : In addition to

these three general affordances for learn-
ing environments, technology also af-
fords considerable possibilities for helping
teachers in any given subject area to learn
what they need to know in order to embed
technologies effectively into the learning
environment.

To summarize our discussion thus far, to justify
the costs of educational technology, we need new
understandings of what kind of learning are most
important, and new conceptions of the kinds of
learning experiences and environments that can
produce these outcomes. Meaningful learning
provides a general framework for thinking about
the connection between pedagogy and outcomes.
Technology can help create suitable learning en-
vironments by affording possibilities in four main
areas: (1) communications and collaboration; (2)
representations and simulations; (3) scaffolding,
and (4) professional development.
Now, let's look at the specific ways that Second
Life and other virtual environments offer these
affordances and some of the ways that they might
be used to support meaningful learning.