Doggie Biscuits and Education

The SecondLife Redux, as a request for 'that SL is not a training tool. May I beg the community for some help? Please respond to this post with use cases, examples either real or theoretical, of people learning in Second Life' - is inherently flawed.

Quite frankly, the dependency on use cases demonstrates that there is disparity between education and learning - a disparity which is not new, but which should not be used as the basis of discussion if incorporating both. The use of a request for use case scenarios does not reveal the opposite, if it did then asking what the use cases are for people not learning in SecondLife would be something which will fill in the void. That is most certainly not the case.

Oops. We fell down the black hole again.

It falls back to the disparity between training and learning. I can train a monkey, a dog, and even a cat (maybe). In that, I can 'educate' an animal because I can give tangible results; if I tell a dog to sit and it sits - verily, the dog has been trained. If I train someone to solve a quadratic equation and they demonstrate that they can do so, verily, they have been trained.

But what have they learned?

They learned by exercising some training that they received, they may get a doggie biscuit or a good grade. Certainly, this does not mean that training or education is not needed. What it does demonstrate that dependencies on the system of training are created, and for a system to evolve into something better (other than 'profoundly' new ways to get doggie biscuits and/or good grades), less dependency on the system is needed. What we learn should be telling people what the borders of knowledge of humanity are, so that these borders can be pushed against. But there's no doggie biscuits there that can be seen. Oh dear. It's the people who don't care much about the doggie biscuits as much as the exploration of new frontiers who push the envelope - some may have had a steady supply of doggie biscuits, some not. Most dogs who have never seen a rabbit will still chase the rabbit. But some of them prefer doggie biscuits. Less work, you know.

So what is the role of education? I think that's what is really being discussed. Is it the handing out of use case scenarios as doggie biscuits, or is it about the new stuff people are learning?

So the use case for educators would be to investigate what people are learning instead of dismissing things without direct knowledge (even with requests from the community).

Learning. I learn something new every day in SecondLife and in real life. Seriously. And not one person has offered me a doggie biscuit, thankfully.

I prefer crunchy peanut butter cookies, and cannot remember the last time I had one.