Second Life & Virtual Worlds in Education

I had originally planned to write about something else, but I'm going to save it for next week because I became extremely excited after our class this evening and Dr. Kapp's presentation on Second Life and virtual worlds.

My mind is going a mile a minute with ideas of the possible implications for education and teaching. I think the one thing that really got me going was when we were looking at the world created by Nickelodeon. 2 million kids !!??!! My first immediate thought was "Oh shoot" (insert your own word there :) ) If we thought it was tough as teachers to teach kids now that they are growing up with the Internet, and video and mp3 players and cell phones, etc. etc. What's going to happen when we get the virtual world generation !! It's scary from a teaching perspective, but it's also really very exciting. Imagine how much easier it could be to motivate kids in a 3D environment instead of the traditional Charlie Brown teacher standing in the front doing their "wa..wa..wa..wa...." lesson.

Once the excited part of me has a chance to imagine whole virtual classrooms in virtual schools with 30 avitars in a class, the practical reasonable side of my kicks in and wonders about the down sides to this. For example, keeping kids out of parts of the world they shouldn't be in (which is kind of a lot like trying to keep them out of myspace right now).

So my ramble so far brings me to my questions/thoughts of the week...Do you think is's possible to oversaturate today's students with technology...is there such a thing as too much technology (in the classroom)? and will there continue to be a place for traditional teaching methods in a technological world?