Language Schools in the New, Voice-Enabled Second Life

Second Life has finally caught up with every other immersive VR world (games) and will soon have voice capabilities. Entrepreneurs are stepping up and exploiting this new medium to offer interesting services like virtual language schools.

Technology Review: A Boon to Second Life Language Schools

Immersive language learning in a realistic environment with native-speaking teachers will soon be available online, in the popular virtual world Second Life. Starting in September, a language school called Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom."

I have to wonder, though, if this is one of those examples of good intentions gone very very bad. Isn't the whole idea of language immersion about gaining the deep, rich cultural and human context that language is embedded in? Doing it in a virtual space seems even worse than doing it in a classroom, where you are stuck for 90 minutes with a teacher and classmates. No logging off if you don't know what to say. You're on the spot.

Seems like a case of bad virtualization to me.