Divorce in "Second Life"

Ok, I agree this is not about online teaching and learning. But, at the same time, it is yet another marker on how much online activities and cyberlife have become complex.
Against such a background, it becomes obvious how much we could come across as the metaphorical dinosaur if we keep resisting online teaching and learning. It is there; deal with it, is the message, I suppose :-)

CNN:

A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

"I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as "avatars" and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars.

Taylor said she had caught Pollard's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: "I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."

The couple's real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities: "He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life."

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

It felt so strange reading this at the CNN website, and not at the Onion's :-) Truth can be stranger than fiction, indeed.

Not simply a matter of putting the syllabus online

I think I taught my first online class about nine years ago. My wife beat me to online teaching by three years, I think. And, she taught calculus, which meant spending hours composing the equations using MS-Word's equation editor. Oh those godawful days with modem connections and slow computers!

Even that many years ago, we clearly understood that online teaching was not simply providing the syllabus and notes online, and then everything being on "autopilot." The reality was quite the contrary and we spent a great deal of time interacting with students and evaluating their work. It took a while for learning management systems to rise up to that reality (I personally don't care for those systems.) The CEO of Blackboard, Michael L. Chasen, says:

When the industry started, it was about how to put a course online. Now it's about how to put the whole educational process online. It's about teaching and learning that take place in the classroom environment as well as outside — people putting their communities online, people putting their student services online. That's just a different problem than people were trying to address back when we started the company in 1997.

Which then opens up immense possibilities for something like Second Life--to become an online learning environment. No wonder then that my wife is exicted about a NSF-funded grant at their college that will underwrite developing and offering courses in Second Life!