Normally I wouldn’t write about signing up for a service, but Second Life pulls one of my privacy pet peeves in their sign up procedure and they do a very crummy job of it. Well, if I’m going to write about the good, I’m going to write about the bad.

On the first registration page, they ask for your birth date and give a reason for requiring the birth date.

Please provide an accurate birthrate for your own protection. We ask your birthrate to verify your account if you ever forget your Second Life name or password.

I came across an article from the BBC titled “Virtual worlds threaten ‘values.’”The substance of the article is based on film-maker Lord Puttnam’s keynote speech at the Virtual Worlds Forum.

Puttnam expresses concern about children “think[ing] of themsleves as not much more than consumers” noting that many of the virtual worlds for children are created and run by toy makers. Unfortunately, the BBC article doesn’t go into the substance of Puttnam’s arguments, but anytime a politician starts talking about morals you can expect a lot of hot air. However, Michael Parsons, writing for the Times Online, was impressed by “how evolved Lord Puttnam … [was] in [his] understanding of the scale, scope, and importance of this new medium.” I would be very interested in seeing the full text of Puttnam’s speech, but I haven’t had any luck finding it online.

There are a number of people teaching languages in Second Life. Over the next few months, I plan on observing, and possibly taking, some language lessons in Second Life. When I do, I will most certainly share any interesting uses, ideas, and advantages that Second Life has for language students.

Today was not about learning languages, though. It was about learning how to do stuff in Second Life.

What’s Exam English?

Exam English is a website for people studying or thinking of studying for an English proficiency test. It has materials covering TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, BULATS, CPE, ECPE, LTE, CAE, FCE, LTE, ECCE, PET, and KET exams. Exam English describes the different elements of each exam and has online practice tests simulating some parts of each exam.

What Exam English Does Well

Exam English is probably the best place to go when you are deciding which exam to take. It provides samples that cover every major international exam.

The finishing touches are being put on the site. The last few little details are being looked after. Everything is finally coming together. Except for one thing: the Search parameters.

The problem with the parameters in the Search menu is that they aren’t all technically accurate. Have a look at the Course Format parameters in the screenshot. The first one, Webcam Lessons, is the one that I am having problems with and keep changing

So much for being original…

Inside Higher Ed published a news piece today on Wikipedia in the classroom titled “When Wikipedia Is the Assignment.” In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for students studying on their own and Add Some Spice to Writing Class With Simple English Wikipedia for teachers because I hadn’t seen anyone advocating students writing for Simple English Wikipedia.

A while back I wrote a couple of posts (Learning to Pronounce English Words with the IPA and More About Learning Pronunciation) about how to use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to learn English pronunciation. In one of the posts I recommended the University of Iowa online IPA chart for English students. However, the University of Iowa chart is not perfect. For one, it is intended for phonetics students and, as a result, it is not very easy to use and navigate without a solid understanding of the IPA and phonetics.

I have started getting TOEFL data ready for the Ask Olli index. I did a teaching TOEFL course about seven years ago, but I have never taught it so I decided that I need to refresh my knowledge.

So, after reading a bit about the different TOEFL flavours now available, I started looking for an online TOEFL practice exam.

The Course Management System (CMS) developer Blackboard released a report on online learning for k-12 students. I found it through an article posted on The Journal titled Study: Students Want To Learn Online.

My immediate reaction was deep skepticism—of course a study sponsored by one of the leaders in Course Management Systems finds that students want to learn online. But I decided to get the report to see if it has any lessons to apply to online language learning.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been getting various notices about two new MMORPGs for preschool children by Disney and Nickleodeon. The first notice that I found was on paidContent.org. Then a couple of blog postings announcing the new services and pointing out that they aren’t anything new. All this buzz left me wondering a couple of things.

Didn’t Disney Just Buy an MMORPG for Kids?

Yes, they most certainly did: Club Penguin for $700 million. Club Penguin is for children aged 6-12. Disney’s new offering, Bunnytown, will tie-in with a Sunday-morning puppet show for preschool children.