Pros And Cons Of Muves

Multi – user virtual environments or MUVE’s are being used more often nowadays. They are a means of helping users examine digital objects and explore different environments. It also serves as a means of communication with other MUVE users and online agents. Users select an avatar to serve as their agent in the environment. The main purpose of MUVE’s is to promote conceptual understanding by placing students in difficult situations where they have to find a solution.

Globalisation of education

The way that education is imparted to students from teachers is different in every country of the world. The ease with which students are able to attain information nowadays is growing everyday all because of the advancement of technology. Today, we are

• 53% of children ages 12 to 18 have their own television sets.

• 5.5 hours/day are spent using some form of media by growing children in the United States. (coursepack culture chapter)

While we have discussed the pros and positive effect that technology has had on education, now we will discuss a few cons as well. As technology – based information has had a profound effect on the way people can now educate themselves, the latter also had its demerits. Like most great advancements in modern technology, the internet’s purposes have been altered and are being used for nefarious acts such as plagiarism, invasion of privacy and content theft leading to academic dishonesty in the realm of education. Plagiarism is nothing new to the academic society, as nowadays students tend to ‘copy and paste’ from the internet in order to either please the teacher or to get rid of the assigned work. Furthermore, technology such as the internet has now created opportunities for students to become better cheaters and to digitally copy information from web based sources resulting in new challenges for the educators. Plagiarism may be of many kinds for example direct plagiarism, self-plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism and accidental plagiarism, of them basically meaning copying someone else’s work and taking credit for it. Plagiarism might not be illegal officially but all academic institutions have some sort of disciplinary action against it. Students might feel that plagiarising is not stealing because they justify their views on plagiarism based on how non credited information is presented daily by the media on