Point/Counterpoint Session: Virtual Worlds: Fad or Future?

Thursday, October 30 2:20 p.m. - 3:10 p.m.
Point/Counterpoint Session: Virtual Worlds: Fad or Future?
Room W209C

* AJ Kelton, Director, Emerging Instructional Tech, College of Humanities
& Social Sciences, Montclair State University
* Cyprien P. Lomas, Director, Learning Centre, The University of British
Columbia
* Sarah Robbins-Bell, PhD Candidate, Ball State University

The education industry has grown weary of the "next big thing." Technology
has promised much over the years, but have virtual worlds finally
delivered on the promise? This session will focus on the major issues
facing teaching and learning in a virtual environment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
These are my notes and NOT a transcription.
Second Life - why a proprietary product?
Cyprien: It is still modeling how to use virtual worlds
Sarah: Not comfortable putting eggs in one basket - we are seeing more open source worlds coming up - Croquet is difficult. These will let you learn how to teach in new ways and make you more comfortable in virtual spaces.
Cyprien: Difficulties of SL caused problems.
Sarah: It used to go down but there was a buy-in from users
How do we know that we are getting a return on investment?
Cyprien: Depends on your timeline. Creating faculty and student engagement when you look in the short time.
Sarah: You need to look at metrics of success. - if your goal is to create engagement or improve retention then your mesurements will be different.
What about the technical issues?
Sarah: If the tech people get in the way of teaching and learning, they need to be let go. It does not have to be installed institution wide. Rely less on IT - more on teachers and student learning groups.
Cyprien: Pedagogy first
What about the higher end technology requirements?
Sarah: Does not require the students to use the virtual world - students know what they are getting into.
How do you handle assessment? Should the virtual environment be assessed as a teaching tool?
Cyprian: That is a longer term goal - we are talking about emerging literacies.
Sarah: There are a couple of things we should keep in mind: we should play with them to see if there is an assessment value. What you do with the tool is what matters - we should assess the use of the tool. Assess them as communities and cultures as well.
Students in SL can take any form they want, communicate on the back channel - why would an instructor want to give up control?
Sarah: Why not learn to take advantage of this and learn to use this to learn about the students.
Cyprian: SL allows us to catch more people and different kinds of learners.
Why let the companies dictate what we use?
Sarah: Linden labs is pretty responsive.
Cyprien: There is a large element of play and flexibility. It is an on going iterative cycle.
Some people are not comfortable learning in MUVEs. Can you address learning styles?
Sarah: The models we use now do not accomodate all learning styles. We need to be cognizant of the ways these tools can shape learning. Let the students create projects that meet goals that suit their learning styles.
Cyprien: Learning styles need to be considered.
Are you aware of anyone using SL to model real world scenarios? Significant difference?
A discussion of the epidemic in WOW.
Sarah: There are epidemiology studies going on in SL: Loyalist College is doing this will heavy assessment. They got higher retention rates from their students.
How to deal with identity issues for purposes of assessment?
Sarah: We can't prove the avatar is the student anymore than we can prove it in any LMS. When she is in a face-to-face situation, she uses the notes tab on the student avatars.
Young kids are getting so used to using virtual environments...what do you think needs to happen...?
Cyprien: Once someone moves to a ne virtual world they do have to learn the new rules but they are able to take some of those skills and use them in the new one. The new students will have some idea about how it works from other games.
Sarah: Unless your subject matter is learning new software, ethnography, or virtual environments. A couple of weeks in SL for a class is too short amount of time. The tools are only as good as what they allow us to use. She sets aside one night for a "boot camp" - scavenger hunt, take pictures as they go.
Why would people call it a game? How do you overcome the game stigma?
Sarah: The environment is not a game scenario - no skills, points, conflict or goals. You can create games though.
What about portability to other worlds?
Cyprien: It is a concern.
Sarah: Each space has its own culture so something that is worth building in SL may not be something helpful for other worlds.
Immersive and engaging?
Sarah: Depends on how you use it. You ave to care to be engaged. I have been immersed in MUDs and they are just lines of text.
Cyprien: Being able to create and explore and being limited only by your imagination.

Assessing the Student Experience in Second Life

Wednesday, October 29 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 a.m.
Teaching and Learning: Assessing the Student Experience in Second Life
Room W230AB

* Tanya Joosten, Lecturer and Educational Technology Consultant,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
* AJ Kelton, Director, Emerging Instructional Tech, College of Humanities
& Social Sciences, Montclair State University
* Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Director of Academic Technologies, University of
Colorado at Boulder
* Wendy Shapiro, Senior Academic Technology Officer, Case Western Reserve
University

For several years, educational innovators have experimented with using
virtual worlds such as Second Life to enhance student learning. Though
many of these implementations seem successful, few have incorporated
structured assessment. This panel brings together practitioners from four
institutions that have conducted such assessments to discuss their
results. This session will be simulcast in Second Life.

************

I was surprised at how many sessions were here in Second Life. I am really interested in assessment in SL. We need to do this at Tacoma Community College. We use it mostly for a social learning space and as a simulator.

They played a film that introduced SL to those who are not familiar with SL.

Evaluating virtual worlds using social media theory with seven variables. Survey challenges - only two classes returned surveys. High degree of neutral responses. Failure to build online learning community. They did not have enough time to build the assignments (?). 50% thought is was a rich media experience. I will need to look at the numbers to really see how meaning full the statistics were.
http://umwsecondlife.wikispaces.com

Cleveland has 8 islands. Partnering with the city - museums, libraries and clinics. Classes, office hours and building. They discussed a digital storytelling course. They had a culminating experience in Second Life to show their work and discuss it with others. Gathering data on how many people show up and class reflections. They hire actors to be patients in clinical classes and they decided to do that in Second Life.
66 dental students involved in a study - a comparison of real life patients and virtual patients. They gave a lot of qualifications to their assessment!

CU Boulder: discussion of use of island. No real unity of their work. They are evaluating one course. Problems: cost, updating the program in the lab. It is best to have the person who is using SL "passionately" to do the assessment. Did not get access to the island until 2/3rds into the semester. They asked 5 questions and got three students to respond. There was a disconnect between the subject being taught and SL. They started to ask other students in other classes. The "assessment" is informal and includes emails to lab personnel.

The problems that they encountered - lack of structure and no connection to teaching and materials is a problem not only in SL but in face-to-face classes.

Faculty at another institution said that "they never set up a formal assessment process." His evaluations are based on two classes he taught. They had an undeveloped and a faculty developed island. They divided up part of the island to 22 parcels for faculty. Again, it is "informal assessment." Problems: overcoming technical issues. They are teaching science fiction in SL, two English writing classes, cyber law, and ed dept is using it for media in the classroom and meetings. Next year they will have better assessment. Hired 6 students to work 8 hours a week in Second Life. He says that it is easy to use as long as you have a good orientation. They need to be properly acclimated. When the tool is used just because it is cool it is not relevant. There has to be a reason you are using this particular tool rather than anything else. He used it as a virtual classroom - replacing the classroom experience. Students did not care for that. He asks "why assess one tool differently than any other tool?" Answer: this costs money, we should evaluate all the tools we use. Why not assess it when we evaluate other learning platforms.

SLED CC '08 Presentation

View the presentation at Slideshare to get my notes. This was my small contribution to "Training for Medical Professionals in Virtual Worlds" with John Miller et alia.

The Pedagogy of the Virtual

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: pedagogy virtualworlds)

Translation Technologies in Second Life

I was really thrilled to find the "Simbolic Translator" in Second Life ( Simbolic Translator: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cupo/102/120/36). About ten years ago, I worked with Lou Spaventa at Santa Barbara City College to help him use a MUD (text based virtual worlds) to participate in the United Nation's World Youth Day. We had people who were learning English from around the world all meeting in various "rooms." The rooms were listed by country and it was really eye-opening because we thought that all of the French people would be in the "France" room, etc. But it was much more dynamic and evolved that than. There were a lot of Egyptians and Israelis talking for instance, it became very political but all very positive. In a single day, a lot of friendships were made and email penpals made. It was a fascinating process. Lou Spaventa is an extremely dynamic and intelligent person. The technology, though, was a lot for him - probably most of us. It was very sophisticated for its time and Lou found it all very stressful. I see this all the time. The technology changes but our relationship to technology doesn't seem to change. It can be very stressful - it is new, complicated, resource-heavy, and you have to trust that a lot of people really know what they are doing to really make it work. And failure has to be an option. People today would probably laugh at that technology: terminal programs all logging in to a single server.

Anyway, in Second Life there is this program that will translate any text in and out of about 22 languages. It handles Asian, Slavic, Greek, Arabic and pretty much all of the romance languages. I have used it to communicate with Asian and French people and have invited some to participate in some of our projects at Evergreen Island. I think it is time to revisit an idea like "World Youth Day" but change it to something like "World Student Day" to include the wide-variety of ages that are represented in education. I wound up giving the creator of Simbolic Translator a thousand lindens which is about $5 American in Second Life. The creator, Tragix Wilder, made a big deal about my donation but I have paid for things in SL that did a tenth as much and work like his really deserves recognition.

Why reproduce buildings in a virtual world?

When first exploring Second Life, I asked that a lot. Here we have this fully scriptable, three dimensional virtual world and we are doing everything we can to reproduce the limitations of the first world (there is an old Zen master who laughs everytime I refer to Second Life as the "virtual world"). After working with instructors in Second Life and participating is some classes, I find that there are some bad reasons to create buildings and some good ones. The wrong reason is to re-create the brick and mortar classroom. Some hold class sessions in Second Life but using it as a virtual meeting is limited by the high tech requirements. Students often have to be on campus to take advantage of this as a meeting space. But creating assignments that utilize the familiar in different ways transforms a virtual meeting is to something more akin to theater. While working as an instructional designer on a courtroom simulation, I began to work and see the space more as a set designer than an instructional designer. I had been looking for courtroom furnishings in SL for months and there just does not seem to be much call for that. Harvard uses a virtual courtroom. I finally was satisfied that my own building skills would allow me to create rudimentary furniture. I have created a courtroom now that looks like it is made entirely from Ikea furniture but it is functional. It does not have to be perfect. I can get people in the right places and they get the idea about how it is supposed to work. The students will participate in the fiction with a willing suspension of disbelief because that is how they tend to approach all media, especially an avatar-based virtual world. Virtual space=theatrical space.

Why not Second Life?

I was just reading Kapp's blog where he says that we should be thinking virtual worlds, not just Second Life. I am all for that. I think that most of what constitutes learning in Second Life is not specific to the platform itself but in the possibilities of the virtual 3-d world. But the reason why Second Life is such a rich experience is because of all of the layers of junk (gaming, gambling, commercial brick-a-brack, etc.). It is a good education environment precisely because Second Life is not a purely educational environment. It is not even secondarily or tertially an educational environment. All of the teaching tools, scripting, and communication methods have roots in the undercurrent of gaming that propels the innovation in Second Life. This does not come from the platform but the people using the platform. I shudder to think what a 3-d world would look like that was created by and for educators. There would be a lot of forms to fill out. You would not be able to own land until you were tenured. It would only operate 35 hours a week and would be down all summer. You could teleport to other islands as instantly as you have received prior authorization from the vice-president for inter-island travel.

How Second Life Affects Real Life - TIME

How Second Life Affects Real Life - TIME

One of the more remarkable things about this article is that it is appearing in Time Magazine. I like seeing this in the mainstream press. The article looks at research at Stanford that explores how a person's avatar can effect them in "real" life. I am glad the behavioralists at Stanford are catching up. A great description of this process is already found in Carl Jung. One of the reasons that I think teaching works in SL is the phenomenon of projection and transference.

"The possibilities are — virtually — endless. Inhabit buffed-up versions of yourself to lose weight, cuter versions of yourself to gain confidence, or older versions to start putting money away for the future (that last one is being studied at Stanford now). "The most stunning part is how subtle the manipulations are and how difficult they are to detect," says Bailenson, "but how much it affects real life later on."

This research really holds up. Ever since I created an avatar in Second Life, I just get better looking everyday.

2008 Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching and Learning Conference

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2008 PNHETL Conference in Spokane. George Seimens was the plenary speaker. It was really good to hear him speak. It cleared up a lot of questions I had about his book. He had a section that talked about objects containing knowledge. And now I think he means the information in context of the objects use. Our philosophy instructor who came with us was politely quiet on the subject. I think Seimens is one of the most important writers in education right now because the field has gotten pretty calcified. He is a revolutionary and a catalyst. He eschews the typical layers of research references (although I consider him widely and well-read in the field) and actually gets down to describing what is happening in people's lives in our relation to information and what is happening in education.

Like his fellow Canadian, Stephen Downes, Seimens seems uncomfortable with virtual worlds. In his opening plenary, he made comments about how SL was "empty"; there is no one there. Downes also makes this comment. If you come to a brick and mortar college at 8:30 P.M. on a Friday night, it too will be empty, but we don't get rid of the school. Second Life is only really useful when there are people there. That is the whole point: it is actually a suite of communication tools that allow people to interact with one another and their environment in some very significant ways. His closing plenary included the statement "We do not need Second Life to provide games in the classroom" misses the point of using SL entirely. Educators in SL, and yes, there are thousands, do not see it as a game, but as a way to increase the interaction between the instructor and students, students with one another, and the students with the content of the course. Seimens did call it one of the more innovative uses of technology at the conference. He also called for administrators to support the innovators on campus and to reward their failures (that is authentic attempts to move technology and info management forward that do not always have buy-in).

Second Life for Educators

This is a presentation I developed for the State of Washington that is an introduction to Second Life for instructors who have never heard of it before. This is for those faculty members who you know would benefit from this but don't really know what it is. I made this using Articulate Presenter. I have more presentations coming soon on developing curriculum in Second Life and how to design assignments.

CIT2007 -- Second Life presentation & round table

These are photos from John Miller's presentation, my walk over the bridge, and the round table we went to. This was hard. There were so many interesting people, I was just stunned. It was great to make contact with people who I have known online and now get to meet in person.

The Best of Both Worlds: Second Life + Moodle = Sloodle! CIT2007

9:45 AM – 10:45
The Best of Both Worlds: Second Life + Moodle = Sloodle!
See how the world’s most popular learning management system can be linked to the most
popular 3D virtual world. Sloodle incorporates tools within Second Life that tie to a Moodle installation, allowing for in-world blogs that post to a website, chats between avatars and online students, and even in-world attendance tracking. Come learn how this exciting project started, where it stands now, and where it is headed.

D.I. von Briesen, Instructor, Futures Institute, Central Piedmont Community College, NC

Avatar: Icabad Vallejo

Used a flickr account at the beginning of the presentation – it was a collection of pictures from Second Life.

He opened the presentation with Radio Paradise in Windows Media Player.
Handed out a playing card that had the URL www.tropicalteachers.com

He discussed the importance of mood established by creating an environment – he used images and pictures to open the workshop to create an atmosphere.

They have a campus Island. He is offering office space for free for educators.

There are weekly meetings sloodle.

Question: how do you create a mashup between Moodle and SL? Why would you want to do this?

Second Life is good for:
1. Proximity
2. Emotional investment

Every Weds. 2:00 PM there is a developers meeting.

Jeremy Kemp at San Jose State headed up sloodle.

A mash-up actually has to use an API. Code that allows other programs to talk to one another.

Linden Labs made the code open source (the client not the server)

Question: How does a quiz happen in Second Life? Is it something that we should be doing in SL? Quizzes can be given some visual reinforcement.

There is a chat integration between sl & moodle. They use a chat logger. If someone was logged into Moodle, they can use this to chat with people in Second Life. This allows others who can not get into SL, are on a PDA, or a low connection speed.

He has a history instructor that gives extra credit for building virtual, historical sites.

Why would you want to give a slide show in SL? There is a sense of being and communicating in a space. There is a powerpoint that discusses this. But he says it is too long. The screens are going to be able to share from Flickr.

They are asking what is appropriate for teaching. An HUD for students should be able to reflect how people communicate in real time.

He considers Second Life as a 3-d web.

He used the Sloodle toolbar HUD (heads up display). User still has to authenticate into Moodle. The HUD has a blog and classroom gestures. The 3d world has a line of communication between SL & Moodle. HUD puts all the gestures one needs all in one place.

There are modules you have to install on Moodle.

Princeton just bought 9 islands.

We were at a place in SL called sloodleville (Sloodle Learning Center).

There is no connection between the assignments and the gradebook.

They want to create an in-world browser.

Virtual Classes in Virtual Worlds CIT2007

Conference Notes – The League for Innovation CIT 2007

Sunday, Nov. 11

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Virtual Classes in Virtual Worlds
Cathy House, Professor, Trukee Meadows Community College, NV
Travis Souza, Coordinator, e-learning, Trukee Meadows Community College, NV

They are using Moodle and Second Life. They are using SL in online courses. A real estate course and an art course use SL.

They gave a basic, step-by-step demonstration on how to set up an account. The description should have given more of an idea that this was going to be a basic beginners’ demonstration. They should have taken some kind of poll to figure out if anyone is using SL or not.

The hand-out gives me some ideas for creating our own tutorials.

Some pros and cons of SL will be discussed.

They showed ICT teaching materials

Methods for teaching:
1. Using webpages as objects of a wall
2. Static presentation
3. Watching videos
4. Infocards
5. Navigation maps (teleports)
6. PowerPoint and interactive white boards
7. RSS feeds
8. Movies
9. LMS
a. Angel
b. Moodle (sloodle)

They then went into “Who’s using SL?”
• Harvard
• University of Florida
• NYU
o Digital communication
• Suny
• Ohio University

There was someone here who is using Active Worlds and online games.

They then took us to the usual places Harvard and NOAA.

They went to www.simteach.com.
www.lynx.tncc..edu/sloodle