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.
Showing posts with label educause2008. Show all posts
Showing posts with label educause2008. Show all posts
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Educause: a comic interlude...
There is a great story by Dostoevsky called "The Crocodile." It is a longish short story of four chapters. It has been coming to mind recently. It especially comes to mind at conferences. It allows me to laugh at others and also keeps me humble whenever someone refers to me as an expert on anything. This is one of Dostoevsky's extremely rare funny stories. In the story, Ivan Matievich decides to go to the Arcade with his wife to see the crocodile that is on exhibit. He winds up teasing the crocodile and getting swallowed whole. A big farce ensues when his wife tries to figure out how to get him out - Who does she go to? Who has the authority over the crocodile? The owner? The state? And there is this horrific bureaucracy to get through. In the meantime, he is miraculously still alive in the crocodile and they ocassionally ask him to speak to see if he is still alive. The crocodile becomes more popular than ever before and people come from all over to hear the man speak from inside the crocodile. Eventually the man begins to believe that they are not coming for the oddity but because he really has something to say.
I see this story as a metaphor for media and politics. People often confuse access to the stage with having something to say. For some people, it can be a real trap. People are often in the positions they are in for many reasons apart from having any deep insights - they can be good at a dozen things and still not really be insightful people. They can be knowledgeable and have some good ideas, but lets have some humility! Maiamonides used to say "Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress." In education, no one says "I do not know," they say "Good question! I would say that the cross modal affordances of the matrices of these pedogogical dispositions are quite problamatic at this stage and will require further inquiry and research." Let's not take one another so seriously: journals, blogs, conferences - whatever your media, it can be your crocodile!
I see this story as a metaphor for media and politics. People often confuse access to the stage with having something to say. For some people, it can be a real trap. People are often in the positions they are in for many reasons apart from having any deep insights - they can be good at a dozen things and still not really be insightful people. They can be knowledgeable and have some good ideas, but lets have some humility! Maiamonides used to say "Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress." In education, no one says "I do not know," they say "Good question! I would say that the cross modal affordances of the matrices of these pedogogical dispositions are quite problamatic at this stage and will require further inquiry and research." Let's not take one another so seriously: journals, blogs, conferences - whatever your media, it can be your crocodile!
The Facts of Life in the High-Tech Age
The Facts of Life in the High-Tech Age
Session Details
Thursday, October 30, 2008
9:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
West Hall WE2
Session Type: General Session
Speaker(s)
* Moira Gunn, Host of Tech Nation and BioTech Nation, National Public Radio
Abstract
Moira Gunn provides a unique perspective into the wide field of technology by integrating her background as a software engineer, her early career at NASA, her current work at the University of San Francisco heading the information systems programs for working adults, and her many in-depth interviews on NPR Talk with the leading figures in technology. In addition, Gunn’s experience integrating podcasting, wikis, and more into the adult curriculum gives her insight into the nature of technology and what we can expect from it.
*********************************************
She says that she was one of the 200 people on Arpanet when she worked at NASA.
She is not going to talk about technologies but visions and attitudes about the future of tech.
Arcs, not trends in technologies - they all have a rise and fall
IT professionals are often forced to use the old technology long after its life cycle
How the arc of technology follows the arc of IT management.
The effects on IT management: They try to manage the old technology using what they learned from the last round of technology (cribbed from McLuhan?).
The previous attitude was all about control - because IT came out of the military. Control of technology was a power struggle in institutions. Small community colleges could handle the changes better - smaller scale. IT departments started to mesh into the telephony on campus because of modems. Personal computers began to change how they related to individual users.
All of this was a struggle between centralized control and the individual. She recounted a story about a nasa engineer who said that going up in the shuttle to fix a sattilite was a terrible idea because you are merely introducing another system that can go wrong.
She hates push technology such as Adobe updates (the catastrophe that is Adobe 10?).
Our dealing with server farms is now like what the old mainframe was like. We should not be concerned with control but with integration. Cloud computing allows us to gain the benefits of server farms without the "footprint." The "iron age" is over - computer services is off campus. IT management is meant to help us trust the systems. We had legacy systems and now we have legacy organizations.
Arc of information: what has lived through all of these changes, we have always had information.
Old Purdue college memories follow... She had a college chum who invented the wiki and he was not understood. This is related to the arc of technology. Our relationship to wikipedia is changing - it is as right as anything else out there. The same wiki that was once dissed and abused is now respected by Stanford.
Those who build the technology can never predict how it will be used. Innovation occurs whenever new technology gets in the hands of another person. She recounts the "beat inflation now" but it was actually called "whip inflation now." Ford asked people to call in and give suggestions for beating inflation which lead to the invention of the 800 number.
We can't control applications, hardware, or information. Cloud: Trusted third-party data storage, she then suggests 4th party encrypted back-up.
She is still focusing on the institutions of technology. "You resist the cloud at your own peril."
She discusses opensource - what is important about Linux is that Torvalds knew that if he wrote a kernal of an operating system that he would not have to pay anyone. He sent it out when it was 80% done and let his friends contribute. He rewarded them by liscensing the source code - created technology that people could make a profit from - it was an economic innovation as much as a technical innovation.
Command and control is no longer our friend.
More college memories follow...
There are professors who use notebook paper and those who use wikis - first to deliver information and now to share and collaborate with information. Students self-organizing their work.
Students are publishing what they want. But in the teaching process, it is a transformative experience.
She then plugs her book.
She then says that we are now getting fast readouts from genomes. We will soon be charged with protecting information that students are leaving everywhere. Some of the things that we are going to be dealing with is the genomics inovations being folded into tech.
HIPAA only protects your health records when they are in the care of a health care professional. Where is the legislation to manage cloud computing? Our laws will not catch up with the technology. An Eddie-Izzard-esque stream of rhetorical questions follow...ex-husband sailing story...how to ride comfortably in a sail boat. Information is the constant - let the technology roll around you.
Session Details
Thursday, October 30, 2008
9:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
West Hall WE2
Session Type: General Session
Speaker(s)
* Moira Gunn, Host of Tech Nation and BioTech Nation, National Public Radio
Abstract
Moira Gunn provides a unique perspective into the wide field of technology by integrating her background as a software engineer, her early career at NASA, her current work at the University of San Francisco heading the information systems programs for working adults, and her many in-depth interviews on NPR Talk with the leading figures in technology. In addition, Gunn’s experience integrating podcasting, wikis, and more into the adult curriculum gives her insight into the nature of technology and what we can expect from it.
*********************************************
She says that she was one of the 200 people on Arpanet when she worked at NASA.
She is not going to talk about technologies but visions and attitudes about the future of tech.
Arcs, not trends in technologies - they all have a rise and fall
IT professionals are often forced to use the old technology long after its life cycle
How the arc of technology follows the arc of IT management.
The effects on IT management: They try to manage the old technology using what they learned from the last round of technology (cribbed from McLuhan?).
The previous attitude was all about control - because IT came out of the military. Control of technology was a power struggle in institutions. Small community colleges could handle the changes better - smaller scale. IT departments started to mesh into the telephony on campus because of modems. Personal computers began to change how they related to individual users.
All of this was a struggle between centralized control and the individual. She recounted a story about a nasa engineer who said that going up in the shuttle to fix a sattilite was a terrible idea because you are merely introducing another system that can go wrong.
She hates push technology such as Adobe updates (the catastrophe that is Adobe 10?).
Our dealing with server farms is now like what the old mainframe was like. We should not be concerned with control but with integration. Cloud computing allows us to gain the benefits of server farms without the "footprint." The "iron age" is over - computer services is off campus. IT management is meant to help us trust the systems. We had legacy systems and now we have legacy organizations.
Arc of information: what has lived through all of these changes, we have always had information.
Old Purdue college memories follow... She had a college chum who invented the wiki and he was not understood. This is related to the arc of technology. Our relationship to wikipedia is changing - it is as right as anything else out there. The same wiki that was once dissed and abused is now respected by Stanford.
Those who build the technology can never predict how it will be used. Innovation occurs whenever new technology gets in the hands of another person. She recounts the "beat inflation now" but it was actually called "whip inflation now." Ford asked people to call in and give suggestions for beating inflation which lead to the invention of the 800 number.
We can't control applications, hardware, or information. Cloud: Trusted third-party data storage, she then suggests 4th party encrypted back-up.
She is still focusing on the institutions of technology. "You resist the cloud at your own peril."
She discusses opensource - what is important about Linux is that Torvalds knew that if he wrote a kernal of an operating system that he would not have to pay anyone. He sent it out when it was 80% done and let his friends contribute. He rewarded them by liscensing the source code - created technology that people could make a profit from - it was an economic innovation as much as a technical innovation.
Command and control is no longer our friend.
More college memories follow...
There are professors who use notebook paper and those who use wikis - first to deliver information and now to share and collaborate with information. Students self-organizing their work.
Students are publishing what they want. But in the teaching process, it is a transformative experience.
She then plugs her book.
She then says that we are now getting fast readouts from genomes. We will soon be charged with protecting information that students are leaving everywhere. Some of the things that we are going to be dealing with is the genomics inovations being folded into tech.
HIPAA only protects your health records when they are in the care of a health care professional. Where is the legislation to manage cloud computing? Our laws will not catch up with the technology. An Eddie-Izzard-esque stream of rhetorical questions follow...ex-husband sailing story...how to ride comfortably in a sail boat. Information is the constant - let the technology roll around you.
Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future
Thursday, October 30 8:10 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.
Featured Speaker: Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between
Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future
West Hall WF5
* Sarah Robbins-Bell, PhD Candidate, Ball State University
Today's technology enables users to form and join communities of common
interest to learn and share information. In opposition to the privileged
learning spaces of higher education, social media encourage learners to
seek out their own answers and construct knowledge as a community rather
than as individuals. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Second Life offer new
learning spaces, but how do they fit into the learning expectations of
institutions?
____________________________________________
Schools and Social Media all offer:
Dialogic communication allows for more community, exchange of ideas.
Social media technologies allow everyone in class to have a voign
Social media creates new ways to learn without the communities and structures created by institutions. Self-motivated people with some critical literacy can replace the kind of learning that institutions provide.
What is the educators role in a world where production and consumption of information is now:
She told an IT person that they need to be the people that create faculty self-support structures to support the new ways of learning. She said that she does not believe in "digital natives" but students today have a voice in all arenas of their live except school. Give students ways to collaborate better.
An audience member pointed out the irony that she is talking about independent learners and self-direction, yet she is getting a Phd from the very institutions that dole out the status quo. Another asked about the "campus commons that we all grew up with" - Ha! some students worked full-time while going to school. We are really talking about privilege. Another audience member talked about her film class that used expensive film stock instead of digital - again it is a class of students that - many would perfer the opportunity to just express themselves .
Notes: I have always thought that online learning and alternative education are revolutionary. Schools are a privileged silo, a barrier to learning for those without the social background or money to succeed in the academic world.
Featured Speaker: Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between
Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future
West Hall WF5
* Sarah Robbins-Bell, PhD Candidate, Ball State University
Today's technology enables users to form and join communities of common
interest to learn and share information. In opposition to the privileged
learning spaces of higher education, social media encourage learners to
seek out their own answers and construct knowledge as a community rather
than as individuals. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Second Life offer new
learning spaces, but how do they fit into the learning expectations of
institutions?
____________________________________________
Schools and Social Media all offer:
- Self expression
- Sharing enthusiasm for common interests - self-organized communities
- Access to experts and personalities
- Enhancing person and professional reputation (school- the rep of the college. The online world- your portfolio in social media
- Build and share skills - "You suck at photoshop"
- who we can reach
- how many people we can reach - we used to have to go through a school to meet mentors
- our methods of expression
Dialogic communication allows for more community, exchange of ideas.
Social media technologies allow everyone in class to have a voign
Social media creates new ways to learn without the communities and structures created by institutions. Self-motivated people with some critical literacy can replace the kind of learning that institutions provide.
What is the educators role in a world where production and consumption of information is now:
- Democratic
- Amateur
- Distributed - information is crowd-sourced
- Educators are no longer the Gatekeepers of knowledge (this is the value of ins
- The role of educators is changing
- how to learn in an information economy (Henry Jenkins)
- the importance of contributing to a community (Mike Wesch's webpage)
- how to relate as more experienced co-creators rather than employers
- we need to serve as guides as students shape their paths
She told an IT person that they need to be the people that create faculty self-support structures to support the new ways of learning. She said that she does not believe in "digital natives" but students today have a voice in all arenas of their live except school. Give students ways to collaborate better.
An audience member pointed out the irony that she is talking about independent learners and self-direction, yet she is getting a Phd from the very institutions that dole out the status quo. Another asked about the "campus commons that we all grew up with" - Ha! some students worked full-time while going to school. We are really talking about privilege. Another audience member talked about her film class that used expensive film stock instead of digital - again it is a class of students that - many would perfer the opportunity to just express themselves .
Notes: I have always thought that online learning and alternative education are revolutionary. Schools are a privileged silo, a barrier to learning for those without the social background or money to succeed in the academic world.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom
Wednesday, October 29 11:40 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the
YouTube Generation in the Classroom
Room W230CD
* Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
* Renee Hobbs, Professor, Temple University
* Susan Simon, Senior Learning Technologist, Dartmouth College
* Anu Vedantham, Director, Weigle Information Commons, University of
Pennsylvania
Undergraduate video creation at American University, Dartmouth College, and University of Pennsylvania engages students from a campus-wide mashup contest to courses in several disciplines where videos replace research papers. New-media assignments have ramifications for copyright and fair use, for viral marketing, and for best practices in media education.
------------------------------------------------------------
Session Link
Links are to the examples and includes presentation links. The students made the videos in the lab or at home. Freshman writing seminars at Penn use video projects in small groups. They use three minute films. Groups of students use voice commentary over video to discuss race in films. They also create podcasts: interviewed restaurant owners about the best philly cheesesteak. The students are creating mashups based on anthropological studies. They have an annual mashup contest. Penn reading project: the students are required to read a book before they come back on campus over the summer. There is now a national video contest. Students are spending hours on these videos and sharing them on YouTube - there is a high level of engagement and student ownership of the learning. Teaching them to do this allows them to be critical viewers of the media and therefore critical citizens - conscious of how consent is manufactured. Cautions: they provided a lab, training, and equipment - there is no pressure on faculty - faculty do not have to train the students. How to assess? There is a link to this conversation on the webpage.
Susan Simon: They have a Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. She showed the Student Video Projects at Dartmouth website. They have an online form to help the faculty create assignments. There are also collections of previously built assignments and the student final projects. The site contains testimonials from students about the projects. "Visual argument" assignments. This website is very thorough - includes assessment, handouts, training, everything we would need at a community college to create assignments like this. They do a video project survey - we can view the questions. She discussed the benefits of group learning.
Rene Hobbs: Questions of copyright. Founder of the "Media Education Lab" at Temple University and Center for Social Media. Creating a code of best practices in copyrighted media. She asked "What is the purpose of copyright?" She said that the Const. says it is for promoting creativity. There is too much confusion in educational use guidelines. This is why they are creating this "code of best practices." "Transformative use is fair use" and favored by the course. Five principles Code of Best Practices in Fair Use - they claim that we can use any copyrighted material for educational purposes.
Peter Decherney: Talked about the DRM issues. DRM limits media tighter than the law would call for. We do not properly understand the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They proposed a class of works to be exempted. Proposed an exemption to college libraries for DVDs in their collection. Copyright as censorship. The exemption was granted to educational use in the classroom by media studies film professors. 2009 will see a number of exemption proposals.
Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the
YouTube Generation in the Classroom
Room W230CD
* Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
* Renee Hobbs, Professor, Temple University
* Susan Simon, Senior Learning Technologist, Dartmouth College
* Anu Vedantham, Director, Weigle Information Commons, University of
Pennsylvania
Undergraduate video creation at American University, Dartmouth College, and University of Pennsylvania engages students from a campus-wide mashup contest to courses in several disciplines where videos replace research papers. New-media assignments have ramifications for copyright and fair use, for viral marketing, and for best practices in media education.
------------------------------------------------------------
Session Link
Links are to the examples and includes presentation links. The students made the videos in the lab or at home. Freshman writing seminars at Penn use video projects in small groups. They use three minute films. Groups of students use voice commentary over video to discuss race in films. They also create podcasts: interviewed restaurant owners about the best philly cheesesteak. The students are creating mashups based on anthropological studies. They have an annual mashup contest. Penn reading project: the students are required to read a book before they come back on campus over the summer. There is now a national video contest. Students are spending hours on these videos and sharing them on YouTube - there is a high level of engagement and student ownership of the learning. Teaching them to do this allows them to be critical viewers of the media and therefore critical citizens - conscious of how consent is manufactured. Cautions: they provided a lab, training, and equipment - there is no pressure on faculty - faculty do not have to train the students. How to assess? There is a link to this conversation on the webpage.
Susan Simon: They have a Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. She showed the Student Video Projects at Dartmouth website. They have an online form to help the faculty create assignments. There are also collections of previously built assignments and the student final projects. The site contains testimonials from students about the projects. "Visual argument" assignments. This website is very thorough - includes assessment, handouts, training, everything we would need at a community college to create assignments like this. They do a video project survey - we can view the questions. She discussed the benefits of group learning.
Rene Hobbs: Questions of copyright. Founder of the "Media Education Lab" at Temple University and Center for Social Media. Creating a code of best practices in copyrighted media. She asked "What is the purpose of copyright?" She said that the Const. says it is for promoting creativity. There is too much confusion in educational use guidelines. This is why they are creating this "code of best practices." "Transformative use is fair use" and favored by the course. Five principles Code of Best Practices in Fair Use - they claim that we can use any copyrighted material for educational purposes.
Peter Decherney: Talked about the DRM issues. DRM limits media tighter than the law would call for. We do not properly understand the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They proposed a class of works to be exempted. Proposed an exemption to college libraries for DVDs in their collection. Copyright as censorship. The exemption was granted to educational use in the classroom by media studies film professors. 2009 will see a number of exemption proposals.
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.
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.
Notes from Educause: Ramachandran
I am interested in Ramachandran and neurology lately because of claims made by George Siemens and others that there is a direct correlation between how the brain physically functions and how we learn (neurons connecting = learning). I think that there is a lot of psychology that happens between someone firing a neuron and writing an email. There are things that are happening in the brain (including neurons firing) but things like memories are distributed through out the brain. George sent out an interesting article on this called "Memories Are Made of This."
There are 100 billion neurons in the brain and there are ten thousand connections per neuron. The different possible states based on these connections out number the elementary particles in the entire universe. Despite that complexity, we can isolate particular parts of the brain by function based on what we learn from people who have had accidents that slightly damage the brain (strokes or accidents).
Different areas of the brain have different functions but that is different than making a judgement about what is happening at the level of the neuron.
Ramachandran studied the phantom limb syndrome. This happens because the brain maps out the nervous system in a particular part of the brain. The brain remaps the hand into the another portion of the brain. A physical event like amputation doesn't just change the body but rewires the brain. Learned paralysis carries over into the phantom limb. He had shown the connection between visual feedback and relieving pain and paralysis in phantom limbs. Used a mirror in his experiments - having patients move their functioning limb in a mirror and the patients are able to remap the state of their phantom limb with the illusion.
There are things called "mirror neurons" "empathy neurons" - they fire when we reach out and grab something but they also fire when we watch someone grab something. There is a malleability of connections. There is someting in the brain that tells us not to feel pain when someone else is poked but that goes away when we have phantom limbs.
He also studied "synesthesia." Theorie about why people see colors is that they are crazy, on drugs, or something that someone has done in childhood, or that they are being metaphorical. He says that it is a concrete phenomena in the brain - one in 50 are synesthetic. Color and number synesthesia is the most common and the areas are right next to one another in the brain. There is increased "white matter" between the areas. It is genetic, why? Our genes are involved in pruning excess connections in the brain in fetal brain development. In higher sysesthetes days and weeks are colored.
Poets, novelists, and artists are good at creating metaphors - making connections - linking concepts in the brain. Artists are 8 times more likely to be synesthetes. Not everyone has this.
The metaphorical allows us to engage in abstraction. Vision, hearing and touch section of the brain are involved in creating metaphors and abstraction.
Are there unique brain structures from other animals? We do have specialized brain structions the are of the brain that engages in cross modal abstraction. He called personality a neural phenomena.
My sense from this presentation is that we are still a long way off from making generalized statements about teaching and learning from brain imaging studies.
There are 100 billion neurons in the brain and there are ten thousand connections per neuron. The different possible states based on these connections out number the elementary particles in the entire universe. Despite that complexity, we can isolate particular parts of the brain by function based on what we learn from people who have had accidents that slightly damage the brain (strokes or accidents).
Different areas of the brain have different functions but that is different than making a judgement about what is happening at the level of the neuron.
Ramachandran studied the phantom limb syndrome. This happens because the brain maps out the nervous system in a particular part of the brain. The brain remaps the hand into the another portion of the brain. A physical event like amputation doesn't just change the body but rewires the brain. Learned paralysis carries over into the phantom limb. He had shown the connection between visual feedback and relieving pain and paralysis in phantom limbs. Used a mirror in his experiments - having patients move their functioning limb in a mirror and the patients are able to remap the state of their phantom limb with the illusion.
There are things called "mirror neurons" "empathy neurons" - they fire when we reach out and grab something but they also fire when we watch someone grab something. There is a malleability of connections. There is someting in the brain that tells us not to feel pain when someone else is poked but that goes away when we have phantom limbs.
He also studied "synesthesia." Theorie about why people see colors is that they are crazy, on drugs, or something that someone has done in childhood, or that they are being metaphorical. He says that it is a concrete phenomena in the brain - one in 50 are synesthetic. Color and number synesthesia is the most common and the areas are right next to one another in the brain. There is increased "white matter" between the areas. It is genetic, why? Our genes are involved in pruning excess connections in the brain in fetal brain development. In higher sysesthetes days and weeks are colored.
Poets, novelists, and artists are good at creating metaphors - making connections - linking concepts in the brain. Artists are 8 times more likely to be synesthetes. Not everyone has this.
The metaphorical allows us to engage in abstraction. Vision, hearing and touch section of the brain are involved in creating metaphors and abstraction.
Are there unique brain structures from other animals? We do have specialized brain structions the are of the brain that engages in cross modal abstraction. He called personality a neural phenomena.
My sense from this presentation is that we are still a long way off from making generalized statements about teaching and learning from brain imaging studies.
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