As promised, here are a few more blogs/sites that I read regularly that focus on using virtual worlds and Second Life in education. Even if you aren’t a teacher or in the education field, these folks work on projects that I think should be interesting to anyone who has an interest in life-long learning, and if you’re looking for something interesting to see or do in Second Life, these blogs almost always have something of interest:
In the last year, I’ve had my first “real” papers published. I’ve been surprised at the long lead times, and the even longer review processes, and even looonger publishing dates before these things see the light of day. In a time when I can publish the same material myself with the click of a button, and get nearly instant feedback from colleagues, and when technology, techniques, and tools seem to be changing so rapidly that what was news a year or two ago seems woefully out of date already, the publishing process seems.. convoluted and a little bit absurd.
I understand, of course, the importance of peer review, and the need for data to be verified, experiments repeated, and findings confirmed or rejected. I understand the long standing traditions behind academic publishing, and agree that there is a real need for quality control and qualified, expert evaluation of information. But is this really the best we can do in the digital age? I don’t think so.
I just read a paper today that talks about this, and I think it raises some interesting points.
They identify 3 fallacies and 3 principles that should be applied to modern peer review, and from the article, I think this is really key:
..simply placing something on the internet is not the same as “publishing” it. [..] A key insight that governs all of these principles is that quality is not an intrinsic component of the content of a work but rather a feature of how that work is valuable to a specific community of users: its context of use.
This reminds me of Henry Jenkins’ talk from ELI earlier this year, What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies (it’s a good talk, worth watching the video archive). A given wikipedia article may NOT be high enough quality to serve as a reference for a chemist, but 9 times out of 10, it IS high enough quality to give basic information for the rest of us non-chemists. And it can serve as a useful tool for teaching students about how “knowledge” is created, disputed, transformed, and disseminated. Context matters.
And of course, when we talk about new digital media, we haven’t even gotten into how to do peer review of, say, learning objects in 3D worlds like Second Life. We’ve taken a stab at creating some criteria for the Second Life Education Community Conference 2008, but it’s a first iteration of something that I hope to see become much more refined, and evaluating the content without knowing the context makes the job that much more difficult.
This is a topic I’m just starting to explore, so if anyone has pointers or resources, I’d love to hear them.
In thinking about that post and the responses I received, I started to think about what exactly “informal learning” with social media looks like for me, and Igori’s comment led me to break down my personal social media use into the various toolsets I’m using. Each communication tool seems to represent a different kind of “head space” to me. In reality, I’m using many many software platforms, widgets, and technologies, but I think it can be broken down into a few broad categories.
Gmail is my nerve center. All the sensors, accounts, message boards, subscriptions, notices – all of my “stuff” out there on the internet alerts me when certain events take place that I may need to pay attention to, and if someone out on the net needs to reach me, that’s the surest way to get my attention. My family and closest friends are on my google contact list, where we IM each other, and Twitter is embedded in the window too. I glance at this screen probably hundreds or thousands of times a day. It is where I broadly monitor my whole network.
Twitter is a portal to shout outs, brief chats, announcements, news blurbs, and a finger on the pulse of my little corner of the internet. It’s my bustling town. I don’t know everyone personally anymore, it grew too big for that, but I know lots of folks, and I’m reassured to look out the window and see everyone out and about and doing things. If I feel like having a quick chat, asking a question, saying hi, whatever, Twitter is there. It tells me the world keeps on keepin on, and if anything urgent comes up, I’m sure they’ll let me know.
(I knew about Tim Russert dying within moments of it being leaked, for example, and shared in a collective moment of shock, grief, sadness, wondering who would take the lead in holding our government accountable on Meet the Press in his absence – we all felt that as soon as we heard, and we experienced the event in a collective way through Twitter. It’s perhaps another post to think about how those collective emotions can be experienced through short, text-only little bleats..)
Blogs are my newspapers, where I get more lengthy, formal information about what’s happening in my world. They also link to the “course materials” for my informal learning. Media of all sorts, videos, films, papers, reports, research – original sources or analyses of them. Some blogs are also discussion boards, I do some amount of peer review and feedback, lengthier Q&A, and if I want, I can email or talk directly to the author to follow up and learn more.
All of this is aggregated in Google Reader, where I manage subscriptions to the blogs and websites I have personally selected to read, as well as the shared posts from my colleagues, who highlight the best of the various blogs and sites that they are reading. It’s pretty efficient, and allows me to see a much broader cross-section of information than I could ever process on my own. I depend on my smartest friends to do some of that pre-processing for me.
Second Life is my office, my laboratory, my work space, my classroom. I try to apply the things I’m learning to this particular medium – what works best for communicating concepts, ideas, facts, information? How do you use a 3D virtual environment to teach, to explain, to inform? How do you build and sustain communities in this place? How effective are my previous attempts? What needs to be improved, changed, or perhaps deleted altogether?
Those are the main tools for my informal learning. On a typical day, at any given time, I have several Firefox windows open (Firefox is my primary Learning Management System), each with 15-20 tabs open representing all the places that I’m working, learning, or reading. One window is reserved for “stuff I want to read and think about later”, all the links from tweets and blogs and friends and emails that seemed interesting or important, and when it grows so big it starts to lag my machine down, I go over and winnow it down, skim through things, close anything that doesn’t seem so interesting after all.
And by the end of the day or the week, sometimes themes have emerged. My brain draws links between all this stuff I’ve seen and read and starts to connect dots between different sources. As I become more aware of the emerging theme, I start to self-select different sources around that theme. Whatever I scan, I’m especially interested in information that fills in gaps in my knowledge about that theme. Sometimes I find myself reading such technically complicated material that I wonder how the hell I got into reading this report that is confusing the heck out of me.
Each foray, I think, stretches my mind a little further. I feel like I am learning in little bits all the time, even while I am working, producing, creating, helping, whatever.
Human Brains & Cloud Computing
Injenuity said months ago that she thinks her technology use is changing the way she thinks, the way her brain is beginning to draw connections between things. I agree, I feel that sense, too. I was reminded of her comment several times as I explored the various sites I kept running into this week about how the brain works, and how the growth of human participation in web services is changing our conception of “the network” online.
The theme didn’t emerge from thinking consciously about how the brain works, but rather from an article in the New Yorker that appeared to be about people who suffer from a demonic sense of itching. Having just recovered from the worst mosquito bite attack I’ve had in years, an article about the irrepressible urge to scratch caught my attention. The blog poster who linked to this article had highlighted the following paragraph:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.†She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
Was this fiction? Could a person really scratch through their skull and into their brain? What on earth would drive someone to do that?
When I finally made time to read the full article, it turned out to not be just about itching, but also about an emerging theory of how the brain receives and associates information from our sensory perceptions, and how that in turn affects our perception of reality.
The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess†theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.
This seemed like a very interesting thread, one that picked up again later when I saw that the Top 10 TED Talks had been released, including one by
neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. (If you don’t know about TED Talks, be sure to check them out, they’re some of the best lectures available on the net, if you ask me.) In this talk, Jill describes – from a brain scientist’s perspective – what happened to her as she experienced a stroke and felt various brain functions shutting down one by one – it is absolutely fascinating.
And as I’m thinking about what all this new information about the brain means to ME and how it is applicable to my work, George Siemens sends out his weekly newsletter with a section about “Brain Based Learning”. Hmm, I wonder what that is, I think, and click on to read more. This lead me to a research paper, “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations”, which concludes that people are generally much more likely to be satisfied by theoretical explanations that contain neuroscientific verbiage – even if it’s completely irrelevant – than by explanations, even good ones, that don’t contain neuroscientific verbiage; and a short 8-minute video about how often theorists incorrectly apply levels of analysis from neuroscience and cognitive psychology research to individual behavior, and to a child’s mind, and indeed to education as a whole.
By this point, I’m thinking wow, the brain is so complex! I go back to thinking about the “itch” article, and wonder if my evaluation of the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception was tainted by all of the neuroscientific data that was included in the article. I wish I had some experts in a room to discuss all these things I’ve just learned, because I find it interesting, but confusing, and I’m not sure how to apply this new knowledge in my own work, which is about teaching with technology.
And while I’m waiting for experts to magically appear and explain things, I run across a post on the Long Tail site about a brief article in Wired magazine that compares the “One Machine” (aka the internet and all of the computers and devices connected to it) to a human brain.
Infographic: Christoph Niemann, Flash Design: officevsoffice
I think to myself that this isn’t the first time I’ve read about or considered the connections, similarities, and differences between this “ubiquitous cloud computing” concept and the human brain, but I don’t know if I really understand what is meant by “cloud computing”, so I find this fairly in-depth and technical article about the topic on InfoWeek, called, simply enough, Guide to Cloud Computing. (Warning, it gets pretty geeky in there, but if you want to put some finer edges on your understanding of the concept, it’s a good piece.)
This leads to me to think about how universities are using technology, or more accurately, implementing technology infrastructure and systems for students, faculty, and staff to explore all these new possibilities for publishing, searching, accessing, and receiving the vast quantities of information and ideas out there living on the web. And while I’m musing on this topic, I discover an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Kansas State Cultural Anthropology prof Michael Wesch’s recent lecture “The Anthropology of YouTube” to the US Library of Congress. (Was that lecture recorded? Anyone have a link? Oh wait, I see it will be archived eventually at the Library of Congress website.)
I’ve posted about Michael Wesch’s work before, he was the creator of the now famous “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video that Wayne Porter and I connected over more than a year ago, and he talks about how YouTube, video-logging (vlogging), and the interaction people are getting online is changing people’s very sense of identity.
And THIS leads me to think about how I need to improve my machinima skills in Second Life, because I want to try using video has a mechanism to communicate various concepts I’m learning about, and I think I’ll feel more comfortable hiding behind my avatar than talking straight to a camera.
. . .
Why did I take you on this long journey? Is anyone even reading this still? I don’t know, but when we talk about “informal learning” and “social media” and what this means to us as educators, I sometimes don’t even know what these terms actually mean to anyone but myself. I know how I am using these tools, but I don’t know what the “best practices” are per se, nor the most effective ways to teach them to others. I think this little trip through Fleep’s Informal Learning Experience was maybe more for me than for an external reader, but as I think about all these topics I’m digesting, I keep returning to the thought that I want formal education at the university level to look more like THIS kind of learning than what I experienced in my undergrad courses.
With all due apologies for the length of this post, I hope if you’re still with me that you’ve learned something about the human brain, cloud computing, and how the web can facilitate “informal learning” that is very real learning about very real and important things. Look at all the fascinating, rich content that a passing curiosity about my mosquito bites itching led to..
The Viral Professional Development that injenuity has been writing about and the EduPunkflare-up (EDUCATION IS SERIOUS BUSINESS YOU CAN’T PUT PUNK IN THERE!) got me thinking about social media both in the context of a learning tool, but also in the context of a business tool.
We all love free stuff, and I think my “viral professional network” includes some of the most creative, collaborative, and giving colleagues I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, but at the end of the day we all have to make a living, and in these economic times, I want to know if living the networked professional life actually yields a better paycheck.
I’m already convinced that it leads to a much, much more fulfilling career, but as I start to feel the real pinch of all these increased prices, I also find myself forced to think in practical economic terms. I know money doesn’t buy happiness, but happiness doesn’t buy kitty food, either. 🙂
Social media, for me, is time intensive. Blogging, browsing, trying things out, keeping in touch with the network and trying to figure out how to do that when the network grows bigger than I’ve ever experienced before.. As I said on twitter the other day, some days it feels like the social media manages ME instead of the other way around.
While I was musing about this, I ran across Intellagirl’s recent slideshow about the differences between formal education in an institution and informal learning through social media. Check this out:
Her analysis really jives with my personal, lived experience of both completing a degree and being very active in social media in the last couple years. I got my degree after 7 years and finally had that stamp of approval, but at the same time, the work I’ve done in my online communities of interest has in many ways been far more important to my personal learning than my formal education experience.
I do feel a greater sense of accomplishment for my online work than for any of the tests or exams I took and scored well on, and through my online experiences I’ve become part of a wider professional community that seems far more relevant to me than, say, other UC alumni.
Social Contract with Social Media?
But then Intellagirl goes on to talk about the sort of social contract we make (Promise, Tools, Bargain) and that’s where I got hung up, because the bargain we make with formal education isn’t just credentials/reputation, it’s also dollar signs in a directly transferable sense. Get the right degree from the right institution and you’ll make more money, guaranteed. Get a degree from any institution and you’ll have a better shot at making more money than you’d make otherwise. That’s also implied in the social contract, leading to the stories I mentioned last week about so many completely un- or under- prepared students entering college.
So, I guess my question is, how does the informal learning through social media translate to better economic conditions, particularly when so many are working in companies or institutions that are completely ignorant of the social web phenomena? It isn’t as if you’re going to get higher marks on your evaluation because you twitter (though if you’re doing it right, you WILL do better at your job because of twitter). That is to say, the time spent on social media, for most people, is personal time, and even though it also benefits the workplace, or the institution, that benefit is not accounted for or rewarded explicitly, and often is actively blocked or sanctioned on work time.
Given this, and even though social media promises all sorts of wonderful learning opportunities, how can we ask our students, or our faculty, (or even ourselves) to keep up the time intensive pace of it all when they’re busy trying to raise a family or work a job that doesn’t have them at a computer all day? It seems that even though the formal educational model is rigid and top down and appears to be counter to what I’d consider a very valid and important form of learning, it’s the mode that pays the bills, and as long as that’s the case, that’s what people will do because they have to.
I don’t know. I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to so closely align my personal passions with my professional career, including social media, but when I’m up there in front of a room full of people who do not work at a computer all day, I want to make a compelling argument that convinces them to try it when they get home. It’s not just the educational or personal impact I’m wondering about, but also the economic impact of social media, and how that plays into the “education crisis” analysis.
If anyone has any thoughts, I’m all ears.
Speaking of Economics.. Metanomics!
Last bit, I’m delighted to say that I’ll be working with the folks at Metanomics as the Education Correspondent for the new season. Hosted by Cornell Prof. Robert Bloomfield, Metanomics is a weekly webTV program focusing on economics and policy in the “metaverse” of online worlds. I’ve been a fan since I caught some of their first episodes last season, and I’m very excited about the opportunity to cover education in virtual worlds and Second Life for the show. I’ve never been a webTV journalist before, so I expect to be learning some new technical skills in that arena (all from my social network!), and brainstorming about some good angles to cover.
Here are some things that caught my eye today. Hit play on this video while you read the rest of the post, it’s such a sweet video.
Ok, now that we have some music…
Tools & Sites
I just installed a little map widget down in the lower right sidebar that shows a map of visitors. It’s a free download from ClustrMaps.com and tracks by IP address where in the world your readers are. Not sure how often it will update, but so far I’m big in the US and barely heard of in Europe and completely absent everywhere else. 😉 It’s going on data since this morning though, so we’ll see how it goes.
Next up is Freebase. I don’t know what it does yet, but their tagline is, “Freebase is an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.” Hmmm. Definitely will check it out in a bit.
Last is a site that looks to be about teaching programming concepts to high schoolers, called Greenfoot. I’m already a fan of Alice, but might be of interest to those of you working with high school students.
If you only have time to read one, read the second one, and then Chris’ take on that article in 3rd link. I don’t agree with all of the positions taken, but as I try to imagine what education could be, it’s helpful to read critiques by others.
Aaron Walsh from Media Grid launched the initiative from within Second Life and the island quickly filled up with many more avatars waiting to get in to join the demonstration.
There are already six nodes on the grid and we got to pop around between them and check out the various applications and builds already in place. What follows are some screen shots, the tools are still pretty primitive, but the audio/voice worked pretty seamlessly and we saw a demonstration of live application sharing, video streaming, and more. What fun! Will try to post more later..
Fleep in Wonderland, purple clothes!
Classroom in Wonderland
Larry Johnson in Wonderland
And my favorite picture of all.. on the New Media Consortium node, my avatar turned into.. Larry!
The Second Life Education Community Conference 2008 planning team has been hard at work and we have several important updates for you:
The main SLEDcc 2008 website is now available at: http://sledcc.wikispaces.com. This will be your one-stop-shop for important information about the SLEDcc conference, in Tampa or in Second Life. Please note: SLEDcc is part of the official Second Life Community Convention (http://slconvention.org). Registration fees cover both the SLEDcc and SLCC events! Conference registration and fees only apply to those going to SLEDcc/SLCC in Tampa, in-world only participants do not need to register or pay any fees.
The Call for Proposals deadline has been extended to June 17, 2008. See the CFP below or view the complete details on the website. Don’t want to do a big paper presentation? No problem! The SLED Sparks and Speed Mentoring formats are designed for rapid information sharing. Can’t go to Tampa? No problem! SLEDcc will have presentations in Second Life as well as real life. You’d really rather show off a great build or project than do a presentation? No problem! “The Sleddies” award competition might be just the thing for you. See the CFP below or the website for more details.
There are many low overhead ways that you can help with the conference, from putting a link/logo to the SLEDcc website from your own blog or webpage, to volunteering for a few hours in Tampa or in Second Life – we can use your help! See the Volunteer Opportunities page and the SLEDcc Social Media page on the website to find out how you can join the team.
In addition to these updates, the website also has more information about “The Sleddies” Award competition, sponsorship information, and much more. Please take a few moments to have a look around and if you have any feedback, let us know.
Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you in Tampa or in SL this September!
Sincerely,
Chris Collins (SL: Fleep Tuque)
Hilary Mason (SL: Ann Enigma)
Jonathon Richter (SL: Wainbrave Bernal)
Co-Chairs, Second Life Education Community Conference 2008
Member of the Second Life Community Convention 2008
September 5 – 7, 2008 in Tampa, FL and in Second Life http://sledcc.wikispaces.com
sledcc08@googlegroups.com
I received a request from a colleague I met in Second Life to answer four questions her classmates had about virtual worlds in education. The course is:
University at Albany
State University of New York
ETAP 723: Seminar in Technology, Dr. Peter Shea
Module 5: Pedagogy in a Virtual World – Lorraine Emerick/Speranza Serevi & Kevin Goodman/Raxen Gears http://www.incubatorisland.com/vworld.htm
They were such great, thought provoking questions that I asked permission to share them on my blog as well, and I’d love to know what YOU think and I’m sure Lorraine/Speranza’s class would as well – please leave a comment and tell me what I got right and where you disagree!
1) What do you see as the benefits and purpose of student socialization (eg. beaches, bars, etc.) in SL higher education courses?
One of the most important benefits of virtual world technology is the ability to “see” when another person is viewing the same content or visiting the same space that you are. In this sense, virtual worlds enable a kind of serendipity, chance encounter, water-cooler effect. If I’ve been assigned a video to watch, I can see when other students in my class are watching the video at the same time, and we can talk about it, discuss it, and form a deeper understanding of the content as well as develop a better network with my classmates. The traditional (or “flat”) web simply doesn’t offer this ability. Social spaces in or near “teaching” spaces in virtual worlds can facilitate this kind of chance encounter and networking effect within the class.
And while traditional students living on-campus are likely to experience the socialization and community aspects of college life, commuter, non-traditional, and distance learning students often miss these important aspects of the university experience. Virtual worlds may enable students with many different lifestyles and schedules to more fully participate in the civic and social life of a university, and perhaps even a greater, more global network than is available on campus, that will have many of the same long term benefits that traditional college networking yields later in one’s career. Having fun and hanging out is an important part of this socialization, one that I don’t think is any different in virtual environments than real ones.
Finally, I think environments like Second Life can change the “teacher-student” dynamic into.. something more akin to a “guide-learner” dynamic, in part because there can be elements of personal expression or social interaction that aren’t generally present in a traditional classroom. The way a person chooses to represent themselves in avatar form can be quite revealing or entertaining, and the ability to create very un-traditional spaces – whether for teaching or socializing – can facilitate a different kind of interaction between instructors and learners. While some may be uncomfortable with this shift, I think the inclusion of social or experimental spaces that don’t resemble what we think of as “classrooms” will be very key elements as we more fully explore the potential of virtual worlds in education.
Besides, who wouldn’t love to be in class by the beach!
2) What do you think distance learning will look like in 5 years? Do you think popular platforms, such as Blackboard, will have a virtual world presence?
One would think that course/learning management systems like Blackboard would be quick to explore this market, but I’ve seen few examples of this to date. Angel does have an island in Second Life, and Blackboard did award a grant (I believe to Ball State University) to explore some cross-over between the LMS and SL, but beyond that I haven’t seen much activity in this regard. I think the virtual worlds market is still in such an early, emerging phase that it doesn’t rank very high on the priority list yet. We’ll have to see greater adoption by educational institutions and more demand from faculty and students (that trickles up to those who make the purchasing decisions) before the major players will jump into the virtual worlds pool. Another factor inhibiting this kind of development is that most virtual world platforms are proprietary and the underlying technical standards that help different systems talk to each other have not yet been developed for virtual worlds. In many cases, this means that existing learning management systems would have to start from scratch in a new market. We may see more LMSs move towards virtual world integration when these platforms begin to adhere to common protocols that can interface with existing LMS systems.
As for distance learning.. I’ve come to dislike the phrase, since the “distance” component may not be the most relevant factor. Traditional and non-traditional students alike seem to be interested in online course options that accommodate flexible scheduling, and whether a student is 50 miles away or around the world, their distance from the institution shouldn’t really matter when we can offer anytime, anywhere student services and learning opportunities on the web. I have great hopes that virtual world technologies will enhance our abilities to provide top-notch service and instruction to students no matter where they live, whether by helping “distance” students feel more connected to others in the course through the sense of co-presence in virtual worlds, or by providing another avenue for students to connect to the institution in a more visually rich and appealing way than the flat web allows.
Having said that, it seems from my experience that what we generally think of as the distance learning student population often has less technical experience and access to fewer high end technology resources than traditional on-campus students, so I think accessibility and digital divide issues will continue to be a significant challenge to overcome since virtual worlds generally require high end computers, graphic cards, and high speed internet access. It’s a sad irony that the very populations who might most benefit from this technology might also be the least likely to have access to it. I don’t imagine those kinds of issues will be resolved in the next 5 years, but I hope that early pilot programs exploring the potential of virtual worlds for distance ed will help provide data that will bolster the arguments for more technology and infrastructure spending throughout our educational and library systems.
3) As the younger generation (today’s users of Webkinz or Club Penquin) age, do you think universities will market virtual world learning to compete for students? Is this happening now?
I have no doubt whatsoever that the “web” will become more spatially oriented in the coming years, and I certainly hope that educational institutions will play a key role in not only developing the technology that will facilitate it, but also leverage its advantages to attract a wider population of students. Based on recent reports I’ve read (there are several good, recent studies from the Pew Internet & American Life Project at http://pewinternet.org/), it certainly seems that students want more technology integration into their academic experiences, so I imagine that institutions who can offer cutting edge services will have a competitive advantage – and certainly in the current climate, anything resembling a video game is probably more appealing than dry boring text on a website.
We see the beginnings of this already with examples like Case Western Reserve’s “Campus Tour in Second Life” program that brings high school students on virtual campus tours (http://admission.case.edu/secondlife.asp) or MITs student “pod design” competition, where students were invited to create their own personalized student spaces. That experience led to some discussions about the possibility of creating virtual dorms that incoming freshmen could decorate and maybe even meet their roommates and fellow residence hall classmates in advance of arriving on campus. I think that’s a pretty creative way to help students transition to college! The incentive is certainly there for universities to offer more engaging and creative ways for potential students to interact with the institution, and students seem to want it, so I think we’ll see even more examples virtual worlds being used as recruitment vehicles in the coming years.
4) Teacher presence in virtual worlds are critical to a successful learning experience. How do teachers in virtual worlds compare with those in more traditional asynchronous distance learning settings? How receptive do you think teachers are to teaching in virtual worlds?
I’m not sure exactly what is meant by teacher presence in the first sentence. Do you mean that successful learning experiences can’t happen without an instructor’s involvement? If so, I would have to respectfully disagree, but I think this question gets at the heart of something that is so crucial to the promise I see in virtual worlds, and yet it is something I also find very hard to articulate. I’ll try to address the other questions and maybe will end up circling back to the first.
It’s almost unfortunate that we talk about and think about virtual worlds as a kind of “technology” application, rather than talking about them like an exciting new laboratory, or as giant sandboxes, or as a way to step into our collective and individual imaginations. Learning new technologies can be stressful, confusing, and scary and particularly when you factor in public hysteria about the dangers of the internet to children, I can see why many teachers would approach something as fantastical as virtual worlds very warily indeed. And yet, it is the educational community in Second Life that has plunged headlong into exploring it most fully (Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds – http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2983&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en), and from my personal experience, it seems that virtual worlds are attracting _not_ the most tech savvy faculty and staff, but rather the most _collaborative_ faculty and staff.
Many of course do have previous experience with teaching online, and there’s a higher “tech savvy” quotient overall, but despite every conceivable obstacle under the sun – from lack of funding and suitable infrastructure, to skepticism and sometimes outright hostility from administrators, to worries about leading students down a prim-rose path to online addiction, to fears about inappropriate content and intellectual property rights and a general confusion about the legalities of digital content – despite all of these challenges, I see educators from all over the world coming into this environment and becoming fascinated with its potential. There is resistance and fear, but I also see a staunch determination to not let these obstacles and fears stop their exploration of a technology that appears to have so much potential. If anything, I see the teachers involved in virtual worlds today as no different than the instructors who pioneered web based distance learning programs and fought the same battles 10 years ago. I’d like to think that we are all continually seeking ways to improve learning outcomes, regardless of the platform.
And that does bring me back to the first sentence – I hope in our seeking and exploring, that we will be open to the idea of facilitating learning experiences that do _not_ require the presence of a teacher. So much of my experience in Second Life has been entirely self-directed learning, with no formal instruction, no rubrics, and the only assessment was my own – did I do a good job? Do I feel satisfied by how I just spent my time? Do I still have more questions?
I think that our modern educational system is in so many ways completely disconnected from the real world, from authentic experiences, with personally felt repercussions for failures. So many younger students simply don’t see the point, because they don’t feel they have any stake in the outcome. But part of the enchantment of virtual worlds is the ability to _play_, to practice, to pretend, to be creative and imaginative, and to do things that we don’t or can’t or can’t yet do in real life. I’ve come to see virtual worlds as sitting within an ecosystem of web and social media technologies that enable so many different learning styles, so many opportunities for “just in time” information, so many opportunities for self-directed learning, that I hope teachers will learn to leverage this technology in ways that do allow students to learn without them. Knowing when and how to intervene, provide assistance, or develop structures that guide the learning experience while still enabling the kind of personal autonomy that deepens a student’s sense of investment in the outcome is key to helping students become life-long learners – and isn’t that part of the goal?
Many thanks to Speranza’s class for providing such terrific questions! (Update: Minor edits and corrections.)
