Examples of 'good use' in education? Some personal reflections

This is the big question - what can we do with second life for learning and teaching, and how can we do it well?

We’re all looking for examples of good practice. Who is doing what? What results are they achieving? Is this really worth the time and effort, does it add value? Does the student learning experience improve? Does it improve and support their learning in ways we have not been able to do in ‘real life’?

In my recent explorations in Second Life I’ve attended, or at least dropped into, a number of events, seminars, conferences and talks. Some of these run by educators, such as ‘Sloodle moot’ a day conference held entirely in SL, exploring issues and ideas around linking the VLE Moodle with Second Life (see: http:// ). I was unable to be attend a session on Assessment Practices in SL, run by [ ], and unfortunately for another session I got my GMT, SL and American time zones mixed up and I missed it! Mishaps apart, other events have included talks by musicians, business professionals, and others in a variety of subjects. Check "SL Events" to find events, and join up to groups to be notified of events that may be of interest to you. [add Sl educators links etc in here].

These events on the whole worked for me, as I believe they will ‘work’ for many educators.

a) I didn’t have to get up at a ridiculous time to catch an early shuttle to London and then spend the day with nothing but soggy sandwiches and rubbish coffee. I could attend from my desk at work [potential problems there with interruptions and colleagues not believing you are actually working!] or from home where I could better concentrate. To get the best out of these you do need to commit the time to attend and engage – I sill find that a little difficult in the online world, but I’m finding SL much easier than just web/text based online conferences that are usually of “bulletin board plus PowerPoint” style.

b) in some ways I’ve found these to be more interactive than real life sessions. For example at ‘SLoodlemoot’ one of the presenters was asking questions of the audience. They could have perhaps used a representation of classroom voting systems (clickers/PRS), but instead they made use of the avatars themselves. They’d prepared some large boards around the arena (no chairs, no sitting in rows passively watching), and the audience got to literally vote on their [virtual] feet buy moving about and standing by the board that represented their vote. This was fun and engaging. Whilst thinking about how you wanted to vote, and in walking about, bumping into each other, you got the opportunity to ‘chat’ and network with other attendees through the messaging system, whilst listening to, or reading, what the speaker was saying.

c) the other aspect to this was that you could, and did, send messages [private or local] to other attendees. It is very possible to network in an online environment! If you haven’t tried it, do (try and suspend your disbelief that this can work, even without the visual cues, body language and facial expressionS). I felt this was a nice parallel to how students behave in class. Some of teh CA's recent research (LEX, LDN), showed that students do communicate with each other in class via technology – usually their mobile phones (Bluetooth, txt message etc). Studies showed that whilst yes, sometimes this was chat that had nothing to do with the subject, that also they were sending queries, questions, ideas and answers to each other on the content of the lecture. I’m sure before mobile and personal technologies arrived that students were doing this but via notes scribbled on paper, or even did the classic urban legend of notes on a paper aeroplane flown across the room. Technology is perhaps just a little less obvious, more invisible, to us.


However, is style of event suitable for student learning? Or is it more suited to staff development, do you think?

Like anything, the answer to that is “it depends”. This is true of all potential learning technologies, of course. What is suitable and effective for one area, group, teacher, subject, is not necessarily then also good for another (and I don’t believe that this is subject specific either).

There is of course benefit to be had from online classes, lectures, tutorials, especially if you have distance students. For example, the lovely example that Sian Bayne gave us of her students attending seminars on the beach, around the campfire. That worked well for those students, and that worked well for that subject. It strikes me though that these students were e-learning students. As such they were using the environment to explore the environment. They had an intrinsic motivation to be there, beyond the need to attend that particular tutorial. They were learning by doing. Studying the subject area will have an effect on their willingness to participate, and their understanding of the process (they will have already made an attempt to ‘suspend their disbelief’)

What I have not yet found much of – and this doesn’t mean its not there, just that the virtual and internet world is so big I haven’t found it yet – is much evidence of practice, either in SL or RL (publications, blogs etc), that really captures and uses the unique affordances of this environment. I’m not saying that no one is doing anything interesting! There is some activity – see Eduserve’s recent ‘Snapshot’ reports, but I think we're at too early a stage to be seeing published results yet. What I *am* finding though is evidence that educators are trying out, practicing, experimenting...as are we now, at GCU. Any search for education and virtual worlds throws up many many blogs about these developments and the ideas that peole are having.

If you know of any deirect evidence or reseach about what is being done beyind the developmental stage, please let me know, or post it to this blog!

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We are at such an early stage of using 3D worlds for education (beyond teaching multimedia, gaming and e-learning students) and this is where our challenge lies. And it’s an exciting challenge.


Current thinking appears to be that we want to avoid using SL as just another repository for "teaching content" (that can be better achieved via web sites etc anyway), and should instead focus on interaction, collaboration, peer learning & learning support networks, simulations, PBL, collective learning, collaborative projects that produce student created content by and for the students own learning, problem solving activities (hide and seek, engineering problems, design, environmental issues, puzzles, geocaching?) and other engaging activities that get students to *think*… activity that helps students create skills for the knowledge age:

• Communication skills
• Team skills
• Adaptability and problem solving skills
• New literacy skills
• Entrepreneurship
• and by no means least - Lifelong learning skills

This is easier said than done, of course. We are all guilty of transferring old ways onto new technologies. In many respects this is an acceptable part of the process of getting to know what new technology can do, it’s part of the exploration process, however how many times do we move beyond those old ways and methods? We turned our websites into repositories, we turned our VLE’s into repositories, now we’re trying to turn SL into a repository. “We need content”? No we don’t (necessarily), we need processes, approaches and activities that promote deep learning, not memorization or rote learning. These processes themselves require an environment in which to carry them out....like Sian’s campfire, or our Saltire Centre which will be a starting point, a focus space in which to be active.

So, where are we now, what *has* been found that begins to capture what is happening in SL, education wise?

To start with try the Eduserve Snapshot reports. These have been commissioned to do exactly this, ie capture the current state of play, and share that growing body of knowledge.
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/upload/foundation/sl/uksnapshot092007/final.pdf


Initially it does appear that much of the activity, in the UK at least, is dedicated to building, exploring and trying out how we can operate in 3D virtual worlds. Many Universities are doing just this and some are setting up island just for the purpose of research.

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Open University ‘Schome’. I saw a great presentation on their teen grid project.

http://schome.open.ac.uk/wikiworks/index.php/Schome_Park_overview

The speakers related a great story of how their teenagers developed ion the world and a story about the marriage, murder and a trial, all invented and run by the teenagers themselves, including discussions on ethical and moral issues.
http://www.slideshare.net/HandheldLearning/gill-clough-rebecca-ferguson-open-university/ (slides from conference)

And thier wiki on knowledge age skills:
http://schome.open.ac.uk/wikiworks/index.php/Second_Life_Knowledge_Age_skills

This may have been 'teens' but it is directly transferable to our own students.

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Art Fosset’s blog is an interesting and usually fun read. This post briefly describes role play activity for MBA students:
http://artfossett.blogspot.com/2008/02/mba-role-play-on-eduserv-island.html


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This link describes what sounds like an very interesting development, but I have been unable to find further evidence of what they are currently actually doing. If you find more, please add it here as a comment!
http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning.htm#VirtualWorldsandSecondLife
“UWE's project is to build a Research Observatory in Second Life (RO@SL). The building will act as a hub for all other resources and activities that currently form or will form part of the Research Observatory that the e-learning team is developing at http://ro.uwe.ac.uk.”

“Manuel Frutos-Perez (Deputy Head of the E-learning Development Unit), says, "We will design collaborative tasks that groups of students will complete in Second Life. The tasks will seek to maximise group creativity and will encourage students to be enterprising and to engage in discovery, synthesis and fact-finding missions. The tasks will be structured and facilitated by academic staff but will essentially be learner-centric.”

More about their build at: http://researchobs2.edublogs.org/

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http://wiki.feis.herts.ac.uk/Virtual_University_of_Hertfordshire

University of Hertfordshire wiki.
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http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.105, post by Pete Murray, BCS.org, about nursing informatics and medical uses of virtual worlds.
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Another blog on work in Second Life for medical teaching:
http://scienceroll.com/2007/06/17/top-10-virtual-medical-sites-in-second-life/

http://scienceroll.com/2007/08/03/the-first-medical-simulation-in-second-life-come-and-watch/

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These 2 links again relate to the Eduserve snapshots, but by the consultants themselves:

http://www.silversprite.com/index.php?s=second+life

http://andyp.edublogs.org/category/hsc-in-second-life/

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and a quick final one....
http://www.ncs-tech.org/?cat=52