Liquid Learning

New book call - design patterns in teaching and learning

Practical design patterns for teaching and learning with technology

A book for Sense Publishers ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’ series

Editors: Yishay Mor (London Knowledge Lab), Steven Warburton (King’s College London) and Niall Winters (London Knowledge Lab)

Deadline:- Submissions should be sent to: submissions@practicalpatternsbook.org by July 31, 2009

Introduction

The design, development and implementation of an educational intervention often involves learners, teachers, educational designers and policy makers. To support collaboration and effective sharing of design processes between these participants, a common language is needed. One form this can take is a design pattern, which articulates sharable design knowledge in a meaningful and actionable form.

Practical design patterns for teaching and learning with technology will produce a collection of patterns across six themes:

1. Learner centred design
   
   • Supporting learners to become active, self-directed and self-responsible participants in the learning process
   • Section Editor: Michael Derntl (University of Vienna)
2. Learning as collaboration
   • Supporting content creation, communication and collaboration between learners and tutors
   • Section Editors: Christian Kohls and Till Schummer
3. Learning as conversation
   • Supporting learners to effectively communicate their learning process
   • Section Editor: Diana Laurillard (London Knowledge Lab)
4. Games
   • Supporting game-based learning practices
   • Section Editor: Staffan Björk (Chalmers University of Technology,  Göteborg University)
5. Social media
   • Supporting learning using social media
   • Section Editor: Steven Warburton (King’s College London, UK)
6. Assessment
   • Supporting effective assessment of student learning
   • Section Editor: Harvey Mellar and Norbert Pachler (Institute of Education, UK)

These patterns will be supported by case stories that illustrate a critical problem and elaborate its appearance and successful resolution within a concrete context. For an overview of the book and further background information, please see the book’s supporting website at http://www.practicalpatternsbook.org/

Submission procedure
Authors are requested to submit co-ordinated contributions of patterns and their supporting cases. These can be individual submissions, or a joint/group submission, where person A produces the case-story, and person B provides the associated pattern. Each submission is expected to be 3,000-4,000 words in length: 1,500-2,000 for the pattern and 1,500-2,000 for the supporting case-story. We encourage the use of images (with appropriate copyright clearance) to illustrate submitted case-stories and patterns. For more details, please see the author guidelines at: http://www.practicalpatternsbook.org/guidelines.

The book will be developed in an open-content process, using a collaborative web-site. Submitted cases and pattens will be reviewed by the section and book editors, and those selected will be included in a shepherding process. During shepherding, all contributions will be openly available for comment. The section editors will iteratively work with authors to ensure quality, coherence and cohesion of the book as a whole. Authors will also be asked to comment on their peers’ contributions and identify links with their own contribution. The web-site will continue to evolve, as a companion to the book after its publication, while the book will remain an authoritative, quality controlled and professionally edited off-the shelf resource.

Important Dates

• July 31 2009: Proposal Submission Deadline – submissions should be sent to submissions@practicalpatternsbook.org
• October 15 2009: Notification of Acceptance
• October 17 2009 – February 15 2009: Shepherding process under the guidance of section editors
• December 2010: Publication

Further Questions and Contact

Please consult the FAQ page.
All enquires should be made to: enquiries@practicalpatternsbook.org
Please subscribe to http://groups.google.com/group/practicalpatternsbook-announce for future announcements

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Presence layers in MUVEs

What the elements that scaffold the strong sense of [co-]presence we experience when working and playing inside in a MUVE? When we examine a social MUVE such as Second Life it is possible to identify three layers on which 'sense of [co-]presence'  operates:

Presence according to Yee et al. (2007) measures how real one believes a mediated environment is in terms of non-verbal behaviours (Garau et al. 2001), physiological responses (Slater, 1994) and other measures. In the diagram three separate presence layers are identified. The physical presence layer is composed of a visual element, where avatars can see each other through the default camera point of view (POV) - the main window on the 3D environment – and a geographic element where the location of other avatars in-world can be tracked using the in-world 2D maps. Physical proximity also allows avatars in-world to see physical gestures, poses and animations. The communication layer offers several channels for interaction from synchronous voice and instant messaging (IM) to asynchronous mechanisms such as an in-world group notification system and the connection of IM to an email account. The status layer provides minimal information about in-world presence indicating when avatars are logged into Second Life.

Warburton, S. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching, British Journal of Educational Technology. 40 (3), 414-426.

Stories of digital identity - tales from twitter

The Rhizome project has been helping to organise the Eduserv Digital Identity event which is being held at the British Library on 8 January 2009. Full details of the event are available here. But in brief, the approach for the day is to run a patterns workshop with the help of the Planet project, using a defined methodology to share the personal stories of our 35 plus participants in relation to their experiences of 'digital identity'. To do this we have solicited stories (or cases) from the invited group coming to the event and provided a template (STARR - see below) to help structure each submission. These are held on the Planet Xwiki site in a searchable database. Telling a story is an interesting and thought provoking exercise exercise and we welcome anyone to come to the site to submit a personal narrative that they might have to share about digital identity. This is a copy of the case I have submitted for the event:

Name of Story: "Twitter-versed"

Situation (what is the setting or context for this case study?):

The context for this case study is what questions are raised about the nature of ones online presence/identity when one becomes embedded in a 'twitter community' (in this case a modest size of around 100 followers/following). Once embedded within an established community there is a nagging pressure to remain plugged into the Twitter life stream, almost constantly, and sometimes to the detriment of other activities. It is also a disruptive communication space in the sense that ones audience is heterogeneous - comprised of the so-called @-crowd, friends, colleagues, and the extended network of followers and follower's of followers who might read be reached through 'retweets'. So how do you even start writing a message in twitter? No wonder so many tweets read like descriptive statements of current or intended activity. Cup of tea anyone?

Task (what was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?)

The problem or the central point of the story (like all good narratives) revolves around a love-hate relationship ... what exactly is this Twitter thing - a multi-channel conversation, a pest, an addiction, redundancy looming for SMS on my mobile phone, a potential educational tool, community bonding, a self promotion vehicle for over excitable egos, a live RSS channel, a reputation nightmare waiting to happen? The first problem is the flow of information - constant and distracting - an extra time burden layered on top of of the demands of an overflowing inbox. Yet why do I experience a strange feeling of unease if I do not 'tweet' at least once per day? Is it the existential fear of dropping out of the community if my presence is not marked in some way? Or is that my digital identity or my digital territory will be lost and I will cease to exist? And therein lies the second problem of Twitter. To I watch the flow of noisy chatter is to feel it also exert an invasive and forceful desire for my presence - the need to present some kind of digestible form of real identity into a streamed digital, micro version. But how? And if it is not possible then how to avoid the frustrations Twitter can present from only watching the backwards and forwards of others?

Actions (what was done to fulfill the task?)

How could I engage/disengage, without deleting my Twitter account that that has served useful purposes? My solution was on reflection, to try and define a simple set of rules for 'managed' use. Perhaps rules is too strong a word, these were more like notes to self:

• Only switch on my Twitter feeds when I actually have free time and I am interested in getting updates on what the community is up to;
• To mainly use Twitter if I actually have something to say to someone in particular - in other words - to communicate with my @-crowd. This kind of conversation immediately feels more personal and comfortable for me;
• To take advantage of direct messaging as a key tool, one that has always given good response times from the recipients;

Results (what happened? was is a success? what contributed to the outcomes?)

Partial success - the rules were a little too rigid to be obeyed with ease. But, not being plugged in all the time did provide some freedom and space to concentrate on other matters - this strategy did go hand in hand with a concerted effort at dealing with email more effectively ... to give space for concentrated writing tasks. I still maintain an uneasy alliance Twitter, knowing that it will never satisfactorily reflect a digital identity that coheres with my internal sense of self. It feels unnatural to compose intermittent micro-statements that say everything and nothing - it often feels to me that I am shouting into a vast empty space "I am here, I am here" and waiting for an answer even if my statements do not directly ask for one. But this is also the compelling nature of community participation and whether I like it or not I do take my voice from one modality to another, adjusting to the affordances of the technology, threading my way trough the strands of my online and offline communities - wherever they may be.

Reflections and Lessons Learned (what did you learn from the experience?)

You get 140 characters per tweet. Twitter seems to demand an all or nothing response. Do I keep posting to build something that makes sense over an extended timeline, in other words a conversation/narrative, or simply tweet once in a while that I am still alive. I am not going to disappear from the world if I do not Twitter but I would be uncomfortable not having access. My online identity is distributed across many platforms and spaces and I choose to see my blog as one of the key nodes. In my blog or indeed Facebook I feel far more in control of the space I speak from, and the potential audience reaction - even if that is not truly within my power to control. Two issues that still disturb me are the illusion of ephemerality and the partial, unstructured nature of the community. Twitter feels like a spoken conversation yet look back and the tracks remain. Twitter also bends attention to itself and creates a certain exclusivity where sometimes I, for one, can forget that not everyone I know is a Twitter user.

Twitter is a strange animal - curiously addictive but also difficult to work out what value it has - it can be infuriating and gripping in one and the same moment. It is a space of distributed social conversation that blurs community boundaries and for me it represents another site where digital personas are performed ... something that makes Twitter worthy of detailed study.

Links to other posts and articles on Twitter that reflect some of the themes raised here:

• http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/10/25/on-twitter/
• http://www.margaperez.com/?p=177
• http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
• http://www.chrisbrogan.com/a-day-without-twitter/
• http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2008/12/the-crowd.html
• http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf
• http://gigaom.com/2008/12/28/on-twitter-followers-are-not-really-friends/

  

Herding cats

I was recently challenged with running a series of events inside Second Life for the JISC Innovating eLearning Conference. These were carefully paced to include a couple of orientation sessions for new avatars, a tour and an evening social event (a ‘fashion show’ as it turned out). For me, I was surprised to find that the biggest challenge of all these three happenings was the SL tour. The one that I had initially felt the most relaxed about. On the surface, a simple case of gathering a collection of meaningful locations and guiding the participants around each venue. But as with all things in Second Life nothing is ever quite as simple as one imagines. Having visited each location, built the notecards, the notecard giver, the automated group joining tool and picked a suitable start location on Emerge Island I over confidently assumed nothing could go wrong. Whoops. By 2pm, the scheduled start time, I was already trying to deal with 30 plus avatars in what I can only describe as complete mayhem. I have never experienced anything like it in Second Life before, and maybe never will again. As the sim started to lag with so many arrivals and so much activity the phrase ‘like trying to herd cats’ did not even come close. Through a mixture of shouting coaxing, pushing and patience I finally, with the help of the tours guides, managed to get small groups to teleport out to the first locations in what was some sort of ordered fashion. Phew. It was an impressive moment - exciting, panicky and intense. Perhaps all the things that make SL such a compelling place to be.

The tour was a learning experience for everyone and I have gathered together the threads from the post-tour discussion so anyone else who wants to create a tour in SL can take away the good practices that we all discovered:

1. Make sure you have a group set up in advance (for us this was the "JISC SL sessions" group) and use an automated group joining tool in-world to make it easy for everyone to sign up;
2. Prepare the tour locations and save on a notecard. Use a separate notecard with instructions for setting up the client to provide a good experience at each spot,  such as the graphics and media settings. Ten locations in two hours is plenty, with a few extra added and marked as "related" for people to come back and explore at leisure;
3. If you have tour guides then brief them in advance.
   1. On the notecard (thanks to Michael Vallance for this suggestion) you can add some pertinent questions about each location and aim for a more quest like experience;
4. Get everyone to arrive in an area with seating and get everyone to sit down, so that you can see numbers and minimise distractions;
5. In front of the seats have a media screen where you can place the instructions - texture with an image or stream in a webpage. Put a script inside the screen so that when it is touched it hands out the pre-prepared tour notecards. The instructions on the screen should give basic orientation instructions such as:
   1. How to join the group and activate the tag;
   2. The structure of the tour (see below);
   3. Get the tour guides to help those who are struggling;
6. Then, and this depends on numbers:
   1. Organise into small groups of not more than 4 (any more is just too tough to keep together) and send off in staggered departures;
   2. Or for larger numbers simply send off the participants in pairs. Each pair "friends" each other so they can communicate via IM and then support each other. The pairs head off on their own and make their way around;
   3. Tour guides can be located at the arrival points at each destination and keep everyone moving around the circuit;
   4. Use the group channel to check where everyone is and keep the tour as a whole in motion;
   5. Gather everyone back to the starting location at the end for a debrief and for gathering impressions;
7. A small tour circuit works far better than a large one. With a limited number of locations it means that groups (or pairs) will bump into other as they wander around - recognisable by their group tag - so lots of serendipity and always a friendly face somewhere at each location.

Creating a tour is an excellent activity and this is something that I would like our participants on the MUVEnation programme to also have a go at doing. Choosing spaces inside SL to visit is a reflective exercise and requires some thought into why you have chosen a location – its value and its purpose.

Who am i? ... mashed-up, disaggregated and distributed

What does digital identity mean to you? Do you care? As more of our lives, from personal to professional activities, find their way online how do we cope with managing our digital presence(s)? Can we ever keep the 'personal' separate from 'professional' when tools and services mash-up our online identities in ways that are beyond our control?

The Rhizome project, funded by Eduserv, is a 14 month exploration of digital identities across learning, teaching and research.

Why rhizome? This project addresses, in part, the issues surrounding the increasingly fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services. Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has energised thinking and creativity in the arts, science and philosophy. It is used in this project as a cipher, or a departure point for representing digital identities as:

• decentralised
• unpredictable
• connected
• branching in many directions
• having multiple entry points
• with no single true view, only partial perspectives
• and constituted as a multiplicity of dimensions where we lose the illusion of the objective all seeing eye/I

Deleuze leads us to cartography and the map, a space which has no privileged entry point and is always open to change. This is a metaphor we have played on with our chosen technical platform - Netvibes - a representation that captures the multiple views and entry points to our work.

The project is taking a mutli-layered approach via narrative inquiry and scenario mapping to study the construction and deconstruction of digital identities (more detail on the methodology) and an overview of how we are planning our 14 months of work is outlined here in our 21 slide presentation:

Rhizome Project: exploring digital identities

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: online launch)

We welcome participation as the project develops! Please see the project home at http://www.rhizomeproject.org and the project blog.

Deleuze & Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U. of Minneso ta Press, 1987.

Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008). The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry, (14)4:632–650.

 

One plus one equals three: the seventh barrier to innovation in MUVEs

'In design, one plus one equals three or sometimes more.'
Josef Albers (1969)

'Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.'
Herbert Simon (1969)

We make design decisions all of the time and Second Life offers particular design challenges that demand us to address not only our teaching approaches but also space, architecture and aesthetics. The art of design is not a natural skill but one that is learned and developed – Simon called for a science of design. Albers captures the complexity of design in the quote above, one that acknowledges the multi-layered nature of design and the multiple interactions that occur between these design layers when they come together.

'When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.'
Richard Buckminster Fuller

My question is - are we as educators in virtual worlds equal to this challenge?

MUVEnation programme opens for participants

MUVEnation - the course,
originally uploaded by StevenW Bohm.

After several months of hard work the EU funded MUVEnation programme opens its doors to participants.

The course - ‘Teaching and learning with MUVEs’ - is a free one year postgraduate programme, delivered online, for future and in-service teachers who want to use innovative methods and tools to address learners motivation and participation issues in compulsory education. MUVEnation is aimed at helping teachers acquire the necessary competencies to integrate massively multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) into their teaching practice.

Registrations are now open for the programme which kicks off in November 2008. Full details are avaiable form the MUVEnation site here - http://muvenation.org/press-releases/ - and by downloading the pdf course brochure.

Download Brochure_MUVEnation.pdf

Please feel free to distribute this information anyone who may be interested in joining us.

Six barriers to innovation in learning and teaching in MUVEs

Preparing to give a conference talk at 6am on a Monday morning is possibly not the most appetizing of thoughts. But when you are speaking to an audience in Kuala Lumpur and you are still in London then the delivery times become somewhat constrained.  The symposium on Second Life was a session scheduled as part of the LYICT conference held a couple of weeks ago and I admit if it hadn't been for the Elluminate video feed and my fashion reputation I would have been tempted to to remain in my dressing gown for the whole thing. There were four of us on the UK end of the panel (Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell and David White) with a jet lagged Steve Wheeler fronting the show in  Malaysia. Technically a risky venture but it worked, just.

With only had 10 minutes to fill I wanted to keep the presentation short and simple. After some last minute dithering I decided to tackle one of the recurring criticisms of Second Life - the perceived lack of innovation in many  in-world learning and teaching activities. The result was an identification of six barriers:

1. Technical - machine and human related [and standards related]
2. Identity - the tension between playfulness and professionalism
3. Culture - reading the codes and etiquette of SL
4. Collaboration - building trust
5. Time - even simple things take time
6. Economic - nothing is for free

These are expanded in the slideshare presentation (which has been updated since the original talk) and feel comprehensive - there are probably more I agree but that depends on the level of granularity one wants to go into:

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

view presentation (tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict)

Update (28/10/08): There is also I feel a seventh barrier and that is "Design" - perhaps this is a meta-barrier but SL does offer up very particular design challenges.

One of the interesting points that came out of this whole exercise was choice of technology. Originally we had planned to deliver the session from Second Life but the advance testing revealed what a challenge it would be. Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate - an audiographic video conferencing tool. But what really tipped it for me was the lack of tools in SL for getting feedback from the audience. How do I know I am being heard - do I need to adjust volume, where is the back channel for people to participate, ask questions  ... and so on? Status indicators are key. I think using SL for conferencing requires caution ... think about the value-added, why make life difficult when it is not necessary? As a final thought, translated into pictures, here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel - perfect:

Waiting for myself

An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?

I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels opening for blogging; twitter, web-browsing, SL to Flickr, audio, facebook links, and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both AndyPowell and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life.

So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps a fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

How tall is tall in Second Life?

Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough. In virtuality it was a more challenging competition than I envisaged.

Building in SL requires a number of skills: knowledge of the client interface, the ability to interpret the ‘build’ dialog boxes, good camera controls and a design based visual grammar that can adjust to a 3D working space. Complicate this mix by making it a cooperative task and the constraints of SL as a tool for collaboration start to become uncovered. The permissions structure in SL means that object sharing is problematic and needs to be solved if team building is going to be effective. To progress, clear communication channels between avatars needs to be established, not a straightforward matter when the main chat window is clogged with the noise from competing parties busy issuing each other instructions and encouragement.

From my perspective as judge and referee it felt like 15 minutes of mayhem. Thankfully, towers did appear out of the chaos and the most productive builders were those who in the end chose to go it alone. It was also a great insight into how to design a creative activity for a virtual environment such as SL. The issues that needed to be addressed (and were forgotten by me) were around scaffolding the activity – ensuring there were a set of baseline competencies in place from which creativity could emerge. Next time I will make sure:

•    the instructions (and supporting resources) are given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here;
•    time is allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem;
•    that I do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area;
•    that if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams.

Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel.

Thankfully here the entire session did not go completely awry and towers were wrought from SL’s basic prim set.  Congratulations to Art Fossett who was awarded the winners prize – a ‘Ruth’. Of course we will be expecting him back next year, or perhaps at the next social, to defend his title.

See the full photostream here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenwbohm/tags/towers/

and other snaps here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubistscarborough/tags/em0608/