Liquid Learning

Virtual environments and game-based learning

These presentations form part of a double workshop given alongside Margarita Perez-Garcia at the recent 6th Open Classroom Conference held in Stockholm from October 24th to 26th 2007. The title for this particularly lively session was “Second Life beyond the hype: taking real world education into virtual spaces, a recipe for failure?”. Audience participation was high and the discussions that precipitated from each of these position pieces provided valuable insight into how and where educators see the current state of play with regards to using MUVEs (such as Second Life) in educational contexts. As with all emerging technologies, the understandings elaborated during the one and half hours stemmed as much from reflections on technology i.e. metaverses in use, as from the design principles that lie behind many 'narrative free' virtual world offerings. In light of this, much of the session concentrated on pragmatics, taking apart the current rhetoric on MUVEs that seems to promise a 'do anything', 'be anything' alternative reality.

 

Presentation 1: Virtual vanity: sex, shopping and reputation in Second Life

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Presentation 2: MUVEs: technical state-of-play and their future potentialities

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Further details of the workshop and other resources can be found on the newly launched Prism(lab) site.

 

ELI 2007, Atlanta

Rather bleary eyed on a wet and cold Monday morning in Atlanta. I would have posted my own snapshot of the view from my 19th floor base of operations in the Omni Hotel at the massive CNN complex, except the cloud cover is so low, the colours so grey and the view so minimal that there is little point (so just like being in London then). Instead, here is the publicity shot from the website which at least adds a little geographical/architectural flavour.

Why am I here? Well thanks to partial financial support kindly provided by ALT I will be attending the Educause Learning Initiative annual meeting: "Creating a Successful Learning Culture: Connecting Learners, Communities, and Information" which runs through to Wednesday 24th January.

It is a packed program and the major themes being addressed this year are summarized as:

• What should we understand about learners, learning principles, and learning technologies that would allow us to enhance learner success? How do we build that into our institutional culture?How has technology changed the way people communicate and network? How can higher education leverage these changes to improve learning?
• How can technology help connect learners, communities, and information in meaningful ways?
• How do we address the need for evidence about learning, teaching, and technology? What questions should be asked? What evidence should guide future improvements?

I will be blogging as many of the sessions as I can, along with a colleague who has also joined me here here. As for today's agenda? Well, I will be taking the advice of a close friend (currently in Brussels) who has 'suggested' the following itinerary. It is great having someone else work out your schedule while you are asleep in a different timezone. So the sessions are likely to be:

The Next Generation of Digital Learning Spaces: Exploring the Frontier of Virtual Worlds, http://www.educause.edu/ELI071/Program/10825?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI071/SESS20

and maybe this: Emerging Educational Technologies and Neomillennial Learning Styles,
http://www.educause.edu/ELI071/Program/10825?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI071/GS02

and also: More Than Just a Game,
http://www.educause.edu/ELI071/Program/10825?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI071/SESS13

If anyone has looked at the program and would specifically like me attend something then let me know and I will do my best.

ALT-C 2006 mumblings

I couldn't help but notice that Josie has added a few mutterings to her blog re: ALT-C 2006 . She picked up on the main debate of the event, namely the growing tension between VLE and PLE approaches to 'learning' which have raised fundamental questions regarding the philosophical grounding of our teaching systems and indeed our underpinning educational values. I think this was reflected in the number of talks that engaged directly with learning as an emergent, context-dependent dialogical activity. One area that seemed to be lacking in many of the conversations surrounding web 2.0 and social software was complexity (including the notion of critical mass) and the associated interest in emergent behaviours (patterns) and emergent classifications (folksonomy) which represent powerful concepts in analysing the way that many social software tools operate, for example social recommendation systems and I cannot help but wonder what implications these might have if (or when) applied to an educational context.

Exploring student views of technology in education

A few notes form the excellent SRHE conference that was held in Edinburgh at the end of last year (2005)

The session by led by Jeff Haywood (University of Edinburgh) 'Exploring student views of technology in education' reported on a longitudinal study (started back in 1991/92) into the changing attitudes in student use of ICTs. Students were asked to self report on their IT skills via questionnaires, focus group and interviews (using open questions and scenarios) which addressed not only factual questions about PC ownership, basic ICT skills and Internet use but also more recent increases in the ownership and use of laptops, wireless networks and “smartphones” [Note - the point was made that to get good returns from online surveys there is a need to incentivise the students]. In this study, gathering data was seen as good practise and part of engaging the student in the developmental process. The team were also interested in the broader themes that emerged form the data, for example: do students come “preconfigured” i.e. with appropriate knowledge sets? .

Some of the findings are listed here.

• The majority of new students see Internet as beneficial and have used word processors etc.
• In the move away from School based activities towards ‘web authoring’ and presentation software the figures are still low for responses that suggest that the students ‘can do this alone’
• Students want more of what they know (classical didactic stuff) such as lecture notes and presentations i.e. they want ‘traditional plus’
• Students are very pragmatic and develop habits. Friends are a major source of information i.e. 'quicker to ask a friend'
• Students worry about a loss of quality in the move to online environments  [an interesting point as this is also about shifting costs e.g. who prints handouts?]
• Students are wary of online courses but do want dialogue about what is happening
• Student have their own defined groups and differentiate amongst each other e.g. nerdy, rich and so on.
• Net generation: “heroes of their own narrative” [see Beck and Wade 2004] herald a wave of new literacies.
• Distinction needs to be made between competence and confidence i.e. we cannot assume that the students are actually ready to use advanced software [two sides to this argument – either we adapt to the so called 'next generation' learners (or is too liberal?) or is us (as educators) who should determine the tone of the the learning and teaching environment and not be completely swayed by the (arguable) existence of a 'net generation'. Interesting question: is the textbook outdated?]
• Students are very discriminating with the available resources and how they use them – this again highlighted a problem with using audio resources. Is the linearity of the medium i.e. you cannot scan through a podcast to assess ‘worth’ or academic level so what markers do we use to understand quality and applicability i.e. does the material fit with purpose? [Note: there was no data on the tools that students may be bringing to their studies e.g. what types of social software and so are are being used already?]

This was a stimulating talk with rich data that extended back over time and provided an insight in the changing student profile - providing pointers to emerging trends and where institutions may need to adapt the latest student cohorts.

More information is available from the SEUISS website at

http://www.intermedia.uib.no/seusiss/results.html

Les Blogs 2.0

What can I say, an enormously eclectic conference with a number of panel discussions that approached blogging from every conceivable angle: corporate, political, journalistic, educational and business. All indicative of a new genre of publishing who's impact is still not yet fully comprehended hence many of the presentations were based around stories of what blogging has achieved - be it political change or company upheaval, see:

Case Study: The Fall and Rise of Vichy

Only time to snatch very brief notes, which I fear are rather as an aide memoir for me as opposed to a review for anyone else.

Some notion that blogs are like conversations over the fence? Blogs for recommendations and information passing. Blogs connect through and across existing vertical hierarchies. Blogging as collecting marketing information. Blogs as transparency ... can see through into the company ... increasing trust? Companies that blog get good PR at the moment. Perhaps a deeper reason for blogging is to get people talking about the product with the team around the world [are we creating a new information streams?]. Getting information from the ground up ... but why do we believe blogging content is 'real'? What about self-surveillance? A good blog is authoritative and passionate. Is it scalable? - a good question ... does blogging mean giving up your life? ? How much time can one seriously spend on blogging? Startups spend too much time blogging and not joining the conversations. But, with all this mass of information production who is actually doing any real thinking - how do we leverage this? Is this a global conversation? Are we creating a deep digital divide ... the 'have' and 'have nots' i.e. in terms of access to the Internet and access to these conversations. Blogging can become overly evangelistic. Information overload! We need to look at how people are filtering and choosing their information source. Blogging keeps journalists honest [my favourite comment of the whole conference].

Check out Ewan McIntosh's blog for more indepth (and inflammatory?) commentary.

JISC/CETIS conference November 2005

Collaboration/Innovation strand:

A key aspect that came out of the recent JISC/CETIS conference at Herriot Watt (for me) was the fascinating debate around the approaches to the issues of control, ownership and authority in relation to identity … issues that were constantly highlighted throughout the day by two fundamentally different philosophies:

Organic bottom up production of content/identity controlled by the individual and distributed across a number of domains: within blogs, ePortfolios such e.g. ELGG and so on. The control residing at individual level allows for context and meaning of that identity to be constantly negotiated and then renegotiated - even simply by closing and opening multiple accounts, storing ones personal data in different spaces and maintaining control over which of those are exposed to the world. Hence identity is fluid and only ever partial - perhaps one might even add extensible i.e. I can create new aspects to my identity that I think are useful or I want to expose to others … creativity? This is an identity for social communication as we are in control and allows for changes that are stimulated by interactions such as dialogue and networking.

The other side is a model of identity controlled and categorised by framework of standards and set of categories that work in a top down fashion … and in these environments ones identity is shaped, negotiated, managed and effectively owned by the system. This can create a rigid controlled formula of applied criteria and produce a nominally fixed identity. This is an identity for doing things, an identity for action, for example accessing bank records, learning materials and so on. It is not one that is naturally conducive to social communication (and change) - it is not dynamic. The loss of ownership - the fixed identity - is further exemplified when systems start talking to each other using these identity templates - we do not know which part of our identity is being deployed to negotiate a relationship between say our educational records and our bank records?