Liquid Learning

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/

MUVEs and Second Lives

This was a presentation given at the annual King's [College London] Institute of  Learning and Teaching conference, a mainly internal affair aimed at highlighting current educational research within the institution and disseminating good practice. The talk itself formed a general, if critical, introduction to Second Life as a social virtual world and articulated the abundant issues that make SL a challenging yet compelling arena for teaching activities. What was noticeable when putting together these slides was just how *much* is going on in SL, to the extent it was difficult to capture the richness in a short session like this. One of the key threads that ran through the talk considered how the first phase of simply diving in-world and trying things out is being extended by a second phase of serious research activity - evidenced by the number of grants that have been  secured by new projects such as MUVEnation, (Open)Habitat and LLL3D. Some of the early empirical data gathering that I have carried out with fellow researcher Margarita Perez-Garcia has been a study of the non-formal learning opportunities made available to SL citizens in the form of hands-on workshops. The emphasis in this work has been to explore how teachers in short duration SL competency building classes have appropriated virtual spaces and have made use of tools and techniques that may be valuable in understanding what good practice is in MUVE-based teaching. The slides show the culmination of the preliminary data analysis in the form of a taxonomy of practices and a matrix that elaborates four areas of teaching that are formed by axes addressing control of the environment and pedagogical approach. The conclusions are that good practice in these workshops is exemplified by maintaining a close control over the teaching space combined with a reflective and  process orientated  teaching approach.

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Making the right MUVE

After a squeezing a few free minutes this morning I have found found time to publish the first set of slides from the Open Classroom Conference in Stockholm held in October 2007. The workshop itself focussed on using the tools that I have described in my previous two posts and included work on identifying critical factors impacting on the introduction of ICTs into educational settings that has been initially presented here by Margarita Perez-Garcia on her personal site, 'espheres identitaires'.

Workshop presentation: Making the right MUVE:

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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.

 

MUVEnation, motivating pupils, linking teachers through active learning with Multi-User Virtual Environments

After a successful bid into the last round of the EU Life-Long Learning call a new project on Multi-User Virtual Environments and active learning will be starting in December this year involving a group of  seven European partners. The funding of this project is further evidence of the increasing interest amongst not only educational researchers but also the major funding organizations in exploring the potentialities of 3D virtual worlds for learning and teaching. This type of large scale endeavour will be particularly valuable in building  a strong evidence base to support the  perceived affordances that virtual worlds offer as a new new modes of social interaction in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

Partnership:

• University of Macerata, IT, Promotor
• MENON Network, BE, Coordinator
• FIM New Learning, DE
• Florida Centre de Formació, ES
• Agence Départementale du Numérique des Pyrénées Atlantiques, FR
• King's College London, UK
• University of Reading, UK

Project overview:

Based on the potential and opportunities afforded by active learning approaches combined with Massive Multi-Users Virtual Environments (MUVEs) as effective solutions to inspire and engage learners and foster motivation, the MUVEnation project's general aim is to contribute to explore, analyse, develop and evaluate within context the effectiveness of this innovative way of teaching and learning with regard to some of the problems of the educational system such as pupils motivation and participation. MUVEnation is founded on the so called 'teachers' effect” on educational innovation and its approach is to explore the promising potential of active learning approaches integrated to MUVEs by starting from the analysis of some major educational problems such as the lack of motivation and find how their integration in education can effectively foster pupils' motivation and participation.

Therefore the MUVEnation project seeks to develop a European peer learning program for teacher training for the use of “Active learning with Multi-Users Virtual Environments to increase pupils' motivation and participation in education”. By doing so, MUVEnation seeks to encourage the development of teachers' metacognition strategies, problem solving, critical thinking and professional judgement so they will get used to make decisions about which technology to use for which students, how to do it, and how to judge the effectiveness of its use. The main objective of the program is to develop in-service and future teachers' competencies and skills so they can contribute by their innovative practice to bring solutions into their environments to increase learners motivation and participation in key fields of common interest in Europe such as the participation of girls in mathematics, science and technology; boys and literacy; the participation in education of children and young adults with disabilities; the combat against dropouts; the cross-fertilisation between informal and formal learning environments; and the smooth and successful transition between school and work. .

The project's specific objectives are:

•    To develop inductive-deductive learning experiences, methodologies, materials and tools that will support the ‘intellectual scaffolding’ needed to integrate MUVEs into the classroom by exploring the nexus between ICT, learning and motivation, and application of active learning methodologies (e.g. Buzz groups, affinity groups, solution or critic groups, ‘teach-write-discuss’, critique sessions, role-play, debates, case studies and integrated projects);
•    To implement technological solutions allowing enhanced online social interaction for the peer learning community of teachers;
•    To set up the peer learning community of teachers in order to carry out the following activities:
•    to identify and analyse training needs of in-service European educators who are running, or wish to run, educational projects in MUVEs in K-12 and middle and upper secondary education;
•    to collect and document good practices illustrating the use of active learning methodologies with MUVEs to increase pupils motivation and participation in education;
•    to design pedagogical patterns that give a solution for identified pedagogical problems in regard to pupils motivation and education in these new environments;
•    To guarantee the wide dissemination of the project's deliverables amongst European HE institutions, teachers’ training centres, teachers’ training and teachers’ networks and/or professional communities.

Amongst the concrete results of the project, we highlight, the peer learning community where 60-80 teachers will participate during 6 months, the inductive-deductive learning activities for prerequisites acquisition, the methodological frameworks for the needs analysis, the best practices collection and the pedagogical patterns design and development, the national collection of information in each country participating in the program, the European reports integrating the data collected during the activities, the teachers own reflection and assessment of the activities they have participated on and the online conference.