Liquid Learning

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.

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.

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?

 

 

 

Download 700.mp4 (5499.4K)

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:

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.

MUVEs and second lives: exploring education in second life from Steven Warburton

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.