SLU

Wired News' Daniel Terdiman has a story about university classes using Second Life. SL donates accounts and virtual land to universities and has had many classes in world since Alpha. UT Austin's Anne Beamish and Trinity Univesity's Aaron Delwiche are both featured in the article. Students have been responsible for some of SL's most interesting moments, including the group of UT Austin luddites who argued that flying was destroying the fabric of society and that everyone should walk instead!

Comments

[Bart Pursel]

1.

...and Magy SeifEl-Nasr used Second Life in Spring 2004 here at Penn State. Her students has the opportunity to pick an engine to do their final project in, but unfortunately no students chose to use second life's authoring tools to create something for their final. The students did enjoy the environment, but spent most of their time learning the ins and outs of the Unreal engine.

I've been chatting with folks at Second Life and There for a while now about using their platform as a next-generation online learning environment. I know I've touted this 'virtual learning worlds' idea here and that a paper will be coming out shortly. The paper is finally under peer review right now, and with some luck will be published shortly. I'll be sure to drop a line to Ed or someone from TN once it's published. I'd be very interested what people around here have to say about it.

[blaze]

2.

How about posting a draft on your blog?

[Fred Hapgood]

3.

There are four ways of supporting a realtime online collaborative environment, such as a remote learning class: whiteboarding plus texting, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and virtual worlds. In virtual worlds you have the advantage of having a single visual context (as opposed to a series of portraits) and a sense of how people relate to each other physically within that context, while avoiding the annoyance of worring about your own appearance. On the other hand, there is a learning curve, the resolution is poor, and for better or worse you are not looking at real people, as you are in videoconferencing.

Surely all four of these modes will find their niches. Does anyone have any thoughts about which app will fit in which niche? So far as education is concerned, will there be a difference among age groups??

[blaze]

4.

I think the async factor of Virtual Worlds will win out.

Audio and video conferencing are interesting apps, but they are fairly focused on their applicability. Virtual Worlds have a lot of different aspects about what they provide. Specifically, I believe the important differences are sync/async.

I believe that we are, for very good reasons, moving towards an asynchronous world where our time is demanded in a packet based way (eg: instant messenger) and not a fixed channel way (eg: telephone).

Video / audio conferencing are synchronous and for certain things will be ideal. White boarding / Virtual Worlds are async and will be ideal for other things.

Specifically, I believe education is an ideal asynchronous topic. There are times when I'm in a course which I really do not need to pay attention. Developing courses and material which can take advantage of this fact will be important.

If I was stuck on a vid cam, I think it might be challenging for me to turn it off and back on again when I need to pay attention.

Whether or not this is more effective than our current synchronous (well, I used to do homework in my other classes..) is arguable, but I don't think there is much denying the fact that we all want finer grained control over our time. Async applications (white boarding / Virtual Worlds) do give us that over and above sync apps like audio/visual channels. If this holds true in a practical sense as well, I believe that virtual worlds will win out.

[Fred Hapgood]

5.

I don't understand this. When I think of online education in virtual worlds I think of a bunch of avatars sitting around an amphitheatre, talking about Hawthorne or something. Is that what you mean? What is it about needing to drop in and out of this conversation -- that's what you mean by asynchronous, yes? -- that connects more with virtual worlds than videoconferencing? It's just as easy to see who is present and who is not with either technology, if that's the issue. Isn't it?

[blaze]

6.

Not with Virtual Worlds.

I have personally taught a number of classes and have participated in a number of classes in SecondLife.

One strategy I came up with was to dialog my members little 'quiz' questions to see if they were paying attention and as a way to get feedback if I was actually getting my point across.

Eventually, I just made the quiz question "Is this going to fast, to slow, or just right" .. even then I barely got enough responses.

My events were very well attended, but I had no idea who wasn't participating (I did know who was).

My end conclusion was that they, like myself, love the idea of controlling their time and their presence. Rather than being there on my terms, they were there on their terms - which is what myself and my friends like about instant messenger.

With video conferencing, which I have also done but not in an educational setting, your video camera is either turned on or off. It's not in a "Oh I might be listening I might not" mode.

Perhaps this is not so much with audio conferencing. However, the 1 dimensional bandwidth you get with audio conference has pretty limited application if you ask me.

Another factor I used a lot was scripting of my Avatar in world to do lecture notes. I used the animation feature to make it look like I was typing everything out.

I found this useful as I could pause the script anytime someone asked a question and focus on that. Rather than awkward cutting and pasting .. especially because I coordinated my lecture notes with ~40 slides per lecture.

[blaze]

7.

To summarize, in case I'm still being fuzzy, I think students would hate video conferencing because they couldn't be nude and doing all their other homework. With Virtual Worlds that would be completely possible.

The addendum was just saying that it's hard to programmatically run a class in VideoConferencing. It's very possible to do that in SecondLife.

[Fred Hapgood]

8.

> To summarize, in case I'm still being fuzzy, I > think students would hate video conferencing
> because they couldn't be nude and doing all
> their other homework. With Virtual Worlds that > would be completely possible.

That's clear enough. But you can message and audio conference in the nude too. What do SL-type Virtual Worlds add to the mix?

[Cory Ondrejka]

9.

Fred> But you can message and audio conference in the nude too. What do SL-type Virtual Worlds add to the mix?

Well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Clearly, many topics benefit from a spatial component that is hard to represent in IM, virtual white boards or audio. One example would be historical studios of early human habitation. It is one thing to describe 3 meter by 3 meter mud huts with no doors or windows and a ladder to enter. It is quite another to allow the student to actually walk around the dwelling, climb the ladder, and to go inside.

[blaze]

10.

Yup, absolutely.

But what interests me is whether or not we can take it even a step further and say that there is something inherent about the immersive, social space (rather than the 3d one) which makes the learning process more effective.

I've found a lot of papers and what not about the isolation caused by elearning, but nothing yet as far as I know that specifically addresses whether or not you learn better if you feel a greater sense of immersion amongst your instructor and fellow students.

My assumption is that yes, you do. However, a) I don't really have the capability of proving / arguing it, and b) will everyone feel a senes of immersion in a Virtual World?

[Fred Hapgood]

11.

> My assumption is that yes, you do. However, a) I don't really have the capability of proving / arguing it,

It shouldn't be too hard to design an experiment on the question. Recruit X teams of Y students each, assign one of MIT's great online OpencourseWare curricula, and test the results.

There might be lots of courses that would do well in virtual worlds if they were tweaked a bit. Like giving a physics class a nuclear reactor to fool around with.

[Jerry P]

12.

What do you all think of something like Kuma War as a specialized learning environment? Check out this blog entry I posted about their playable recreation of John Kerry's Silver Star-earning 1969 voyage down the Mekong Delta (I quote one of Cory's comments here in the comments there).

Kuma's site says the upcoming download will include "[a] broadband video news show, real-world intel, satellite images and the background you need to understand a key issue in this year's presidential election," and they identify the genre as "interactive reporting".

There's some great research to be done quizzing Kuma users on their knowledge of the events they've participated in virtually--along the lines of Fred's suggestion with the MIT OpencourseWare. I wonder how many of their users focus on the reality of the scenario vs. stay with the play. If people are at least splitting the difference then it sounds like Kuma's quietly developing a very promising platform for immersive learning. Thoughts?

(Note: Kuma isn't massively multiplayer or persistent--it's serialized, replayable scenarios based on real world news events.)

[Fred Hapgood]

13.

> (Note: Kuma isn't massively multiplayer or persistent--it's serialized, replayable scenarios based on real world news events.)

What persistent MMOs (like SL) deliver better than any other medium is quasi-real world interactions with user communities. Architecture and landscape students can expose their structures and designs to a real market, with real consumers. Design students can sell their clothing, jewelry, boats, etc., online for a fraction of what it would cost in time and money to have the same experience in the real world. Same with courses in gallery and museum management, in organizing cultural events, in promotion. (It's a whole lot simpler to publish a magazine in SL than in the real world.) All of which makes virtual worlds ideal for learning the applied skills involved with these apps.

I'm a bit more sceptical about literature. Still, maybe.

[Jerry P]

14.

>What persistent MMOs (like SL) deliver better than any other medium is quasi-real world interactions with user communities.

Yes. But depending on the lesson, there are situations where educators need cocoons. To stay with the Kuma example, it's a lesson-ender when cyberpunk monkeys in flying cars chase Kerry's Swift Boat down the Delta. What's so great about Second Life in this regard, besides the community and markets, is its combination of user-created content with ownership and privacy. Educators can use custom-designed private settings to protect the integrity of their lessons while still keeping an umbilical attached to the MMO community around them--for feedback, design input, resources, etc.

>I'm a bit more skeptical about literature. Still, maybe.

Someone needs to write Hamlet on the Holodeck part 2: Hamlet in the Metaverse. I nominate Cory :)

[Prokofy Neva]

15.

Fred Hapgood is right that SL, or for that matter even TSO, have the advantage of accelerated simulations of interactions and results and decision trees, etc.

Re: "whiteboarding plus texting" -- we don't have whiteboards in SL and it's darn frustrating. I'm told that complexifying this need into the bundle of things needed for "web on a prim" has delayed whiteboarding. Is that true? We need to be able to all get in a group and all write and respond on a whiteboard, and to leave up text for others to add, or correct (permissions could be set). Currently, we have "notecard giver" and "notecard taker," both very cumbersome. All the "books" created so far involve expensive and clumsy uploading of tga files, and having to go into edit mode or mouselook to read...but not be able to interact with the text. When there's whiteboarding capacity, there will not only be more education, the world itself will become more authentic, it will really take off then.