Just when you thought we’d finished blogging SoP2! Before memories of the conference fade, I wanted to post a few thoughts about the final session, a workshop titled "Law Teaching on the Screen" held at the New York Law School on October 31, 2004. In this session, Paul Maharg, a professor of law at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law in Scotland, presented an overview of a virtual learning environment called “Ardcalloch,” in which law students and tutors take on roles of lawyers and clients to solve simulated legal cases over a period of 9 weeks.
Ardcalloch, which launched in 1999, is used by 256 students divided into 64 fictional law firms. Each firm has its own public web page along with access to a town map, message board, calendar, a diary and a transaction list. 7 tutors monitor administrative areas and feed information to the firms based on various fictional case scenarios (they are essentially functioning as GMs). The cases are closely modeled on real-world cases but the variables of each case are slightly altered. For example, students might be presented with a work-related injury case based on a real case, but details like the type of injury, the location, and the number of witnesses may be changed and similar cases with slightly different variables may be presented to different firms. Currently the Ardcalloch project is text-based, with scenarios performed through written interaction using web, email, message boards, calendar, and diary functionality, and bolstered by occasional in-person feedback from tutors. The program teaches problem-solving skills and encourages collaborative learning without fear of real-world reprisal in the form of negligence and malpractice accusations.
After workshop attendees were brought up to speed on the basics of Ardcalloch, Beth Noveck asked The Big Question: How could the Ardcalloch program be extended into an immersive 3D virtual environment? After a somewhat awkward group pause, Cory Ondrejka stepped up to the plate and gave an admirably straightforward answer: 3D immersion may not be the next logical step for this particular project right now. After all, it would require a whole new set of expensive resources (including the purchase of new equipment) that may not provide a satisfactory return on investment. In other words, Cory said, “don’t do it just for a sexy press release.”
It was generally agreed that virtual world technologies are just not there yet in terms of providing avatars that allow the subtle and complex range of emotive expression necessary for this particular type of professional roleplay. Ultimately, upgrading an educational/professional role playing environment to 3D might provide interesting opportunities for students to run through more realistic negotiation, courtroom, and client interaction scenarios. However, as impressive as today’s virtual worlds are, in this particular case learning through role play may be accomplished more effectively via live role playing scenarios.
This doesn’t mean that the current Ardcalloch project, even in its text-based form, is not a remarkable educational tool. It struck me as a particularly creative approach to legal education and the law professors in the room also seemed suitably impressed, certainly enough to convey interest in implementing this type of program at other schools. The biggest concerns expressed related to the scalability and transportability of the program (ie. implementation at other educational institutions) because of resource constraints, particularly teachers’ time. Prof. Maharg seemed to feel pretty strongly that the ratio of 7 tutors to 256 students was necessary to ensure the project’s smooth operation. This may present a problem at some institutions, depending on staffing situations. Also, it should be noted that Ardcalloch has the benefit of a Learning Technologies Unit department which handles development and technical support, a resource which is undoubtedly crucial to its success.
Since I am not a law professor, I had the luxury of being less concerned with the practicalities of resource constraints. I was more interested in the ways Ardcalloch students learn to put themselves in the role of “lawyer” and by taking part in this role play actively incorporate this role into their real-world identities. This enables a psychological transition from “law student” to “professional lawyer” while highlighting the performative aspects of the legal profession in that students must not only learn requisite facts about laws, legal precedents, and proper procedures, but must also effectively learn how to perform a persona of professional lawyer in the spaces of the courtroom, the office, conference rooms, etc. In my thought paper for SoP2 I talked about virtual worlds as spaces in which young people participate in various job-related play in a 21st century version of “what do you want to be when you grow up.” The identity play in Ardcalloch strikes me as a more mature and controlled version of this type of play, taking this concept to the next level by focusing on a clear end-goal: turning law students into lawyers. Furthermore, Ardcalloch proves that a 3D visual environment isn’t really necessary to accomplish this. Still, I can’t help but wonder what a 3D virtual Ardcalloch would be like. If only current virtual world technologies were up to the challenge.
Cory is right about the application of immersive 3D worlds to Ardcalloch. The zoomable map of the town – currently the nearest thing we have to 3D – is actually seldom visited by the students once it has served its purpose of giving them a felt sense of topographical place. The directory is much more useful to students in the projects they’re engaged in.
But this doesn’t mean that a 3D Ardcalloch can’t be useful as an immersive learning environment. Avatar technology, for example, could be useful for the interaction between tutors-as-characters and students. At the moment we seven tutors in the Personal Injury negotiation project (‘facilitators’ might be a more accurate description of our roles) feed information to groups of firms when they request it; and the information the firms receive can be contradictory, incomplete, changeable, etc. The information is text, photograph or video; but the video is canned, not live. We can’t role play clients or witnesses in f2f meetings (too many characters), so video conferencing & phone is not a solution because we need a mediating, pseudonymous reality if we are to play different roles. Avatars are good solutions in this respect, allowing us to be the representations of other persons, and to construct a dialogue with students. But I take the point about avatar technology not quite being there yet for this sort of social encounter.
One of the ways we’d like to develop the concept of the virtual town as a learning space is by involving other law schools internationally. Another direction is to involve other disciplines and professions in online projects. Architecture and other professions based on construction are obvious examples. Think of an interdisciplinary module that focuses on design or construction in part of the built environment of the town, eg housing, a footbridge, etc. Law students can be involved not only in legal disputes over the objects in the environment (and 3D virtual reality could provide valuable site evidence) but in preventative lawyering for their ‘clients’ (who would be students studying architecture, surveying, planning, etc). Yet another direction might be to give students experience in resolving actual disputes that take place between game players within the virtual environment. If students can be involved in real-life clinics in law schools, why can't they do so online?
Posted by: Paul Maharg | Nov 09, 2004 at 05:07
I had written up some comments on the workshop and thought that I'd post them. It was a very interesting and during the discussion, I kept coming up with various decision options that would help to clarify what kind of world/web page/product/whatever would best fit teaching needs. It isn't a complete list, but I think that it is a useful start. It's also just a stream of thought, so it may not be the clearest writing ever ;-)!
Also, per my comments about whether or not to use 3D -- I am very excited about using digital worlds in general, and SL in particular, in teaching applications, but I am also sensitive to digital worlds’ long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Now that we’re on the cusp of these spaces becoming really useful, it would be a mistake to not apply them to the tasks that they are best suited for.
Most of the questions tend to relate to the first one:
1) Text or digital world?
This is really the crucial question. Why go to 3D? Does the topic at hand require a sense of place and shared physical experiences? Or synchronous interactions? Or rapid physical prototyping? If not, text is easier and may get you much of the way.
2) Any PC or game PC?
Web pages will run on anything from cell phones to the highest end PCs. Digital worlds need relatively buff machines. The good thing is that there are sub-$2000 notebooks and sub-$1000 desktop machines that will run Second Life quite well. The bad side is that this class of computer needs to be mandated or made available to students.
As an aside, were I to mandate a single computer for an entire school, my choice by a wide margin would be for Apple Mac laptops. They are competitively priced, nearly indestructible, easily protected by encryption, easier to backup, and – most importantly – will generate far, far less IT load due to broken setups, viruses and trojans. Plus, Apple loves doing deals with schools.
3) Asynchronous or synchronous?
Do you want to be online with your students? Do your students want to be online together? Yes, chat can do this, but text-based communication tends to fall back on asynchronous models, such as blogs and wikis. On the other hand, 3D spaces can do both, providing far more flexibility.
4) Broadcast model or network model?
Closely related to the previous question, this question focuses on information dissemination. Blogs and wikis, again, tend towards 1-to-many broadcast models of communications, while real-time chat (whether text or 3D) allows more options for point-to-point and many-to-many options.
5) Individual or collaborative lessons?
Again, related to the previous question. A system that supports collaborative learning is likely to also support individual exercises, although the opposite may not be true.
6) Are students graded based on tests and papers or collaboration and creation?
3D worlds aren’t good places to write papers, nor do they necessarily lend themselves to automated grading techniques. However, they are great places for creating and brainstorming and what happened within them can certainly be tested and/or written about. A related issue is whether students have deliverables or are graded via monitoring.
7) COTS or DIY?
The age old question of doing it yourself or buying something. Some products, like Second Life, are strongly biased towards allowing customization. Also, commercial products get tested, are improved, etc. Finally, the technical and content challenges related to 3D world development may preclude DIY in that area.
8) Game or digital world?
T.L. is correct and we probably shouldn’t try to break these apart so strongly, but there is a big difference between trying to teach in EverQuest versus SL. I can imagine concepts that could be taught in both, but I suspect that generally SL’s flexibility is going to trump EQ’s larger player base. Still needs to be fully considered, though.
9) Immersive or non-immersive?
People tend to assume that immersive means 3D, but as Paul showed us, text can be plenty immersive. Also, any system that can support immersive experiences can also support non-immersive ones. The converse tends not to be as true.
10) Scripted or live?
Are students running through scripted experiences or operating with only general instructions? Many tradeoffs exist between lesson creation time, lesson reuse, grading time, cheating potential, etc. Also, lessons that exist within the environment of a live world – with all of the variety generated by thousands of other residents – may feel far more real world.
Posted by: Cory Ondrejka | Nov 09, 2004 at 13:43
Lots of interesting points raised by Cory here. Could I take up one – the point about ‘Scripted vs live’. During SoP I was constantly travelling a parallel thought track: listening to the stuff on the panels, then translating it into educational simulations. One of the big themes, touched on by many panels, was how people create narrative interest within the worlds out of the objects and situations they find and create there. Worlds, virtual & real, are interesting to players in the extent to which they enable free play within constraints, rules, expectations, etc, and don’t impose an arbitrary narrative on the lives of their inhabitants.
The same is true within an educational simulation. For us, the most difficult simulation to run is what we call an ‘open-field’ simulation in Personal Injury negotiation, where there are no learning outcomes except for a negotiated settlement at the end of the semester, and where we require four bodies of evidence in the students’ case files. Students can contact anyone in Ardcalloch; facilitators have standard documents, simulation guidelines, and rules of conduct when role-playing; but their play is largely led by the student firms. Contrast this with a much tighter simulation in Private Client. There, students wind up the estate of a deceased client, are much more constrained in the information they receive and are required to produce specific documentation to pre-set standards for assessment. Students learn through both simulations how to do the two quite different legal transactions; but the evidence is that they learn more about a wider variety of aspects of legal practice and the ethics of practical lawyering from the free play of the PI project. In a sense both projects are highly scripted, but the PI project is scripted to give the students much more freedom to move within the scenario. It’s scripted to be more live.
Posted by: Paul Maharg | Nov 09, 2004 at 17:23
Lots of interesting points raised by Cory here. Could I take up one – the point about ‘Scripted vs live’. During SoP I was constantly travelling a parallel thought track: listening to the stuff on the panels, then translating it into educational simulations. One of the big themes, touched on by many panels, was how people create narrative interest within the worlds out of the objects and situations they find and create there. Worlds, virtual & real, are interesting to players in the extent to which they enable free play within constraints, rules, expectations, etc, and don’t impose an arbitrary narrative on the lives of their inhabitants.
The same is true within an educational simulation. For us, the most difficult simulation to run is what we call an ‘open-field’ simulation in Personal Injury negotiation, where there are no learning outcomes except for a negotiated settlement at the end of the semester, and where we require four bodies of evidence in the students’ case files. Students can contact anyone in Ardcalloch; facilitators have standard documents, simulation guidelines, and rules of conduct when role-playing; but their play is largely led by the student firms. Contrast this with a much tighter simulation in Private Client. There, students wind up the estate of a deceased client, are much more constrained in the information they receive and are required to produce specific documentation to pre-set standards for assessment. Students learn through both simulations how to do the two quite different legal transactions; but the evidence is that they learn more about a wider variety of aspects of legal practice and the ethics of practical lawyering from the free play of the PI project. In a sense both projects are highly scripted, but the PI project is scripted to give the students much more freedom to move within the scenario. It’s scripted to be more live.
Posted by: Paul Maharg | Nov 09, 2004 at 17:24