Earlier this month on Terra Nova, a thread started by Aaron Delwiche discussed aspects of teaching and learning in Second Life. He is not the only academic who has realized the potential of Second Life to serve as a platform for instruction. The virtual world is already being used at 125 colleges, universities, and schools worldwide, according to the Second Life Educators Wiki (thanks to Barbara Z. Johnson for the link).
The thread and the wiki prompted me to look at how Second Life is being used at the Harvard Extension School, where I am currently a graduate student. In 2006, the Extension School and the Harvard Law School launched CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion. This course in "persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space" included weekly sessions and assignments in Second Life. I did not participate in the class, but had wondered about the virtual classroom experience, which I believe was the first of its kind at Harvard. Last Friday (May 11, 2007) I was able to interview Rebecca Nesson, one of the course instructors for CyberOne, to find out more about the challenges, tools, and interactions she observed while teaching in SL. I transcribed the entire interview, but in this Terra Nova post, I am only including the sections that relate specifically to teaching in Second Life (the full unedited interview, which also includes several Harvard-specific questions and answers, is available here).
It was interesting to see how she led the classroom sessions, and handled some of the challenges that arose using the SL interface. The CyberOne experiment was apparently successful -- in the spring 2007 semester, the Berkman Center and the Extension School held another class in Second Life, Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control, and this fall Nesson will teach Virtual Worlds at the Extension School.
Without further ado, here are the questions I asked, and Nesson's answers. I have included a brief version of Nesson's bio at the end of the post. Feel free to add your own observations about teaching/learning in Second Life (or other virtual worlds) to the comments.
Ian Lamont: Aside from [connectivity] issues, what was the feedback [you heard] from people about the Second Life interface?
Rebecca Nesson: Overall it was very positive. I would say that there was a definite arc to it. At the beginning, there was a certain amount of Second Life culture shock, where people try to get acclimated about how to use the interface. The first impression that a lot of people had about it was that it was a very chaotic environment in which to have a class discussion because everyone talks at once and there's no threading in the discussions. When you read the transcripts of the discussions, they can seem fairly disjointed and that felt a little disorienting to people right at the beginning.
We all got used to it over the course of the semester, and also got much better at it. One of the things that we brought to the class with us are years of built-up experience of how one is supposed to act in a class as a student and an instructor. And a lot of those norms — like, raising your hand and waiting for someone to stop speaking before you begin speaking — they just dont make sense in the Second Life environment because it would just take way too long to have a discussion.
And as a result we were basically faced with the challenge of having to develop a whole new set of classroom norms that worked in this environment. Once we got that going, everyone got much more comfortable with the environment. By the end of the semester, people were really enjoying it.
There were some people who had a much easier time expressing themselves in the Second Life environment, than in the more formal writing [assignments] and turning it in on our courseware website. So for those people, it really opened up the distance education experience to have this other method of being able to express themselves and interact with the instructor and other students.
And there were some students on the other side of things who were very comfortable writing traditional response papers and had a harder time in the spontaneous, more interactive discussions that we were having in the classroom environment in Second Life. So all in all, that's a major improvement. I would prefer for my classes to be available to a wider range of learning and styles of expression.
Lamont: You just said that some people found it easier to interact in Second Life. Why do you suppose that is? Does it relate to their personalities, or the fact that they're used to typing IMs?
Nesson: Let me be clear. I don't necessarily mean it would be easier for them than acting in real life. This is just opposed to them acting in their normal way in a distance education class, interacting mainly through a website and through email with their instructors.
I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.
And having a physical representation of their "selves" through their avatars, whether it looked like them or looked like something completely different, was quite important in having them establish relationships with each other. Because it gave people a way to express something of their personality that wasn't necessarily directly related to what we were doing in the class. And it just was the icebreaker for people beginning to relate to each other and make comments about somebody's cool dress or something like that and get a little conversation going.
So having the class have a sense of a community, and being a little bit social for most students really adds to the experience. It certainly added to the experience for me. I think that probably helped to draw in some students.
Also, we tend to think of Second Life as a less expressive environment than face-to-face environments because at the moment we don't have the ability to easily do gestures and facial expressions or even to really direct our gaze really well.
It does in other senses offer people a wider range of ways that they can express themselves, and that was something I was excited about. Early on, when I was writing on the blog, just finding that some students just really seemed to take to the creative aspects of the environment and really try to use the unrestrained environment and really try to violate the laws of physics as part of their way of existing in the world, and it just gave them a range of expression that doesn't really exist when you are typing out a response paper and turning it in.
Lamont: What surprised you in terms of the creative aspects and the things that they did in the classroom sessions?
Nesson: I guess what surprised me was that I had sort of a typical narrow view of what Second Life was going to be like. I was thinking of it as a big improvement over a chatroom but I hadn't really considered as something that had potentials that really went beyond what I had experienced with other technologies. I think that it's not until you spend some time in there that you start to get a sense of the way in which it's different, because it's kind of hard to pinpoint, to put into words, what exactly is making the difference.
So I would say the biggest surprise for me wasn't the way that some people were expressing themselves, but the experience of all of us running our classes in a text-based environment. I expected that to be only a hindrance, and at the beginning it did seem like a hindrance, it seemed a little chaotic, and it was something that we had to get used to. But as we progressed in the class, it became clear that running the class in a text-based environment has a whole lot of advantages over the face-to-face environment that I just hadn't anticipated.
The first one that was really striking, was that in all my years of teaching classes, there are always some students in the class who are very hard to get to speak up. You can ask them a direct question, but basically, unless they are put on the spot, these students will not volunteer their own opinions in class, and I think that there are various reasons why people are reticent and don't want to do that. Sometimes I think people are shy and don't want to be put on the spot — all the conversation stops, and everyone turns to look at them. In some cases, students for whom English is not their first language, it really can be an intimidating thing to have to extemporaneously put together English sentences like that in a classroom environment.
In Second Life, that problem of students not participating in class discussions just totally disappeared. And when I thought about it, these reasons, these challenges of speaking up in a regular class went away in this environment. In Second Life, when you want to contribute something to the class discussion, you just go ahead and start typing it in your chat box, and nobody turns to look at you, even if they do notice that your avatar is doing the typing motions, they are not actually looking at you, it's just your avatar, and your avatar is not doing anything embarrassing. When you are ready to enter your comment into the conversation, you just hit enter. And it doesn't have that moment where everybody stops and looks at you. Your comment just goes right into the conversation, along with everybody else's. So i think a lot of the anxiety that goes along with the public-speaking aspect of participating in class discussions, is just removed in this environment.
On the flip side, we didn't have any trouble with students who dominate the discussion. There's always been the phenomenon of the student who ends every sentence with a conjunction in order to not stop their comment, and you can do that as much as you like in Second Life, and it doesn't stop anybody else from participating in the discussions. What's nice about that is very frequently people who usually speak a lot in class have a lot of very good things to contribute, and it's hard as a teacher to shut somebody down in order to make space for other students, especially if you do feel that you want to be encouraging of their interest and enthusiasm. And this just takes away that problem as well.
So for me the idea that I would actually end up almost preferring to run a class in a text-based environment to a voice-based environment, that was a huge surprise.
Lamont: In Second Life, or a virtual world, or any chat environment, don't you have students who are really stepping over each other, and it's impossible to sort out all the questions that really need to be answered?
Nesson: Well, it turns out that that was not a problem, and I think there are a few reasons for this. First of all, over the course of the semester, I developed some skill at moderating this type of group discussion in this type of environment. Basically, what happens is you have a few different threads of discussion that start, and the job of a teacher or discussion moderator becomes continually trying to weave the threads together, so that you don't end up with a discussion that's too fragmented. Because if it's too fragmented, it's as you described — it's just a bunch of disconnected things going on.
But you also have some help as a moderator, from just the natural effect of trying to participate in one of these discussions. If there's a lot going on, you have to put a fair amount of energy into reading the discussions and sorting out what's happening. So even if there are a lot of people, it's not that easy for everyone to be adding some totally different thing all at once. People sort of tend to stay on one topic or another, especially if the moderator is doing her job well.
But that said, we definitely did break the class up into smaller groups for discussions fairly frequently for exactly this reason — just like with any discussion, it's just much more effective if you have it with smaller groups.
Now that Linden Lab has open sourced the viewer for Second Life, there are quite a few possibilities open to make this management task easier. Right now when you chat in Second Life, everything just goes into an undifferentiated chat history. But it would be possible to add some simple threading technology to help identify different threads in the discussion and make it easier to follow. Perhaps even some moderation tools that would let the moderator modify what was going on in the discussion in some reasonable way. I am not exactly sure what that would look like.
Lamont: In virtual reality classroom environments, what's your perspective on grading and evaluating students?
Nesson: It's really no different than in a regular face-to-face class. For CyberOne, we obviously had to know the real-life identities of the students who were in our class, in order to grade them. For some people, who wanted to keep their other avatars anoymous, they created a new avatar to take our class. From my perspective, I expect that it is the actual student who is operating their own avatar, and I grade them just as I would in another environment.
Lamont: What types of tools would help you be a better educator? If you could magically create or program some tools or objects or something in Second Life that would help you teach, what would they be?
Nesson: I'll tell you what we used that were really great. We had a video screen which was wonderful and also streaming audio, which was great. If you want to use any lecture-type material in Second Life, those are total must-haves.
Then we aslso used a basic slide projector, which is similar to having PowerPoint, and that obviously can be useful. I didn't use it all that much.
One thing were using right now in the Internet and Society course which I am not teaching, but other people at the Berkman Center are teaching, is something called the Question Tool, which is a great tool that the Berkman Center has developed. How their class works is that it's webcast live into our classroom in Second Life. So students who are taking the class from a distance can attend the class in real time and watch it and they can sit with the other students in Second Life.
And the way that they can participate in the class is through the Question Tool. How it works is that anybody who wants to can post a question on the Question Tool, or they can vote on somebody else's question. And the Question Tool organizes the questions from the top of the page to the bottom of the page, in order of popularity [depending on] how many votes they've gotten, so the professor then has access to this list of questions or comments coming from the student audience that's sorted in a way that's actually meaningful in terms of their level of relevance and interest to the students in the class.
One of the things that's really cool about it for the Internet and Society class is that students who are physically in the classroom at Harvard Law School and the students who are in Second Life are using the same instances of the Question Tool so that they're interacting directly with each other through that. So that is one great tool, and it's not actually in Second Life, in the sense that you do everyithing in Second Life. Right now, we just have it set up so that there's an object you click in Second Life and it takes you to the Web page, which is the interface for the Question Tool.
The main thing that doesn't exist in Second Life and I can't for the life of me figure out how one could program, is something that's more like a blackboard. A free-form writing tool is something that I would really love to have. As a person who studies Computer Science, I am frequently wanting to draw all kinds of diagrams on a board if I am teaching students about Computer Science, and there's really no way to do that in Second Life. So you have to simulate doing everything you want to do like that, using slides, and the problem with that is when a question comes up, and you need to give an example that isn't already on your slides, there's not really any good way to do that in Second Life right now.
The full, unedited version of the interview, which includes four or five additional questions and answers, is available here.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, Nesson will be the instructor for Virtual Worlds, scheduled for the Fall 2007 semester at the Harvard Extension School. Nesson is currently a candidate for a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she studies computational linguistics and conducts research in the area of synchronous grammar formalisms and applications to computational semantics and machine translation. Nesson is also a 2001 graduate of the Harvard Law School and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Related:
Ian Lamont's Terra Nova interview with Boston College instructor Aaron Walsh: Virtual reality and higher education: Another perspective
>here's no threading in the discussions.
There's a simple way that this could be ameliorated.
In the Sims Online, when you wish to chat, you open up a full-sized square box. You type more than a half line, you tend to complete a thought and type a paragraph. That paragraph becomes a balloon out of your character's mouth.
In Second Life, you tend to type only half a line, and that means a tenth of a thought.
You type it, and while you are still wishing to say something, someone else intervenes with their half line and half thought. You hasten to print yours, and so it goes, each perhaps half lines and half thoughts tumbling over each other.
While you can opt to put chat like a balloon, few do, possibly as they find it isn't "like the IRC channel enough" for them.
Indeed, like other aspects of SL, chat suffers from the pernicious influence of IRC channel culture that makes one big giant scroll with people constantly riffing, being humorous, making one-liner non-sequiturs, etc. the norm. That culture was absent from TSO because people spoke in whole paragraphs. It made them listen more, and be nicer to deal with.
Such a simple thing -- a box for a paragraph, a half line for only half a thought -- of such things worlds and cultures are made of.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 17, 2007 at 01:37
Great post. Lots of fertile stuff here.
As for the chat/threading issue, I suspect that, as Prokofy Neva says, those who are used to a certain style of chat want to keep it, even if it's limited. I would expect that a new set of expectations/style can be developed w/o too much trouble. It might need to be explicitly spelled out to get people in a class to work together on it. But it shouldn't be too hard; people in different cultures and subcultures have different expectations for classrooms, but new expectations can be made.
In the mid-90s, I co-directed a "live roleplaying game" that ran only 3 events in spring and 3 events in fall, but people wanted to continue the experience more often, so we tried using an AOL chat room (or roomS, really). It took a while, and some liked it more than others, but once we adapted to the new context, it worked decently.
Posted by: Tripp | May 17, 2007 at 09:20
I can't help but bring this idea back up -- perhaps it does deserve it's own independent post -- but it's interesting that this was a law course. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that physical classroom buildings be accessible for students with disabilities -- who will be responsible for making that virtual classroom accessible? Is it Linden? Or is it the instructor/university? So I'm wondering what a law professor would have to say about this very real and probably not far off issue?
Posted by: Michelle Hinn | May 18, 2007 at 19:47
@Michelle : remember Terri Schiavo ? These lawyers , ignoring the very reality of ADA but wasting taxpayers' money playing a game and pretending they are " instucting ", are the same with those who killed Terri for money. Does it sounds " pathetic " ? It is.
Posted by: Amarilla | May 18, 2007 at 23:48
Michelle, I'm glad you raised this issue. Although I'm neither an expert on the ADA nor a law professor, I'm happy to add my two cents. Whether or not the ADA applies to virtual classrooms, my personal commitment to fairness and openness dictates that I/we find some solution to this problem.
Luckily, we are actually in a position to begin addressing it. Now that the SL viewer is open source, it is possible to create a version of it that will work with screen reader technologies. I'm not sure what sort of development community has arisen around the SL viewer, but it seems like this would be a very good project for it to undertake. As universities begin to commit to the environment and face the potential legal issue, they will likely be willing to contribute their (perhaps financial) support. If some aspects of the user experience are not communicated to the viewer in a way that is easily usable for providing a text-based representation, Linden Labs might be called upon to enrich the API available to the viewer.
Other notes:
* It is hard for me to imagine that the ADA would apply directly to Linden Labs rather than to universities that use SL as a platform for teaching. However, Linden Labs has made a substantial commitment to education in Second Life and would presumably consider it important to make it possible for university-associated educators to continue using it.
* A low-tech solution (similar to the one used for hearing-impaired students in lecture classes) is to provide an assistant for the student who can provide the necessary access to the environment.
Posted by: Rebecca Nesson | May 19, 2007 at 11:07
Thanks for your reply, Rebecca! I've also given thought to the low-tech solutions, as it's more often than not used to help students with web-based courseware accessibility. I'm not sure how other campuses operate but at the University of Illinois these assistants are either paid employees of the university or volunteers. I hadn't thought about this before but I'm wondering about the financial case that could be made as more professors explore teaching in virtual worlds? It would be a gamble but what if more financial resources were put toward creating accessible mods or UIs for these, would it be, at least eventually, more cost effective? Unfortunately I'm not an economist of any sort so I'd need some assistance with figuring this out even if only for our campus, which has a VERY high percentage of students with disabilities.
I personally would have a nightmare in a class in Second Life because one disability I will make public now is Dyslexia (I've always wondered about the wiseness of the spelling of that word for those of us WITH it). For many reasons, I feel like I'm getting less, not more information, and left out of the learning community MUCH more so than a traditional classroom because of how many ways and how many OVERLAPPING ways text is presented in these environments. I *can* access the environment but it's so often a very embarrassing situation (so a huge part of the barrier is psychological) that I've given up. I LOVE the idea of Second Life and other MMOGs but at the end of the day, it's not, well, fun or practical for me.
So I would need an assistant, which would be the first time I would have ever required one -- not very empowering when I've spent my life being proud of being completely independent of assistance for this disability (with invisible disabilities, you often figure out work arounds very quickly and I was also diagnosed very late into my schooling when I'd already learned my own ways of engaging with written materials).
I'm not sure that there is a solution for MMOGs and people like me, just as others on TN have speculated on the incredible feat creating a solution for potential blind MMOG players/users. But regardless I think it's interesting to speculate on and it's the first time I have ever faced a digital disability -- that is, one that is created DUE to a particular technology. As far as most other games go, I have no problems or I at least know how I learn so I know what strategies I need to use to best play the game. But MMOGs? A completely different story.
I know...it's interesting that I post this month on TN given I'm not in the user group but I think that it's an important thing to get out there -- that there are those of us who want to not only experience but have an enjoyable and empowering experience MMOGs that are really being left out of the community.
This was all supposed to be my final post of the month (and will still be) but I'm finding that I'm needing to "out" myself sooner than later!
Posted by: Michelle Hinn | May 19, 2007 at 17:37