10 Challenges & Solutions to Teaching in SL

Lisa Dawley (Boise State University) and owner of EDTECH Island, has been doing some fine work around teaching and learning in SL. Here graduate students and faculty compiled challenges and solutions as pa,rt of a weekly assignment in EDTECH 597: Teaching & Learning in Second Life, a course offered at Boise State University, EDTECH Island. Topics were chosen by each author. These are SL real world challenges with thoughtful solutions.

Here are SL Guides and Tutorials

Just a reminder that this site has a bunch of resources for novices, newbies and well versed Second Life residents.  For example on our page Guides and Tutorials you’ll find a free unofficial guide to SL in PDF format. For anyone who’s spent only a couple of hours in SL, it makes sense out of the myriad of things you might have experienced but couldn’t  understand as well as the myriad of things you didn’t even notice.
Then there’s the Starter Guide, another PDF, which is shorter, not as pretty or comprehensive, but good to get at the basics.

As one of our workshop participants observed, SL isn’t just another tool but a culture and a complex of technologies. These guides, and the tutorials and resources on our site are all designed to teach and support you in learning about SL. However, without spending time in world and being willing to figure things out as you go, it’s like learning about Russia without ever going there. Hoo!

New opportunities in 2008 for Second Life

The New Media Consortium’s Virtual Worlds has announced an exciting year.  Here’s a PDF of their services for free and for hire. In particular, I like the live mentoring they’ll be offering: “Live mentoring for new entrants into Second Life. High on the list of planned enhancements for the NMC’s Orientation Island experience is the implementation of a mentoring program. There is strong support for this in the Second Life educational community, and a presence-aware mentor notification system has already been piloted. The mentor community is expected to launch sometime in the next 30 days.” Read more.

Presence and the Wizard of Oz

I’ve been thinking about what I call the Wizard of Oz affect of synchronous communication in distance settings. I’ve been reading and hearing about, and experiencing a kind of social presence in Second Life that has implications for any avatar-based environment. It’s a feeling of location-bound, embodied presence of you and others that’s emotionally immersive whether you’re engaged in complex or simple activities, whether you’re solving problems or simply talking.

It’s easy to forget there’s a physical person sitting behind the curtain for whom the experience of engagement and presence might be quite different than ours. We don’t give much thought to what other people are doing while we’re attending a webinar, or IMing together in the 2D web. In part because we don’t extend the conventions, protocols and cues of F2f interaction to those interactions.

Embodying an avatar in a 3D environment is something different. In comparison, we have a different sense of being there and of others being there. No matter how in our heads, emotions or spirits we are, our direct experience of the world, our selves and others is profoundly embodied and I think it is because of the psychology of this experience that we ascribe the same sensibilities to the avatar experience. We likely bring some awareness that our physical selves are sitting behind our Wizard of Oz curtain, but when we’re fully engaged with our lives on the screen I think we can easily forget that. And we forget as well, that others are sitting behind their curtains doing who knows what.

This brings me to question our assumptions about engagement, attention, attentiveness, focus, etc in 3D VEs. At a particular skill level, participants can multitask quite easily. For example, I’m often browsing the events tab, IMing with one or more residents, maybe dancing and partially attending to the spacial chat. Sometimes I’m browsing the flat web, skimming my bloglines feeds, checking and writing email. I can do all this in text-based situtation much more easily than on voice. However it’s not difficult to be multitasking while on voice either.

So what’s the point? I think the tendency to make assumptions and conclusions about SL without any hard evidence is a common practice that creates more assumptions and conclusions. It’s as if we just won’t look behind the curtain for fear of dispelling our fantasies.

Academic Impressions Webinar: Exploring SL Basics

I wanted post this announcement of AI’s webinar on SL  to note  and reflect on a few things.

This first is to acknowledge that AI webinars have been good products we have used and would continue to use.  I’m sure this webinar will be the same. The second is to say in so many words something I’m sure I’ll stumble over: “Phewww… now we don’t have to put resources into such endeavors.” I say that not with a sigh of relief per se but with an exhale of “problem solved, opportunity created.” External entities are continually creating opportunities and filling in gaps for us in academia. Resourcing (not outsourcing) isn’t just a buzz word, it really does make a difference. The cost of putting on our recent SL workshop isn’t a sustainable cost. With budget cuts just up the highway, creative resourcing is essential. The pICTsl Farm would be happy to host this webinar if there’s interest.

Is there?

Winterbreak SL workshop results

We had 32 participants attend six, two and a half hour sessions of our Introduction to Second Life Winter Break workshops. Faculty, instructional staff, campus administrators and folks from our neighboring USD got their second lives up and running. Overall it was well received, the majority thought the sessions were effectively organized and presented. They thought the content was effective and were likely to discuss it with colleagues or students.

When asked about the likelihood of applying SL to teaching and learning the results were more diverse. On a scale of 1-10 (very unlikely to very likely), 22% responded very likely, 13% with a nine, 9% responded with an eight and 34% with a seven. The responses to the likelihood that they would use SL in other ways that would benefit SDSU were also spread out. 16% responded very likely, 19% with a nine, 13% with an eight, 19% with a seven and 25% responded with either a five or six. (These figures are rounded up. Here are the actual stats)

Some of the open-ended responses:

When asked to elaborate on the likelihood they’d apply SL to improve teaching and learning:

“I am willing, but still unsure of possible applications. I need more time to think about what I learned today.”
” improve may be ambiguous. I believe it will be an interesting adjunct to teaching.” ”
“Doesn’t seem quite ready for novices — high cognitive overhead and slow performance — but interesting as a test bed for advanced students”
” This medium presents a challenge to instructional design. We should brainstorm on new ideas for design.”
“I believe this techno can be used to encourage DE learners to get to know each other and also be used as a tool in traditional classrooms.
” I am very interested in using this tool as a meeting place for our online students, particularly those working on group projects. Our courses are entirely online.”

When asked to elaborate on the likelihood they’d use SL in other ways to that benefit SDSU

“Again, if I can figure out effective uses, I will apply them.”
“The notion that people can virtually visit SDSU has been taken to another level.”
“Hard to say at this point.”
“Just having a better understanding of the environment will make a world of difference”
“various applications when it comes to student and faculty orientations”

On the immediate horizon: Metaplace – a web of worlds

Wouldn’t you know it, just as our very successful SL workshops come to end I get a Tweet from Bernie Dodge who’s looking into Metaplace
to replace Second Life in his Games and Simulation course.

Here’s an article about Metaplace, “a system that’s designed to treat virtual worlds like other content on the Web.”

The company is based in San Diego and the president, Ralph Koster says, “We think virtual worlds are just a new medium. That means that like other media–like pictures, audio, and video–virtual worlds are eventually going to start being ubiquitous on all sorts of Web pages.”

← Previous Page — Next Page →