SLBPE. Validating & Recognizing Skills by Chris Eggplant

After attending the first session of the SL Best Practices in Education Conference at 2AM (CDT) and catching another 1.5 hour of sleep, I attended and moderated the session by Chris Swaine (SL: Chris Eggplant) which actually delivered by his colleague Susan Kelly: Validating and recognizing skills – a core competency framework. Chris & Susan, or at least Susan, work for National Institute for Adult Continuing Education in the UK; the session focused on work published at sleducationuk.net

The topic focused on the notion of developing core competencies necessary for SL residents to properly engage the environment. Chris proposes, as noted in his whitepaper, that the SL education community work toward:

1. A set of agreed technical competences for residents, learners and practitioners.
2. Supporting guidelines on good pedagogical practice.
3. An agreed consultation process to identify the competences and guidelines.
4. Accreditation and/or benchmarking for these competences.

In short, Chris simply suggests that we collectively identify core competencies and principles of quality pedagogical practice in Second Life and move toward benchmarking those levels of skill and performance.

I believe, perhaps assume, most educational institutions are, should be or will be engaging the exact ideas Chris suggests. The notion is not groundbreaking; what’s encouraging with the proposal is the early timing of it. I’ve expressed before my primary concern is that we – my institution (and indeed many others) – will make the same mistakes we made with web-based learning: teach now and plan, manage, and assess quality later. Quality teaching and learning doesn’t typically happen organically; it can, but often it does not particularly when new media and technologies are added into the learning environment. Institutionally, we need to define what we believe to be quality teaching and learning via Second Life and provide the resources and scaffolding/support/training to make it possible.

With that said, a community-wide effort to identify the core competencies for SL faculty and learners will facilitate quality instructional use of Second Life; that will benefit the entire community.