Archive for April, 2008

Continuing the sessions I attended at the vBusiness Expo by Clever Zebra; the last session for the day (for me) was a panel discussion facilitated by Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins, “Perspectives on the future of Second Life and other virtual spaces for education.” The panel included Jeremy Kabumpo and buridan Simon (SL names), and in all honesty, it was one of the better sessions I’ve attended at any conference.

To briefly introduce the participants, Jeremy Kabumpo – Jeremy Kemp in RL – is from San Jose State University; he created the heart murmur sim and is teaching in SL for the third semester – a workshop for information and library sciences. buridan Simon is Jeremy Hunsinger; he teaches communication courses in Second Life for the University of Illinois-Chicago.

As Intellagirl noted, the focus of the panel was to step past common questions like, “What makes Second Life cool for education?” and “What are some of the projects we’ve seen?” The discussion focused on more forward-looking questions that begin to engage the environment in more depth. I’ve noted a few of the questions they addressed with my notes interjected.

What changes would make virtual worlds more effective learning spaces? Accessibility represents a critical issues, as Jeremy Kemp noted early in the discussion. I believe this is absolutely a critical issue, particularly for the vision impaired. I recently encountered (in the last two days) a professor who is visually impaired; he’s done previous phenomenal work regarding accessible technology, including I was told a graphing calculator for the vision impaired. Currently, he’s working with others perhaps including a prominent private company with heavy investment in Second Life to improve the accessibility of the virtual space. There’s an underlying issue here as well; for the sake of the vision impaired, we can not rely on individuals to “tag” objects accurately within a virtual environment. As my new acquaintance noted, that process is too unreliable for it to realistically work. The accessibility technology he described focused on the use of artificial intelligence engines to process objects and information to add standardized meta-data accessible to those that can not see the visual environment.

A separate issue, which came up as a backchannel conversation as well later during the conversation, was suggested by Jeremy Hunsinger; it’s not the the tools within the environment that need to change in SL as much as the teaching and learning methods utilized within the space. I agree entirely but will elaborate below (and in a forthcoming blog post regarding a session I attended a week or so ago).

Why have virtual worlds become such a hot topic in education? How do we move past the novelty stage: the “wow isn’t this neat” type thoughts regarding SL? One of the first answers was, “This isn’t new. We’ve been doing this for quite a while.” The reference was to VRML and other previous iterations of virtual environments; Harvard’s River City project was also mentioned. The comment was absolutely true, but it previous iterations of virtual environments, in my opinion, happened more in isolation on desktops rather than available and publicly accessible via the internet. The internet-available, networked virtual environment makes Second Life significantly different from the older virtual environments mentioned by the panel. The nature of the networked environment has contributed to the critical mass necessary to create a buzz within the educational community and larger world-community at large.

To move beyond the “wow isn’t this neat” type thoughts regarding SL, I believe, simply requires time. Every significant new technology has had the same novelty effect; the duration of that reaction is influenced by the magnitude of the difference between the new technology and the previous technologies on which it expands or which it enhances or replaces. Ultimately, I believe many educators have moved beyond the novelty stage; they’re the ones producing research reports and continuing to innovate in the environment. Until we reach the point of widespread adoption – possibly the point of “80% of Internet users having a Second Life account” statistic – virtual environments will continue to be “neat” to a significant portion of the education and global communities.

Are virtual worlds “creepy treehouses?” How do we ensure genuine interest? Or can we? Creepy treehouse is an environment that we create for learners to “entice” them, but it turns out that learners wouldn’t choose to interact in that space on their own. That means that educators are the ones driving the adoption of the technology. So, are we merely bringing users into a “creepy treehouse?” I’ve encountered this term before, but not in a manner in which it was well defined enough to understand the concept. My first reaction was that this is exactly what education does with learning management systems; aren’t all LMS’ nothing more than “environments that we’ve created for learners” that the learners wouldn’t choose to use by their own devices? Absolutely.

Here’s the higher level problem as I’ve conceptualized it over the past semester. While I’ve supported faculty teaching in online spaces for the past 6+ years, I hadn’t the opportunity to teach online as a faculty member until this semester. Through all of the many (13+) internet-based distance learning courses I took as a student, I never felt disconnected; the environment never seemed impersonal or dispersed. However, I think education as a whole has likely experienced the same thing I have since then. When I was taking those courses (1999-2005), I really didn’t have an “online” life outside of my courses; I did a few other things online, but since social networking hadn’t taken off like it has since then, the most engaging activity online, for me, was my courses. NOW, however, I am engaged in a very large educational technology community via blogs, my news reader, twitter and Second Life. As a result, the class I’m teaching seems far removed and separate from my online life; it resides and occurs in a different, walled-off environment of Blackboard. It’s a creepy treehouse. I think many other faculty and students are experiencing the same thing even though their “online life” may exist in a different circle or via different tools (Facebook, Ning, MySpace, discussion forums and groups etc). The challenge, then, is to integrate the two worlds – bring my class into these other spaces; push class information and activities into the social spaces of students.

How can we accomplish that? First, for both internet-based and virtual environment-based learning, we’re seeing it happen with tools that integrate information into social tools like Facebook: the Second Life friends application, Blackboard pushing out a Facebook application in the near future etc. Second, for Second Life and other virtual environments, I think learners will “meet us in the middle;” as we hopefully move toward interoperability between virtual environments and standard communication protocols, learners will also become more involved in virtual environments (the 80% of users by 2010 statistic noted above). Once that happens, the creepy treehouse phenomenon fades as the tools we’re using simply become another social networking tool.

As this discussion was going on with the panelists, the audience engaged the issue of “digital natives.” I’ve stated it on numerous occasions in multiple spaces, but I think the idea of a digital native is a myth. Younger users are not necessarily more computer literate or more proficient using the new tools; there are users, that may be younger, that are, but I think the factors truly influencing greater proficiency and literacy with technology are: access to technology, exposure to new technologies, early school environments, parental use of technology, etc. I *know* that many of the 18-22 year old learners in my class were completely unaware of Web 2.0 type technologies like collaborative writing tools, blogs, news readers, virtual environments, social bookmarking and micro-blogging; I’m just as certain of that as other faculty, in other situations, are that their students are all using those tools. What’s the difference between our students? It’s not their age. It’s their access to technology, their early learning environments, their parents use of technology etc. Similarly, my daughters are aware of virtual environments, blogs, collaborative writing tools and a few other things, and my best friend’s boys, who are roughly the same age, are not as aware of the same technologies. Why? I’m an educational technologist working with the technologies on a daily basis; my best friend and his wife have careers in different fields. Sounds a lot like the age-old educational argument: nature vs. nurture.

IBM’s private. Pre-cursor to private grids more widespread? How will this impact education and the virtual worlds?
I don’t have many thoughts regarding this question that I haven’t already noted. Jeremy Kemp doesnt’ think private grids will negatively impact education; in fact, he suggested it may make it easier to get grant funding given private, secure server space in which to conduct research and protect learners. Specifically, Kemp has found through surveys of his students that interaction with strangers is often perceived to be interruptive and to make the experience less pleasant.

On the flip side of the coin, Jeremy Hunsinger dislikes the notion of private grids because of their potential to limit learning opportunities and to lead us down a path of reinventing the wheel. I agree entirely; the primary affordance of Second Life, in my opinion, is that it puts all faculty and learners in the “same space” much better than the internet does; you can “see” who else is in a space. You can serendipitously meet someone in a space who has similar interests, background and experiences; that is a powerful tool. If we start walling off educational efforts from one another with private grids, we handicap the true effectiveness of the virtual environment and make potential advances like interoperability irrelevant. Personally and professionally, I will always encourage any institution to make their resources available to others; there’s mutual benefit in open sharing of resources.