Posts tagged tools

Finally getting back to this post I started about two weeks ago . . .

This morning/afternoon I attended a workshop that demonstrated a variety of Teaching Tools for Second Life. I absolutely appreciated the workshop and those involved in making it happen: the host institution, the faculty moderator and the facilitator. It’s these kinds of activities that make Second Life of keen interest to educators; there’s simply not another technology that brings everyone into a common workspace like Second Life does.

With that said, as an instructional designer and technologist, I have several significant pedagogical issues with the tools that were demonstrated. Each of the tools I saw demonstrated have, in my opinion, little to no useful place in Second Life. Worse yet, I believe they may actually be counterproductive to the development of quality learning experiences in Second Life. I think this is at the core of the “quality use of Second Life” question. My opinion may be perceived as being too harsh, but I’ll explain.

I don’t want to refer to the tools specifically because I do not want to denigrate the individual tools or the individual who created them; the developer is a fantastic educator for whom I hav ea great deal of professional respect. What I do want to do is to discourage the transfer of traditional assessments and learning tools into a virtual environment which has much greater capabilities and potential.

By and large, our classrooms are much more limited than the real world; it’s not easy or in many cases possible at all for learners to perform a skill in the classroom in the same manner they would perform the same skill in a real-life situation outside of the classroom. For example, in a business entrepreneurship class, it’s not possible to have learners engage the process of actually starting a business; that requires too many actions and resources that lie beyond the capabilities of the classroom. So, we cover the concepts and processes in as much detail and in as innovative ways as possible afforded by textbooks, new media, interactive technologies, classroom activities and the online environment. We then use an assessment instrument of some sort that hopefully provides a valid and reliable estimate of how learners would actually perform if they were to in fact start a business. So, out of necessity, we resort to tools that estimate how a learner would perform in the real world – in an authentic environment once they’ve left the classroom.

The virtual environment, in contrast, creates a unique opportunity to abandon the estimates and the not-so-reasonable-facsimiles of performing real world skills in a real world, authentic environment. In the case of the business entrepreneurship class, it IS possible for learners to actually start a business within a virtual environment, Second Life in particular. They can conduct market research within an actual, living market; they can fabricate actual prototypes of a product; they can bootstrap the business or seek funding for the startup; they can have actual customers purchasing products. Given enough time, they can engage every phase of the business startup process. As an instructional designer, the transfer of classroom tools and assessments that estimate how learners will perform in the real world to the virtual environment is, at best, incongruous, and at worst, counterproductive. They do not belong.

But wait . . . many will say, “We have to have some sort of assessment?!” Right, but I argue that the manner in which we assess learners needs to change; we need to take advantage of the affordances of the new environment. BUT for now, I’ll concede that argument, for argument’s sake. Even if we MUST conduct traditional, exam-type assessment, I ask, “Why do we have to do that within the virtual environment when we already have internet-based tools that do the same thing and perhaps do it much better than any currently-available tool in the virtual space?” Any learner that can access a virtual environment can also access any web-based learning management system that is guaranteed to have an integrated assessment tool. The two environments aren’t and shouldn’t be mutually exclusive; even if we want to teach a class entirely through a virtual environment, that doesn’t mean that ALL activities have to occur within that space. In fact, it’s MUCH more efficient to use both environments; we should leverage the particular strengths of each application.

If that’s not enough, one of the other participants commented, “We need to keep this as simple as possible; many of our students are not strong computer users.” We know that’s true; even strong computer users engage a learning curve within Second Life. Even if there’s disagreement about my arguments above, should we not still leverage the assessment capabilities of LMS’ rather than developing less reliable and more clunky tools to do the same thing in Second Life? for the sake of our learners?