Virtual Learning Worlds

Just an FYI, due to a recent barrage of comment spam, I’ve temporarily turned on ‘required login’ for comments.  Once I find some time to upgrade to the recent version of WP and apply some better spam protection, it will back to normal commenting shortly.

Also, I plan on adding some of the recent research on blogs, wikis and podcasting in education into the mix here at virtual learning worlds.  We’re uncovering some interesting trends with data on ~35,000 users of these systems at PSU.

I wish I could find more time to continue writing in this space regarding games and game-related issues pertaining to learning. I’m nearing the 6-month mark at my new position with the Schreyer Institute, where I’m learning a great deal about data mining, faculty consulting, undergraduate and institutional research.

I brought with me to the Institute many years of experience with technology, including blogs for a variety of purposes. That said, I’m trying to get a blog rolling at the Institute focusing on a wide variety of topics, such as student privacy, the technology ecosystem at Penn State, grade inflation, classroom management, experiential learning…a whole bunch of stuff. Please feel free to check it out if you’re into not only technology and learning, but a much wider variety of strategies to engage undergraduate students.

I recently picked up ‘Authenticity‘ by Gilmore and Pine (authors of the Experience Economy). I have not read the whole book yet, but spent time jumping to different sections while traveling, and read through the first 100 pages or so in detail. The basic premise? We, as consumers, are looking for authentic experiences. The authors quickly point out Starbucks and Disney as the pinnacle of this motto.

This year I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Las Vegas, Austin and Key West. As I reflect on each destination, I can’t help but think of the varied experiences each has to offer, and how authentic each felt. Looking back:

March 2010: Key West, FL. My first time to the island, and it offered amazing experiences (aqua-blue water, beaches, tourist spots, local spots, Sound Check at the Parrot, tour of Jimmy Buffet’s studio) and felt very authentic. Key West feels like it has its own vibe going. I spent most of my time with locals, so my view is a little skewed.

January 2010: Austin, TX. I was in Austin to give a talk at the annual Educause Learning Initiatives conference. I booked the trip with some free time both pre- and post-conference to check out Austin. Live Music Capital of the World is no joke. The first night in town we saw 6 bands, from Jazz to Country to Blues to Classic Rock. We went to several different eateries (many recommended by locals) and had fantastic food. Like Key West, Austin seems to have it’s own vibe, feeling very authentic and providing some amazing experiences, many musical.

August, 2009: Las Vegas, NV. My first trip to Vegas last summer was for a bachelor party. In terms of offering experiences, I’m not sure anything could beat Vegas. From the time I landed until I took off I felt like I was in a movie or some alternate reality. Of course, that’s the experience they aim to create. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” right? But in terms of authenticity, it felt very fake and contrived.

I’d like to return to all of these places at some point, especially Vegas because I’m not sure I gave it a fair shake. Seeing as it was a bachelor party weekend, I didn’t have a lot of time to do the tourist thing…maybe I would have found something a bit more real and authentic?

I was going to do this in an email, then I realized putting together the recipient list might take the better part of the morning, and I still would probably forget to include people I’ve worked with over the last ten years. Starting tomorrow, 11/17/09, I’ll be working for the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence (SITE) at Penn State. I’m very excited to start working with Undergraduate Education across the Penn State system to better the student learning experiences around the State. Also, the position is an academic appointment, primarily research-focused, so I will be able to put the Ph.D. degree to use immediately.

My 10+ years in IST has been a fantastic experience, and I wanted to thank everyone that I have worked with during this time. I’m going to avoid listing all the names (again, I’m sure I would forget people and that list would be LONG), but instead the areas I worked:

IST Solutions Institute - What a great experience. Working with a small team of highly innovative and skilled people, doing great things in the online learning space since October of 1999! I’m not sure I will ever experience such a unique culture and work environment as we had in SI. Thank you to everyone I worked with as a member of the Institute, I learned a great deal from everyone and had a fantastic time.

IST Instructor - From the PA Governor’s School for Information Technology, to IST undergraduate courses to guest lecturing in graduate courses around campus…I never realized I had a passion for teaching until given the opportunity to get in the classroom. Teaching can be equal parts fun and frustrating, but for me it has been a great learning experience and incredibly fun. Even with SITE, I am looking to continue my teaching experience at least once a year moving forward.

IST Research - I have been lucky to be part of many interesting and engaging research projects over the last three or four years. Looking at virtual worlds for learning and simulation, games as data analysis and design making environments to supporting several faculty in Second Life…I feel I have learned a great deal about grants and scholarly writing from all the colleagues I have worked with in this area.

Education Technology Services - My work with ETS grew from my work in the gaming and virtual world space with IST. Getting the educational gaming commons up and running was a monumental challenge, but extremely rewarding. I hope the EGC continues to do great things and I plan on staying involved as an affiliate.

Office of Learning Initiatives - my time with OLI was short, but still a good experience. Good luck to everyone working on the new online learning initiatives, you have a large task at hand that will be very challenging to meet, but I’m sure you will exceed expectations.

Back to your normally scheduled game and virtual worlds posts in the near future!

I was talking with Cole a few weeks back about various types of social networking services, and he said something along the lines of “I’m not getting much out of Facebook. I wish I could go back and start all over with that one.”

So the question of the day: Why not? Why not start all over with a social service if you’re not getting the maximum benefit?

I certainly understand why some people would not want to do this (keeping networks intact, not wanting to lose touch with certain people, etc), but part of the beauty of these sites is that we can re-create ourselves. Personal growth is a good thing right? As we grow older we (hopefully) get more mature, gain new wisdom, meet new people and learn. So it only makes sense that as we grow our identity (online or otherwise) grows with us.

These sites also change as well. Twitter has gone from a helpful way to share information with friends to something that is being shoved down my throat every 10 minutes on TV (Note to ESPN and commercial producers: PLEASE stop!!! We get it, you found out how to use twitter). My RSS reader has gone from something I used to visit every day to a collection of seemingly unrelated websites that have either disappeared or only receive updates on rare occasions.

Rebuilding my Facebook identity isn’t something I’m interested in right now (I like what I get out of that community), but my twitter and RSS reader need to go. With that being said, I think it is time to ditch bloglines, setup Google reader and start to create a new data stream that will help me think critically about topics I care about. It is also time to jump into Twitter and delete everyone I am following (there a batch command for this?) to build a new network for myself, one that hopefully adds more value.

On a sidenote, I just updated the site to the new Wordpress install as well as a new theme. Look for more content updates shortly and more restructuring of some of the widgets.

It’s been an interesting week for a lot of reasons. I was interviewed for a show on the Big Ten network called “The Millennials” about generational differences, primarily around technology. I also had to deal with filing a few insurance claims on my home owner’s policy.

Stay with me here, there is a connection…

When filing my claims, my agent asked for copies of the receipts. I rarely, if ever, keep paper-based receipts. The ones I do keep would probably take me 4 hours to find between my office and my house. Organization is definitely not my strong suit. My father, a retired insurance agent, could not BELIEVE I didn’t save all this stuff. He’s hyper-organized. So after giving me an ear full on the phone about this, I asked him how long it would take him to find a claim from last year he filed for his home. In the time it took him to answer, I had searched my Gmail account and found the digital receipts of all the work I had done on my home that I need to forward to my claims agent. Search trumps organization in this case.

Gmail vs. my MS Outlook email account is like night and day. In Outlook, I have an ungodly number of emails in my inbox, hundreds of directories with more email within…total chaos. It’s hard to find stuff in Outlook, mostly due to my poor organization but also do to its poor search functionality. Gmail, on the other hand, is wonderful. I label my emails once in a while, but I mostly just let them sit. My Gmail inbox is ~1700 messages, and I can still find things from three years ago with ease based on the search capabilities. No organization necessary.

I talked about this a bit during the interview, and all the students agreed: organization is over-rated, search takes less time and is more accurate in many instances. To reinforce this notion, I’m finding that taking notes in my personal blog space is also paying dividends. I received a note from a sponsor that I have not worked with for over two years about a conversation he wanted to revisit. I typed the sponsors name into my blog search…voila, the notes from all the meetings with the sponsor from two years ago. Being unorganized might well pay off

Just wanted to post something quick before the craziness starts. I’ll be teaching two courses this semester, one that I’ve never taught before, consisting of ~200 students. I’m also trying to defend my dissertation by the end of April. Also, the EGC Lab will be opening this semester, so I’ll be working with the crew to continue to grow that initiative. Toss in a few funded projects in virtual worlds for our Institute partners and…well…I probably won’t have a lot of time to write many blog posts.

I have noticed over the last few semesters that I tend to hit twitter more during teaching semesters vs. blog posts. I suppose it’s a combination of not having ample time to put together blog posts and the ability to quickly twitter interesting things taking place in and around the classroom.

Here’s to a good semester, and hopefully the emergence of Dr. Pursel by the summer!

I had the opportunity last year to talk with a potential student about the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. His father, a renowned researcher from Singapore, was visiting for the day and had his son in the states to look at universities. After talking about interests, he sheepishly asked

“Do you know if admissions offices look at social networking sites when making decisions?”

Good question. I told him that a university the size of Penn State probably does not, but I bet other, smaller schools do. Sure enough, some do to a small degree (one out of every 10 schools surveyed answered yes). I spend a good chunk of time in my IST 110 class talking about social networking, web 2.0 and identity. We’ve had several students NOT get internships, and in one case a job, due to Facebook or other pieces of content a student put online. I urge all IST students to carefully look at Facebook’s privacy features (must be logged in to Facebook), and use them accordingly. I actually looked up all 50 of my students on Facebook last semester, and nearly 75% had open profiles. I was tempted to put together a presentation using some of the more…colorful photos of my students, but decided against it at the last minute.

Of interest to me is what the admissions offices who answered “yes” reported:

• 25% reported finding positive information about the student applicant
• 38% reported finding negative information about the student applicant

Some of my students argue “this is OUR space, for me and my friends. You old folks need to get out!” Well my friend, welcome to reality. With the proliferation of net-capable cell phones with embedded cameras, it’s easy to upload that picture of Joe Smith passed out and duck-taped to a stop sign 5 seconds after it is taken. What’s even scarier is that Joe Smith did not upload the photo, one of his friends did and tagged him in it. If Joe is smart, he’ll login and remove the tag of himself in the photo, then promptly take his buddy’s phone and delete the picture (or drop the phone in the toilet, that works too).

It’s always interesting what you find when you Google yourself every few months, or search for yourself on different social networking sites.

I just got back from the first talk at the Learning Design Summer Camp, an event that Cole has blogged about recently. Cole and Scott gave a good recap of their graduate course on Disruptive Technologies. They had a slide or two about “identity” and how students felt about publishing course-related work to publicly open spaces (blogs, twitter, delicious, etc). I asked how many of their students continue to use these tools outside of class. But as they talked, my thoughts shifted to “Have their online identities changed once class ended?”

I was recently pulled into a research project on identity in online game worlds, so the concept of identity is generating a lot of ideas. I started to look at my identity (more likely, identities).

I have my professional identity. This could be broken down even further:
- my teaching identity (how I portray myself to my students and act in the classroom)
- my IST identity (how I interact with my IST colleagues and projects)
- my ETS identity (which is different than IST, much different organization, culture and projects)
- my blog identity here

Then if I move to my personal identity:
- friends and family identity
- World of Warcraft identity (which could probably be broken down into in-game identity, forum identity and ventrilo identity)
- online social identity (Facebook, other social sites my friends and I use)

I could break this down further, but the point I’m trying to make is that each of the audiences I interact with in the above scenarios, I interact with differently. Each group of people sees me in a slightly different light…am I portraying different identities? Certainly, especially when you look at the professional vs. personal identities. Some overlap definitely exists with friends that are also colleagues, Warcraft guildmates that I interact with in real life, etc.

It got me thinking about student identities in the disruptive technology course. Twitter seemed to be THE tool for the course that was used heavily, mostly for course-related conversation. But after the course, did students start to migrate to social identities within Twitter? Or in any of the other tools that were used for learning purposes during the semester?

On a side note, I did learn about two technologies I plan on leveraging in my Spring courses:
- Harvard’s Live Question Tool. This appears to be a GREAT way to generate questions while giving a presentation, and allowing my students to guide the direction of the talk. Seems to work similar to clickers, but a very inexpensive yet powerful alternative.

- Pligg. I wish I had a link to Cole and Scott’s pligg site. Basically each student had to post a single blog reflection each week of the course. Students evaluated one another’s posts through a voting system. Each student had 3 votes per week (18 students total). Once a blog post received a certain threshold of votes, it was promoted to the front of the Pligg site. Again, a great way for instructors to gauge interest and the students to help drive the direction of the course.

Cole and Scott made a great point about teaching a course in this manner: you, as the instructor, are giving up CONTROL of your course. You need to be agile. This likely scares the hell out of most faculty members, but if it’s something we can embrace and experiment with…it could lead to MUCH more engaging course experiences, for both the instructor and the students.

I spent some time this morning pruning all the trackbacks to my site. A few colleagues sent me the results of Google searches lately, and apparently some of the pages directly linked from my site had adware/malware. I’ll be disabling trackbacks from here on out in an effort to avoid this stuff. Hopefully the domain will return a clean scan the next time a Google bot comes around. Sorry if I accidentally deleted a legit trackback or comment!

Back to grading and dissertation writing.