Slides from today’s talk are online in PDF format. Nice to be back around IIT alums and other folks doing excellent work in various fields. It felt a little strange at first being an academic talking to a corporate audience, but several folks mentioned that their organization is looking into Second Life, and the talk helped clarify a lot of the issues they are working through.
I’m speaking today at my alma mater, Bloomsburg University, about virtual worlds in education and training. It’s part of the IIT’s Corporate Advisory Council Conference, an event I participated in as a grad student in the Fall of 1999. This post is here to support today’s talk.
IST’s Second Life Portal - Be sure to check the “SL Resources” section for educational and development resources.
Educational Gaming Commons @ PSU - A university-wide gaming initiative we’re launching in the spring of 2008.
A few virtual worlds…
World of Warcraft
ToonTown
Club Penguin
There
ProtoSphere
A few tools to build virtual worlds…
Active Worlds
Multiverse
- Google SketchUp - Can create models to import into Multiverse.
Croquet Consortium
SmartFox Server
Sloodle - A collection of SL applications that can talk directly with Moodle.
Second Life Currency Exchange - Learn about the economy of Second Life.
Tony has a great post over on his blog regarding a project some of his students tackled for an independent study. The students chose seven different virtual worlds and broke them down in a nice, neat table based on features. Great piece of work and a great discussion piece.
As I sit here on a nice Sunday afternoon, locked in my office working on a literature review, I stumbled across an interesting piece of news regarding Facebook and virtual world technology provider Active Worlds. Seems like the active worlds crew took advantage of Facebook’s friendly API and created some sort of integration.
Another world to add to the ‘must explore soon’ list. Once the new year hits, I’m hoping to find time to explore and experiment in:
- Multiverse (Google SketchUp and Google Earth integration could offer unique opportunities)
- Croquet (seems to be used a lot by the EDU community and is now powering some interesting applications)
- Active Worlds (our students live in Facebook…anything that can tie to Facebook is a win)
I’m talking tomorrow at the Design Thinking: From Inspiration to Innovation conference at Kutztown University. It should be very interesting and enlightening to have a chance to talk about virtual worlds as more of a design test bed and creative outlet, primarily at the K-12 age range.
Some support materials for the presentation:
PDF of my slides (~21 MB)
Second Life URLs - This page will take you to another post in the blog with many different links to actual Second Life locations. In order to access these locations in SL, make sure you have SL installed. When you click on a link, your SL client should open and the coordinates of that specific destination should be pre-populated on your map.
I’ve been a bit disconnected with World of Warcraft for a while, but with the recent release of a new content patch and a new expansion on the horizon, it’s sucked me back in. I came across an interesting article on the wow site that talks about how the design team put together the first major instance in the new expansion. You can skip the first 1/3rd of the story if you’re not a wow player and jump right to the design sections for the good stuff.
The article mentions things like ’story-driven’, ‘memorable experience’, and ‘player choice’ when talking about key design philosophies driving the creation of this instance. It got me thinking about a quote from a colleague, Brian, regarding context and learning:
Content might be the meat of the experience, but context is the entire pedagogical meal.
I hope I got that right. Brian and I are trying to collaborate on a way to bring high levels of interactivity into his classroom of 150 students this spring. Relying heavily on PBL and teamwork in small sections is manageable, but with 150 students is quite a challenge. One idea is to add a very contextual, story-driven approach to the class.
Enter Ocho, our fictional character that we’ll drop into various IST-related situations throughout the semester to illustrate key concepts. We hope to do this through a mixture of podcasts, videos, text, and images delivered over various platforms, all from the perspective of Ocho himself.
That’s the story piece. What about interactivity and experience? We’re spending some time evaluating the use of clickers in the classroom. If this is something Brian wants to implement, we could potentially drop Ocho into ‘choose your own adventure’ style situations. The class could watch a short video illustrating Ocho’s current status, then be presented with several choices that they could instantly choose from via the clicker. Brian quickly views the summary report of the clicker poll, and the class moves in one of several directions. All driven by the majority of the students.
Will we be able to pull this off? Maybe, maybe not. Would it be an interesting experience for the students? Memorable? Will they learn anything?
My last post has led to some great discussions with colleagues here around the university and a few online. I’m still thinking quite a bit about how we’re attempting to integrate all of these various technologies into the curriculum. The more discussions I’ve had, and the more I watch my class interact with these tools, I’ve started to work down a different train of thought:
Digital expression vs. assessment
Let’s continue to evaluate my blog and Second Life experiences. An early assignment required my students to register and setup their own blogs. Subsequent assignments required posts that dealt with certain topics or questions. The students didn’t seem to care for the actual content of the blog, but some spent MANY hours customizing the look and feel of the blog. It appears as if one student even hacked the CSS to create a new layout.
Did I require them to do anything with the aesthetics? Not at all, but probably 50% of the class went in and tampered with the various templates and went to great lengths to make the blog unique.
The same can be said about Second Life. The first analysis assignment (see student quotes in this post) didn’t go over very well. The consensus was that SL is buggy, unintuitive, frustrating, and pointless. After the analysis, students were required to build an interactive sign consisting of 4 prims and a texture. About half the class went WAY beyond the requirements of the assignment, adding particle effects, motion, and several facets of interactivity to the signs.
I also had my students produce a podcast early in the year, which has been the overall favorite assignment so far. This assignment called for teams of two to discuss expectations of IST 110, IST as a major, and their understanding of podcasting and podcast technology. The students had a blast producing the podcasts and I even had a good time grading them. During the debrief, the only part of the assignment the students would have changed was the content. They wanted a much more open, creative topic they could structure their podcast around. I didn’t think I imposed that much structure, but in their eyes, I did.
I’m thinking that maybe I should have STARTED my blog module with the podcast assignment, or started my SL module with the sign assignment. Get them into the technology immediately with a goal or a purpose, and then facilitate the discussions, analysis, and critiques AFTER they have time to engage the technology in some sort of creative, expressive manner.
I’m having a hard time figuring out the balance between creative, expressive assignments and assessment. Leave too much room for expression, and you have no standards to grade upon. Provide a lot of structure, and students disengage or lose motivation because they can’t do what they want to do…
You can find the slides from today here.
Other posts in the second life category.
Teaching this semester has really enlightened me (and sometimes scared me) with regards to how we’re trying to implement technology to enhance the student experience. I’ve run my students through blogs, RSS, podcasts, virtual teaming, and now Second Life. I also had Cole in yesterday for a good talk on the perspective he and his organization is coming at all this stuff.
I’m working on a survey for the final day of class to allow my students to rank my assignments from most favorite to least favorite. I’m curious to see how that turns out. In the meantime, this is what I’ve found (and what really has me thinking critically about how we, in academia, are approaching this stuff).
Let’s start with blogs. Cole posted a nice figure regarding the use of the blog software here at PSU this semester:
Looks good, right? But it got me thinking…what defines an ‘active author’? How many of these are student blogs? How many of these are student blogs NOT related to a class? How many are voluntary posts vs. mandatory posts from an instructor (like I forced my kids to post)? My class probably accounts for ~300-400 posts, and I personally account for 100 posts + comments. So of the ~5,300 entries, I can account for 10%.
All forced by me as an instructor.
I asked yesterday during Cole’s talk “how many have posted something to the blog after our blog module was complete?”. Nothing. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting on my pessimist’ hat claiming this is all BS and not worth pursuing. It’s just something that has me thinking…is this the right place to put our efforts?
Same thing with Second Life. I just finished grading 45 Second Life analysis documents where students had to explore SL and compare two organizations. What’s interesting, frustrating, cool, innovative, etc. I’m part of the SL hype machine and have given many talks about why this is an interesting and valuable tool that can enhance teaching and learning. Have a look at some my students’ reactions:
“I would like to preface this analysis with the fact that I feel that Second Life is without a doubt the buggiest interface I have ever used. The avatars fall through the floor, textures disappear (after they take 30 seconds to load) the geometries get screwed up, navigation in the world is awkward, the list goes on and on. With that being said, why any company would invest any sum of money in this stupid world, is beyond me. Second Life seems to me like nothing more than a weird little place to mess around in with your friends.”
“The reason for the space is to advertise IBM, and why would anybody voluntarily go to an ad?”
“Not enough here to hold my interest, I need goals and objectives”
“I, personally, do not enjoy flying aimlessly into a ceiling, unable to control my character for at least seven minutes, but then again, what do I know?”
“All in all, my trips to these two spaces reinforced my overall thoughts about second life: there isn’t much of a purpose for it.”
“Dell’s space, as well as SL as a whole, seems to provide something which is already available on the internet, over the phone, or through other communication tools. For instance, I found it very time consuming to find Dell’s factory, read about how to order, sit down, order/customize a computer, and then eventually be taken to their online website in a web-browser. I could have accomplished the same thing in half the time by going directly to www.dell.com.”
My class consists of primarily Information Sciences and Technology freshman. I’m trying to teach them to look critically at the ecology of people, information and technology. I think they’re doing a fantastic job so far, but they really have me thinking…are we on the right track?
I think we are, but maybe we just aren’t going about it the right way? I do have a junior and senior in my class who seem to appreciate what I’m trying to do conceptually. Even they tell me “this is interesting stuff, but I’d never use any of it”. I continue to push forward with everything, and I told my students when they are seniors or starting out in the workforce I want them to look back and say “Ah ha! Bart was right about all this stuff, I’m glad I already have the foundation so now I can jump right in.”
