Virtual Learning Worlds

This semester was my first experience teaching 100+ students in a large lecture hall. The course, IST 110, is a basic introduction to the College of Information Sciences and Technology at PSU. Overall I’ve learned a LOT regarding how to transition my old version of IST 110 to a much larger course setting. I used a lot of different technology tools, broke the class down a few weeks to run workshops and ended up asking them to do quite a few things online, including podcasts, video, eportfolio creation, blogging and evaluating social networking services.

Marc Prensky was an early influence to the direction I’ve taken my instructional design philosophies, both around gaming and around generational differences (the digital natives vs. digital immigrants). Marc doesn’t necessarily write about social networking (it was a bit too early for that when he wrote his paper almost 10 years ago), but MANY people have picked up the torch and claim that this concept also holds true for social networking, and in many cases, technology in general.

After this semester, I don’t buy the hype.

Most students don’t know how to make a website. The idea of creating a web page or a site is very foreign to them (even though they do this everyday via Facebook or MySpace). Podcasts? Yeah right, just give me more music please. Creating video? A SMALL fraction of students do this, which in turn means only a small fraction of students can even get footage off a digital camera to a computer. Twitter? Delicious? Brite Kite? I get very confused looks when I bring these things up with students.

…and I’m teaching a course with TECHNOLOGY in the title, so normally students have some sort of interest to enroll in this class (it is a general education course so many students take it outside the major).

The few students that use twitter use it to follow celebrities, TV shows or athletes. I’ve found a total of ONE student (out of 210 this semester) that is using Twitter as a means of collaboration and community support around his professional life (and the student is non-traditional).

Now they do use MySpace and Facebook, but they use it very differently than we do (and many times they want us to stay out of this space). We often use these sites for professional reasons (build our networks, share our ideas and so on) while they use it almost exclusively to virtually hang out with friends.

This Saturday was the TLT Symposium here on campus, and I was able to get away from the EGC Demonstration Room to listen to dana boyd talk about her field work on social media with teens. I was ecstatic to hear her echo these thoughts, and even stress the fact that she finds this assumption (”digital natives just know how to use all this stuff, ya know?”) extremely frustrating.

On one hand I still see value in looking at these tools and illustrating how they can be used professionally or to improve organizational productivity, but the whole idea of “I need to integrate these into the flow of my course because students use this stuff and understand it” is something we all need to question.

I’m still in dissertation land (which merits a very long series of posts this summer around the research project dealing with virtual worlds), but thought I’d post a few quick pointers to interesting finds.

Gaming Television - Over the past three years, I’ve put together a few posts on game-related television opportunities. I found another great example today of a weekly webisode themed after ESPN’s Sportscenter Top 10; enter the weekly Team Fortress 2 Top Ten. My time is extremely short this semester, so I’ve shifted a lot of time away from World of Warcraft in favor of TF2 and Left 4 Dead (both Valve games). The TF2 Top Ten is another great example of where we might see gaming TV go in the future.

Browser-based Gaming - I talked to my IST 110 class this week about possible futures of the web, and of course the Metaverse came up. I tend to agree with Raph Koster, who once said something along the lines of “Why are we trying to make virtual worlds the next web? Why not just put virtual worlds ON the web?”. Although not a virtual world in the traditional sense, id’s Quake Live has demonstrated that you CAN do some amazing multi-player, 3D gaming experiences all within a web browser (sorry Mac users…I had to use my PC desktop to get this running unfortunately).

Jeff Kaplan at GDC - The theme of Jeff’s talk was around quest design primarily, but extracted all the points he made led to interesting insights on directed gameplay (which has a direct correlation to directed learning, something I’m very interested). Jeff mentions a few Valve examples of how they direct gameplay in Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2 without taking control away from the player. Overall a great read, and from a learning standpoint you can pull a LOT of relevant information from Jeff’s talk that can be extracted out of Warcraft and fit within a learning design experience.

And Jeff, if you’re ever Googling your name and find this, drop me an email (bartonpursel [at] gmail [dot] com) about maybe giving a talk at Penn State. I’m currently tangled up in Blizzard’s PR department trying to get someone from Blizzard to give a talk here about design lessons from WoW for students, faculty and staff. We take good care of our guests here @ PSU