26/02/2009 by lizit.

This week isn’t over yet, but as I am now away from Sussex, it seems fair enough to treat it as the end of the week. Looking back, the last few days have felt a bit like a roller coaster ride with moments of deep despair about what the students are or are not doing combined with exhileration at seeing activity and hearing excitement at achievement.

Starting with the low points - and, I guess an acknowledgment of my personal involvement and investment in this course and in particular the Second Life aspects of it. On Monday, I covered the U/G project meeting.  Before the meeting there was an email from one of the groups saying they would not be present and everything was in hand.  If only I could believe things were as under control as reported, especially when there was clearly some misunderstanding about the tasks still needing to be completed.  An exciting project with an enthusiastic client, but so little being done to use the affordances of SL.  (By chance, I bumped into the client later in the day and she mentioned she might be meeting the group, but was a little concerned about assisting them - I encouraged her to both meet with them and to express high expectations of what they might achieve, especially as she hopes to be able to use their deliverables with real students and potential students.)

Initially 2 students turned up at the meeting.  A positive was that one had at long last produced a project specification and we were able to discuss that and potential extensions to it.  The other student was feeling pretty low as he was having difficulty getting communication within his group and getting things done.  The frustration was compunded by the late arrival of another student, who refused to accept my suggestion that those present in the group could make decisions and allocate work within the group; how could people be allocated tasks if they were not present and might not want to undertake those tasks.  Some time later a third member of the group arrived and the 3 of them decided to go and do some work on their project in the lab. It felt as though we had moved away from rock bottom.

The other really low point of the week was Wednesday and the workshop.  Just 3 students turned up with no explanations or apologies from any of the others.  Although students are free to choose whether or not to attend classes, it is incredible to think people are choosing to miss out on opportunities, some of which cannot be repeated.  This week there was an opportunity not only to interact with each other and hear a theoretical, scene setting to the topic in hand, but the opportunity to interact with people from elsewhere. Others gave their time freely to benefit people who just didn’t show.  I felt angry and disappointed at this lack of engagement.

Alongside the lows there have been highs.  Monday evening I was able to go in world and find 5 students engaged in work on their builds. There was a real buzz as one project (the one with the 3 students from the morning) had begun to take shape and had a direction to go in and the effort was beginning to pay off.  The other group were tackling the problem of the dead parrot - or how to remove oxygen from a virtual glass globe and make the globe implode!  Again it was good to see the amount of work going on and the sense of enjoyment and effort as people created their build together.

Perhaps the real high of the week was Tuesday morning, when the dispirited student of Monday turned up wanting to check out what he was doing was OK.  In fact, he was beaming and full of pride (rightly so) at having cracked some tricky scripting problems and got his build doing what is was meant to do!

Although students have not engaged with the project in the same way this year as last year, nevertheless, there has been engagement and clear demonstrations of student learning and overcoming problems to achieve success.  It might be a rollercoaster ride but there are definitely some highs along the way!

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21/02/2009 by lizit.

I still have a sense of things going very slowly in general with little willingness to do more than the minimum on the different builds.  I keep visiting the island and hoping to see something really exciting, but so far there isn’t much to see and very few of the groups are providing any kind of notecard feedback making it difficult to know what is happening. On the other hand, the weekly project discussions are useful for exploring ideas on how the different builds could be developed. I feel more involved overall this year, no doubt helped by being involved in the workshops and hearing the material students are being asked to use in developing their thinking and learning experiences.

All but one of the groups has provided a specification and received feedback. This has made it much easier to begin to look at the projects both in terms of learning experience and of using the affordances of Second Life.

The workshop on simulations included looking at a number of builds in Second Life and categorising them by type of simulation.  Impressionistically, students appeared to enjoy this activity and to be surprised and interested by some of what they saw in the virtual world.

I need to pull together the material I have on machinimas and make that available to students during the coming week.  They now only have a little over two weeks until the presentations and it is difficult at this point to believe there will be much to present.  I look forward to being surprised and excited by what has been achieved.

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17/02/2009 by lizit.

A message on Plurk yesterday got me thinking about names a bit.  The question related to whether students could change their names on the OU system as somebody had had to endure an evening of being known by their given name as opposed to the name they are known by. I know how much my name matters to me - I just do not identify at all with my given name, and one of my priorities when I started at Sussex was to ensure wherever I could that my name got changed to ‘Liz’.  I do not know who is being addressed if anybody speaks to ‘Elizabeth’ - it sure isn’t me!  This can cause all manner of confusion at the doctors, dentists, etc.

I then got to thinking a bit about people I know, and particularly people I know better online than in real life. Very often we use different names with our online identities.  I am ‘lizit’ in most places and get quite cross when there is already a ‘lizit’ registered, which happens occasionally - how dare anybody have stolen my identity! When I think of my friends, I sometimes have to make a real effort to remember there real names when I am more used to using their virtual identity names.  I don’t think I’ve actually called anybody by anything other than their real name yet, but I do think of them by their virtual names.

So my real name is Liz.  I think of myself - and identify myself - as ‘lizit’.  I wonder what other people do - and what their relationship is between themselves and their different names? A further question, does how I think of myself have any bearing on the extent to which I am immersionist or augmentalist in my relationship to Second Life and other virtual environments?

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14/02/2009 by lizit.

Halfway through term already!

There has been a bit more activity this week but things are still slow.  Two groups have sent in their specifications and received feedback (one group having then prompty sent in a further submission incorporating the feedback, but missing the point to some extent).  Another group has sent in 2 progress reports - lacking in detail but at least meeting the requirement.

With the remaining 2 projects, I am keen to see both specifications - one of them because the student seems to be living in Second Life but it is unclear what is being done for the project apart from building, demolishing and rebuilding.  With the other group, I have seen one of the students in Second Life trying to get an understanding of scripting - we were able to discuss a couple of points inworld.

I spent an interesting hour or so on Thursday inworld.  I had some stuff to do on the SLZ island and there was a student working on trying to get a video player working.  We spent some time looking at the problem together.  There appeared to be a number of problems to overcome, from knowing how to program the object to making it play the desired film, to setting the video stream in the land details to having to make the student a member of the SLZ management group (with very limited permissions).  The good thing was that the video was playing by the time I left.  I noticed the same student was working on this again this morning, but I did not get involved this time - he knew I was inworld and if he needs to contact me, IMs go straight into my mailbox. It would be interesting to know what is the motivation to continue striving for a solution to the problem.

On Wednesday, we tried to play Primtionary in the ILE class.  There were a number of learning points from the exercise:

• Have laptops booted before needing to use them so students only need to log-in
• Stagger log-ins (some students had multiple versions of SL loading simultaneously)
• Stand up to get student attention while explaining activity (I should know that by now!)
• Be clear about activity -short, precise instructions
• Be clear about need to use IM for privacy

I suspect the activity works better in a distance environment where there isn’t the temptation to chat in real life or watch what others are doing.  Nevertheless, it was interesting to watch the activity and see how some students very quickly created artefacts while others didn’t seem to know where to start.  Some of this may have been lack of imagination at that moment in time (just the same as in Pictionary or charades), but some of it may have been lack of familiarity with the building and editing tools.  It would not be an appropriate activity with a group where building skills are not needed, but could be a fun warm up if there was a regular class with a building focus.

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10/02/2009 by lizit.

Still looking at the Csikszentmihalyi stuff.  There is now a summary of “Beyond boredom and anxiety” on my wiki. This book was published in 1975 and introduces the concepts of flow and microflow and describes the studies on which the development of these concepts was based.  Unlike the later books, there is not the feel of a self-help manual, but there is the implication that flow is an important concept for individuals and societies. The book as a whole provides a context, both theoretical and appropriate to the time of writing. I found some of the assumptions questionable and dated but found the description of the studies and analysis of results interesting and informative. Csikszentmihalyi recognises some of his conclusions are tentative and suggests a number of reasons why further work needs to be done on some aspects of his work, for example the microflow study is based on 20 university students, self-recording activities and self-monitoring a deprivation period.  However, even this aspect of the study is backed up with physical and psychological testing providing a quantitative basis for the conclusions drawn.

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07/02/2009 by lizit.

This week feels bitty, perhaps because we missed Monday’s session because of the snow, and because we are still waiting to get the student specifications for their projects.  Compared with last year, when people were building and doing stuff by now, this year feels like stirring treacle.  I know some of the students are talking to each other and developing their ideas, but we are seeing so little evidence of it.  There isn’t much questioning us happening either. The numbers failing to attend the Wednesday sessions is disappointing and it is a bit worrying wondering what we will have to present to clients come week 9 - still who knows, last year was slow at times and then suddenly things started to happen, so maybe more is going on than is apparent.

Personally, I am enjoying the Wednesday classes.  It is a good refresher for me of various theories and ideas and I am doing some of my own connections which I hadn’t been aware of before.

Going off on a tangent, it was fun having the first of the OU tutorials inworld this morning.  About 17 students turned up and we started with many of them asking how to sit - shows just how new they were.  We had fun just introducing ourselves, saying what we wanted out of the course and doing a group exercise with a jigsaw and then working out what we had learned from the exercise - listening, asking questions, watching each other, deciding which block not to move, etc. Some people were frustrated at not being listened to - gave an opportunity to talk about how difficult it can be to be doing stuff and watching the chat.  General impression was people had enjoyed themselves and were asking when we would meet again.  Nice seeing the enthusiasm.

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03/02/2009 by lizit.

I am plodding on with trying to work out how seriously to take Csikszentmihalyi.  Given that he has spent over 30 years working in the area of flow and optimal experience, has written several books and papers and presented his findings widely and his ideas have been adopted and applied in many different disciplines, the implication is that something meaningful is there.  However, having just read Creativity (see summary in wiki) I remain unconvinced, especially when the final chapter appears to be a self-help handbook on how to become a more creative person. I would like to find a knowledgable critique of his work, which might help me to assess better what I am reading, how seriously to take it, and how to apply it.

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