30/03/2009 by lizit.

Just finished a full week of conferencing.  CAL last Monday to Wednesday and Best Practices in Education over the weekend in Second Life.  Interesting participating in 2 such very different conferences and one f-t-f and one inworld.  On a practical note, advantages of inworld are being able to do other things in between sessions, having a cup of tea when I want, being able to join in the chat channel, and not having to mess around with trains and stuff.  On the other hand, it was nice to experience the buzz of the f-t-f, to meet people I had met before and make new contacts, and to discuss thoughts and reactions to the different speakers as it happened.

CAL is a general education conference.  It drew a number of ‘big’ names and there was a lot of discussion of learning and education theory and practice.  Somewhat disappointingly, there was not a lot said or demonstrated of current technologies. It is the only gathering I have been to recently where there wasn’t a hashtag for use in electronic media.  It felt as though there were a lot of old debates continuing to be worked out.  Having said that, I did meet some other folk actively involved in working in virtual worlds and we were ale to talk about what we are doing and the challenges we face.  There was also a salutary reminder that not everybody sees or uses the virtual world the way I do; I found myself questioning the seamless integration of real and virtual advocated by one speaker with little evidence of using the affordances of Second Life. Unfortunately, he had to leave immediately after his presentation, but we did swap cards and I have contacted him asking for details of his blog on how to teach in SL.  For me, the best session in the conference was Carina Garvin’s presentation of the work she has done on mapping SL affordances and pedagogy.  This is a work in progress and Carina and I have agreed to keep in touch.

VWPBE was less intellectually challenging for me than CAL.  There were many good presentations of different aspects of using Second Life in teaching and learning.  Perhaps because the territory was more familiar, I was able to focus more on content and methodology.  Although I had heard both Carina Garvin and Lisa Dawley present during the previous fortnight, it was good to hear their presentations again and to ‘hear’ things which I had not taken in first time round.  Some brief notes on some of the other presentations I attended:

Joykadia is an international learning community drawing together a mixture of individual educators, students, organisations, and parents of younger students. The focus is on informality and activity. A number of ‘unconferences’ are held during the year. There is a major emphasis on community (Wenger), design and use of space, facilitation and recognising skills.

Devon Alderton spoke about the ethics of undertaking research in SL and reminded us that behind every avatar there is a person. Linden Labs ToS and Community Standards are very clear about no disclosure of personal IDs.  IRB tends to focus on potential harm to research subjects, and may be phased by avatars and virtual worlds.  Tom Boellstorf offers some useful guidelines, eg double blind avatar names, locked and encrypted storage, waiver for written consent of inworld subjects (written consent would mean revealing ID) and very clear explanations of what would happen.

The Theorists’ Project was advertised as teaching difficult concepts in SL and turned out to be a total learning experience developed by and with counseling and psychology graduate students.  A fascinating place to visit and experience.

Jackie Darkstone (Jackie Marsh from Sheffield in rl) presented her work on literacy and ClubPenguin.  I found this more interesting and meaningful having seen ClubPenguin.  Hopefully she is sending a copy of a paper currently in press.

The DELVE project made two presentations based on different aspects of the current research project.  Interesting for me to hear Shailey and Ahmad talking about what they are doing.  Should be helpful with the work I am doing for the project!

Now the conferences are out of the way, I am hoping to be able to focus on doing some thinking and starting to pull some of my own ideas together and beginning to work out the way ahead!

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23/03/2009 by lizit.

Catching up with myself!  I need to make some proper notes about last week’s event at City University before I get too caught up in CAL and never get round to it!

A number of things struck me during the day as being potentially useful to my thinking and to student’s use of Second Life.  These included:

• An observation in response to my talk questioning whether it was a good thing to introduce students to building so quickly when many people are not ready to consider building for weeks or months after entering Second Life.  When we invite Sussex students into Second Life, it is in relation to a specific course and the deliverables from that course include creating a product for a client. Essentially we are using Second Life as a tool or platform and the focus is on its affordances rather than on enabling students to become SL residents.  I noticed when I cleared the group for this year that very few of last years students had been into SL after the end of the course and I wonder if we are effectively making the students augmentalists in our approach.
• In contrast, OU students have not been required to do anything when they enter SL and very few demands are made on them, but they have formed a vibrant community and initiated a number of activities and events, some with support from tutors and some of their own volition.  The community has formed itself in such a way that it is able to welcome newcomers and help them to feel at home in the environment.
• Should socialisation (I hate that word as it is used to mean something different from what I was taught when I studied sociology) be explicit or implicit in the induction of students to SL? With the Sussex students, we don’t really address this at all in any meaningful way and we do not encourage use of the island as a social environment. We don’t discourage it either.  Socialisation and community building is the main purpose of the OU island and other activities stem from this.  OU tutorials introduce students to SL, but they are encouraged to visit SL other than for tutorials and to become part of the community.
• Consider communication patterns - one of the reasons text threads can get complex is a tendency to use several part sentences or incomplete thoughts (cf micro blogging) rather than a complete idea and these can get lost or misunderstood when there are multiple threads with a large group of people.
• The idea of doing things in SL because they are difficult to do in real life came up with a couple of speakers, reminiscent of difficult, dangerous, impossible.
• Levelling - a changing role of teacher and student.  This sometimes occurs because people are unsure who is who and also occurs because students may have greater expertise in aspects of SL than their teachers.  A few months back, I was seeing SL creating a situation where ‘teachers’ and ’students’ become fellow travellers or ‘learners together’, changing the usual student/teacher dynamics and hierarchy.
• Being outed by the technology. This phrase was used in a talk about being a deaf or hearing impaired user of SL but might have other applicability.  I that instance, an avatar wearing an ‘anti-voice’ t-shirt and with a tag indicated involvement in a hearing impaired group was asked if they were deaf in real life and felt a sense of violation as the virtual world and real worlds collided (the question had not made sense as the person concerned had not been consciously aware of the message they were giving out).  Presumably the same thing can happen with cultural differences (accents) and possibly with people who choose to have opposite gender avatars in situations where voice communication is being used.

There was a lot more content during the day and when I get chance I will go through the notes and write them up properly.

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17/03/2009 by lizit.

There is a weekly meeting in Second Life for people who are involved in research in the Virtual World.  As these meetings tend to be at 10pm or later, I rarely get to them, but yesterday evening I made a point of going to Jeremy Kemps’s presentation on how he has introduced 1100 information science students to Second Life over the past year.

The context is a distance learning course with a large number of units introducing many different electronic resources of which Second Life is one - students are also introduced to Web 2.0 technologies including social networking and blogging, to Elluminate, and a range of other resources.  The students never meet face-to-face.

A background to the course is available on these slides.

Basically students have a choice between learning about Second Life through a short video, reading some selected papers and answering a quiz, or learning about Second Life at first hand by registering an avatar, undergoing a brief induction and undertaking a quest inworld which includes pasting an image of their avatar on the university social networking site.  The majority of the students choose the second option and this is being refined for the next cohort with additional quests and more attention to orientation; instead of relying on the generic induction offered by Linden Labs, Jeremy intends to use a well-designed and staffed orientation space such as Virtual Ability.

The work on this course is supporting Jeremy’s doctoral research which is focusing on what motivates students and stimulates flow.

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17/03/2009 by lizit.

Week 9 marked the last of the formal classes with the machinima presentations.  During the days running up to the 11th March, I was very aware of increased student activity in Second Life.  Over the weekend, I found myself engaged in trying to assist students with sorting out media streams and providing other last minute advice and assistance.  Monday morning, there were heated words in one group as work had not been done which should have been, and little apparent understanding from some team members that failing to attend team meetings messed up other people’s planning and time management.

Come the day of the presentations, I was bowled over by the work the students had done and the professional quality of the machinimas.  Given that most, if not all, the students had never been near Second Life before early January, their achievements were truly remarkable. Perhaps as important was the response of the clients, one of whom is planning to use the resources developed on a course next term and another who is planning to discuss how the machinima and materials might be used with colleagues on the Newton Project.  Although the ethnography project is incomplete, it is still possible that this migh be used in some way with students next year.

Although it probably only applies to a very small percentage of students, there was a warning note sounded about the potential to become over-involved in Second Life.  Some months ago, there was discussion on the SLED list about the fears expressed by some that Second Life might be addictive.  The general view was that this was not the case.  Students did not choose to go into Second Life, but were there because we took them there and, in general, did not engage with the virtual world beyond what their courses required them to do.  Although students might spend long hours in Second Life engaged with specific projects and course requirements, this was seen as relating more to ‘flow’ rather than indicating anything more worrying.  One student in his ILE presentation did indicate that he had found himself over-involved in Second Life to a point where it was becoming addictive.  Not only had he engaged with the project, but he had become involved in the virtual world to the extent of finding a partner in the virtual environment.  Although for many students this would not have been problematic, for this young man it was.  He did acknowledge that he had ignored advice and it was only now he was aware of the problems, but nevertheless there may be something to be learned from this experience when it comes to considering the advice given to students about SL risks and the formation of working groups.

Apart from the housekeeping that will need to be done now - arranging to get builds moved to more permanent locations on the island, I have a number of tasks to address.  I need to look at the chat logs and make sure files are appropriately named and saved.  I need to speak to Pablo (and hopefully Judith) and sort out arrangements for next term.  How will students be introduced to SL? What kind of induction will be needed? Possible use of the Sussex avatars?  I also need to consider what kind of tracking can be used to monitor what use is being made of the island and the resources.  For the past term, I have been clear that my interest is in how SL supports learning experiences and in how students deal with it when they get stuck when engaged in a learning experience or task.  I need to clarify what I want from the use of the SL resources.  Something about the effectiveness of SL as a learning environment when there is not the involvement and engagement that comes from creating products within the virtual world? I need to look at the augmentationist/immersionist stuff again - althought students may not fit those types, we are asking some to use SL as a tool and asking others to be more involved by doing stuff there. A lot to think about and plan!

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11/03/2009 by lizit.

Please sir, my avatar overslept…

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08/03/2009 by lizit.

It’s hard to believe the presentations will be next Wednesday!

During this past week, there has been evidence of a fair bit of student activity in Second Life.  Some have been fine tuning work that has already been done and some have been starting to work out how to film their machinimas ready for Wednesday.  I suspect that most, if not all the projects, will have something to show off and to be proud of.

My personal focus this week has been on thinking about the end of course survey. I still have to discuss it with Judith, but my inclination is to keep it fairly short with multip-choice questions and keep the questions about experiences of being stuck, etc, for follow-up interviews.  I need to make sure I have a means of contacting all the active students after ILE before they disappear!

The other thing I need to make sure I do is catch the clients who may be able to use the learning experiences in their classes, and arrange to see them and discuss the options. That way I - and they - can do some planning. Having found the 5 Sussex avatars again, they could be perhaps be used by students under supervision rather than requiring everybody to register an individual avatar initially.  It will also be necessary to ensure Second Life access is possible on whatever computers are being used.  That has not been a major problem as far as I know for Informatics, but I’m not sure how easy it will be elsewhere on the campus.

The other thing I need to do before the students disappear is get some of the builds moved to other parts of the island in order to free space up for ILE10 - really too far away to start thinking about that yet!

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02/03/2009 by lizit.

Not sure what I’m going to do with this post - maybe something for more thinking, but sudden thought that I might be able to make some links between work I did around barriers to getting into SL and stuff I am doing now on supporting students in creating content in SL - opposite sides of same coin?

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