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.

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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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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03/01/2009 by lizit.

This is going to be a bit simplistic, but I need to get some of what I’m thinking on paper (or on screen) rather than just in my head.

“Troublesome learning spaces are places where ‘stuckness’ or ‘disjunction’ occurs.” (Savin-Baden, 2007). She goes on to identify a number of catalysts that may be involved in moving into such a space.  The idea of troublesome learning appears to originate with Perkins (1999) - at least he articulated it - and he identifies some types of learning which can be seen as troublesome.  This is developed by Meyer and Land (2005) in their consideration of Threshold concepts.  Others have applied this thinking to specific disciplines (eg Davies, 2007).

Savin-Baden offers a model of transitional learning spaces which relates to how stuckness is dealt with. She suggests that a learner arrives at a place where disjunction is experienced: “Disjunction is not only a form of troublesome knowledge but also a ‘space’ or ‘position’ reached through the realisation that the knowledge is troublesome. Disjunction might therefore be seen as a ‘troublesome learning space’ that emerges when forms of active learning (such as problem-based learning) are used that prompt students to engage with procedural and personal knowledge. Alternatively, disjunction can be seen as the kind of place that students might reach after they have encountered a threshold concept that they have not managed to breach.” Other authors have spoken about ’stuck places’ (Lather 1998). Savin-Baden goes on to suggest that learners deal with disjunction in one of five ways: “students may opt to retreat from disjunction, to postpone dealing with it, to temporize and thus choose not to make a decision about how to manage it, to find some means to avoid it and thus create greater disjunction in the long term, or to engage with it and move to a greater or lesser sense of integration”. She suggests that: “Engaging with disjunction requires that students acknowledge its existence and attempt to deconstruct the causes of disjunction by examining the relationship with both their internal and external worlds. Through this reflexive examination process, students can engage with what has given rise to the disjunction and they are then enabled to shift towards a greater sense of integration.”

How students deal with stuckness is also examined by McCartney et al (2007) and a lengthy list of potential strategies is identified and linked to types of learners.

These studies suggest that having reached a place of disjunction of stuckness, there is a choice over how this might be approached which essentially is a choice between retreating from the uncomfortable place or rising to the challenge.  The second of these approaches would appear to link with thinking about ‘flow’, a term first suggested by Csikszentmihalyi in 1973 and since developed and applied in many different fields by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) and numerous other authors. Chen (1999) has considered flow in relation to use of the web and identifies 9 factors involved in a flow experience: “(1) clear goals; (2) immediate feedback; (3) personal kills well suited to given challenges; (4) merger of action and awareness; (5) concentration on the task at hand; (6) a sense of potential control; (7) a loss of self-consciousness; (8) an altered sense of time; and (9) experience which becomes autotelic.” An important aspect of flow appears to be a level of challenge such as is achievable, that is the challenge should not be too daunting but needs to such as can be perceived as a challenge. The question that arise for me is whether being able to deal with disjunction or stuckness is in part related to the personal challenge involved in the process.  In other words, does disjunction which leads to understanding involve a flow process?

Linking this to Second Life.  It can be anticipated that the introduction to Second Life will induce a range of different feelings within learners.  Some will be positive and some negative.  Being presented with the stress of being asked to create within Second Life presents learners with a challenge requiring a number of different learning experiences, some of which may lead to feelings of stuckness and disjunction.  How do learners deal with the difficulties they encounter in Second Life.  On reflection, how is the experience viewed? What are the factors which lead to a positive or a negative experience?  To what extent do students experience flow in meeting the challenges presented by creating projects in Second Life? Does the learner’s approach to Second Life - augmentalist or immersionist - make a difference to the way in which challenges are dealt with, or flow experienced?

Chen, H., Wigand, R. T., & Nilan, M. S. (1999). Optimal experience of Web activities. Computers in Human Behavior, 15(5), 585-608.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York,NY: Harper and Row.

Davies, P., & Mangan, J. (2007). Threshold concepts and the integration of understanding in economics. Studies in Higher Education, 32(6), 711-726.

Lather, P. (1998). Critical pedagogy and its complicities: A praxis of stuck places. Education Theory, 48(4), 487-498.

McCartney, R., Eckerdal, A., Mostrom, J. E., Sanders, K., & Zander, C. (2007). Successful students’ strategies for getting unstuck. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education.

Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2005). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education, 49(3), 373-388.

Perkins, D. (1999). The Many Faces of Constructivism. Educational Leadership, 57(3), 6.

Savin-Baden, M. (2007). Second Life PBL: liminality, liquidity and lurking. Paper presented at the Reinventing Problem-based learning, Republic Polytechnic, Singapore.

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16/11/2008 by lizit.

The EndNote training was useful and convinced me I might as well go with that as any of the other software options, especially as there is also a web version that will synch with the installed version.  It is possible to attach notes and there is also space in the tool for including notes within a bibliographic description.

Friday I had a dry run with the ReLIVE presentation.  From my perspective I made a bit of a meal of it - not helped by getting ’stage fright’ and ‘drying’ for the first time I can recall.  Very strange suddenly being at a complete loss for words and not really being able to make sense of what I had written down. I think there were a number of contributory factors which included not really owning what I was saying (following a pattern rather than doing my own thing), an awareness there was a lot of material to get through and I wasn’t completely sure how to pace it, slight discomfort with the technology - that monitor needs a longer cable (!), and, perhaps most importantly, an awareness that the people in the room are folk I will be working with for some time and I wanted not to appear incompetent.  In the event, I did manage to get into the subject matter and got useful feedback both on the content and on how I might rejig the presentation slightly both for my comfort, but also to avoid possible misunderstandings.  Probably being less than happy with myself was positive in realising what a supportive group of people I am working with.

I’ve spent some time over the weekend revamping the presentation and playing with EndNote.

At the research group meeting on Tuesday in SL, somebody mentioned the “hype cycle” - a take the Gartner Group have on uptake of technology and a very different curve from Rogers - might be worth looking at that some time in relation to SL.  The other concepts that I’ve heard a couple of times recently are immersionist and augmentalist, used to describe different users of virtual worlds (those that get fully immersed and create there own place witin the virtual world and those who see it as a tool to be used alongside other tools) - other stuff worth exploring a bit further.

This next week will be busy with ReLIVE 08 and a staff development day in Birmingham.  Then, theoretically at least, things quieten down and I can focus on DPhil related stuff.

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