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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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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30/01/2009 by lizit.

We are now at the end of week 3 of term - time is racing by and I find it even more incredible what was achieved last year now I am on campus and more aware of timescales and student pressures.

The project teams have been allocated and 4 of the 5 teams have met their clients; hopefully the fifth has also.  The next stage for students is to develop their specifications for comment by us and their clients.  In the meantime, I have divided up the island to set the building plots as specific zones and allocated them to the groups, learning quite a bit about how land permissions and prim counts work in the process.

After 3 weeks focusing on practical aspects and developing my own building skills, I think I can now begin to start thinking again about how the project relates to my research objectives - both short term (what I can get from ILE 09) and longer term (how ILE projects might be used with other student cohorts).

My current interest with the ILE students is how they respond to stuckness and problematic learning.   There are various places where students could get stuck.  They are working in a medium which is new to them and need to learn basic skills about being, moving and relating in the environment (perhaps not dissimilar to moving into a new real life environment).  In addition, they need to learn the specific building and scripting skills necessary to create artifacts in Second Life and make those artifacts do whatever it is they are intended to do. Although there may be some transfer of skills from other environments, the SL building and scripting interfaces are not intuitive and some students may experience a degree of stuckness in these activities.

The project requires students to develop solutions to problems presented by real life clients.  As the clients are drawn from a number of different disciplines, students need to be able to understand and interpret client needs and demonstrate this in the production of a project specification.  They then need to develop a project in Second Life, using their building and scripting skills and their knowledge of the greater world of Second Life, to meet the client requirements.

The third aspect of the project which also involves new learning is the creation of a machinima for a presentation in the 9th week of term.  Machinima making involves creating film clips in Second Life and then using appropriate software to edit the clips and create a sound track. Although some students may be familiar with these skills, it is likely others will find this also presents challenges and may lead to a degree of stuckness.

I am interested in how students respond when they get stuck.  What strategies are used to get unstuck? Does the immersive nature of Second Life have any effect on the motivation of students to find solutions?  Are there episodes of flow - and does flow experience affect response to stuckness.  I need to get back to my pencil and paper and what I want to know, what tools I need to use and how I will collect and use data.  This project is going to be iterative if nothing else.

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16/01/2009 by lizit.

Been pointed to an interesting article on procrastination this morning. It is a summary of a report of work by some German psychologists who were looking at procrastination in relation to concrete and abstract tasks.  In short, the concrete tasks got done and some of the abstract ones never got done - even though all the volunteer participants were receiving payment on completion of the allocated task.

The suggestion is that thinking about abstract tasks more concretely - breaking down into smaller parts, etc, can assist in getting things done.

Looking at my ‘to do’ list, over the last week, it is true that the concrete tasks have been done, but the ones where I need to get brain in gear seem to be languishing and looking at me! Now I’m sure if I was feeling clever, I could relate this to motivation and flow…

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