Looking through the project by Innova JC

The project has a very long title of ‘Enhancing JC students’ critical thinking and writing skills through argumentation, enacted role play in immersive affinity spaces, and reflection’. The report is posted on IJC’s website. Here are some points that I find salient, with my comments:

• Manpower – 3 IJC teachers, 2 NIE lecturers, 2 research associates and 1 3D graphic designer
• Internet access via a 10Mbps private line paid for monthly by IJC
• Mentions ‘relative low cost’ and ‘relative ease’ without saying what they’re comparing with
• A virtual private island was leased by the Learning Sciences Lab at NIE. The lab’s website is inaccessible as I am typing this.
• Teen Second Life was used – According to the Teen Second Life site, ‘only teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are allowed in’
• Participants were from JC2 – According to the Wikipedia article on Teen Second Life, ‘Teen Grid users are transferred to the Main Grid once they turn 18, taking all content and private islands with them’. How did they work around this?
• Activities:
  • Term 1 – 2 classes. Groups of 4 or 5. Discussion of issues. Role-playing. As avatars in SL in 5 scenes, with a problem, complication, tension or conflict regarding which all stakeholders had legitimate concerns or conflicting interests. The decision taken or solution offered by students required them to simultaneously address the concerns of the various stakeholders.
  • Term 2 – Same grouping. Assuming the role of members of a specific interest group in a newly democratic island nation, the groups negotiated among themselves to determine the parameters to impose in the process of embracing globalisation. 1 class conducted the negotiations on SL while the other did so face-to-face
• Materials: information on the learning outcomes, setting/situation, props, list of characters and role cards relevant to each scene
• Discussion on the issues in SL was carried over to a discussion board on the college portal in the first term. Transferred in Term 2 to ‘Voice of Reason’, a software being developed by LSL, which ‘provided more scaffolding’.
• Rationale of using SL: ‘by being in character, they identify more strongly with the character and learn to think, speak, and act on issues from the perspective of that unique persona in the given semiotic domain’
• Cost:
  • S$1500 monthly subscription for the 10mbps line
  • US$980 one time payment for the island (educational institutions)
  • US$150 monthly subscription for the island
  • US$150 for 25 user accounts
  • US$9.95 monthly subscription for the island owner
• Some SL project design considerations were outlined
• Ground rules used were reported
• Interaction was through typed text and gesture scripts – A voice chat function is available in SL now
• Sets, i.e. furnished buildings, were built to help the participants assume their roles
• Chat should be logged to facilitate analysis – It might be easier to use typed chat since voice chat might require transcription or machine playback
• No clear evaluation of how much SL contributed to the learning objectives. Was learning facilitated? Did the students enjoy the experience? Was it really engaging?
• Answers to the 5 research questions were also not presented in an obvious fashion

Multi User Virtual Environments have been used for Primary 5 students before this. See this page, dated 2005.

Lesson Ideas

A homework handout for Avatars and Identity from Elon University – looks manageable

Global Kids, Inc.’s Best Practices in Using Virtual Worlds For Education – seems more advanced

Found a sandbox at this SLurl (don’t remember how though) and finally tried my hand at building something, even though it was only a cube.

This looks like a great overview of some of ways Second Life can be used, and in some cases, has been used for educational purposes.

Thinking about Second Life in education

A candid discussion (started in March this year; last reply December 15) of the use of Second Life in education can be found on this page on the Classroom 2.0 blog. Found via the Edublog Awards. The following is what I extracted from the discussion:

Some (potential or actual) applications described

• Learner flies around an expanded 3D model of an eye to learn its parts and their functions
• Build an internal combustion engine to demonstrate how the parts of it work so they can get up close and personal to see it actually in motion without being burned
• Build a space station — pick your lesson plan here between astronomy, physics, materials sciences, math, geography …
• Use a 3d model of the solar system to teach about the planets
• Museums and science exhibits
• Language learning – Second Life English
• Education UK – An island in Second Life supporting teaching and learning
• Eduisland II
• Simulations for nursing students to use as pre-tests for their clinicals

Issues raised

• Cost of buying islands
• Cognitive overload dealing solely with the interface and navigation controls (including learning them)
• Going out of the classroom model
• unfamiliar, hard for people to grasp educational uses quickly
• less than 5,000 active teen residents on the Teen Grid (source)
• Not a viable teaching platform in the US because it’s not accessible (to all students). Regulations 504 and 508 prohibit the use of these technologies to actually teach a class for any institution receiving federal funds. That said, a lot of institutions are using them anyway on the grounds that ‘we don’t have any blind students’
• Controlling the learning
• Expensive, funding required
• Very time-consuming – ‘bleeding edge’
• Bandwidth-hungry
• Most people are not early adopters
• Hardware requirements are too much to ensure equal or ubiquitous access
• User contribution aspect of SL seems significantly more technical and difficult to participate in
• Lack of focus on rigorous content, e.g. ‘advanced math and science skills’
• Not currently developed to the extent where it is efficient for a teacher to utilize its full potential
• Safety

Interesting mention

• Google SketchUp – ‘a free, easy-to-learn 3D modeling tool that enables you to explore the world in 3D’
• River City – ‘A Multi-User Virtual Environment for Learning Scientific Inquiry and 21st Century Skills’
• Runescape – a browser-based MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)
• TappedIn – ‘The online workplace of an international community of education professionals’; ‘a groupware website with integrated chat and a geographical metaphor (offices, buildings, etc.)’
• Project Darkstar – ‘a research effort aimed at simplifying the process of developing multiplayer online games that can be deployed on a massive scale and made available to players using virtually any client device’
• Sloodle – ‘an Open Source project which aims to develop and share useful, usable, desirable tools for supporting education in virtual worlds, making teaching easier’
• Virtual Worlds Review – Last site update: February 20, 2006
• Croquet – ‘a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices’. See also this group for Croquet/Secondlife/OpenSim 3D virtual classroom users and developers