One of the questions Mark and I have been exploring is whether to use Teen Second Life or the main grid. One important assumption I wanted to challenge is that we can’t use Teen Second Life if we teachers can’t enter the grid. The examination of this assumption only makes sense if we have some idea of a lesson in mind. The lesson I’ve been thinking of involves the students going on a guided tour of the virtual world and reflecting on it, and this has been done before. The research we will do based on these activities will add to the pool of qualitative data already out there about the whole experience. The challenge for us will be to produce an informative analysis based on our observations of the students’ responses to their virtual world experience. But before we even get there, we’ve got to produce some material to guide their exploration of the teen grid, if that is what we’ll be using. The teen grid is a really appealing option to me at the moment because of the common concerns about safety.
Brainwave: We can work around the problem of classes with numbers of students larger than the number of working terminals in the computer lab by having pairs in which the more computer savvy person is in control of the avatar. The same arrangement can be used with students who are older than 17 years. Though it’s probably less fun being the back seat driver, these participants should be conscious of this factor in their reflections and try to imagine how the experience would be like if they were in control instead. In summary, some students can play observer roles and reflect on their experiences in this capacity.
Back to the idea of the guided tour itinerary for the teen grid. Since we older people aren’t allowed on the teen grid, we have to depend on second hand reports of interesting places therein. Some teens have been blogging at the Global Kids blog as recently as 12 February, earlier this week, posting pictures, videos and reflection that look pretty good. According to this SimTeach wiki article, Global Kids operates on an open estate model, which means that our students can visit their campus. A list of open estates is included in the article.
For the main grid, Intellagirl’s got a list of places favourite nominated by her readers. Might need to explore those as well, if we decide to work with students 18 years or older.
I also landed in the Social Simulation Research Lab in SL today after following some link (had trouble retracing my steps). Found a paper entitled ‘Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the new media classroom‘ on one of the shelves. The paper by Aaron Delwiche had this abstract:
Recent research demonstrates that videogames enhance literacy, attention, reaction time, and higher-level
thinking. Several scholars have suggested that massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) such as
Everquest and Second Life have educational potential, but we have little data about what happens when
such tools are introduced in the classroom. This paper reports findings from two MMO-based courses in the
context of situated learning theory. The first course, focused on the ethnography of on-line games, used the
game Everquest as a vehicle for teaching research methods to 36 students in an undergraduate
communication course. The second course used the game Second Life to teach the fundamentals of videogame
design and criticism. Synthesizing comments from student web logs with data collected from followup
surveys, the paper highlights key findings and offers concrete suggestions for instructors contemplating
the use of multiplayer games in their own courses. Recommending that potential virtual environments be
selected on the basis of genre, accessibility, and extensibility, it is suggested that game-based assignments
are most effective when they build bridges between the domain of the game world and an overlapping
domain of professional practice.
The use of an MMORPG to teach research methods sounds exciting for Project Work. Synthesising comments from students’ blog entries sounds good too, and we have seen students’ blog entries on SL Teen on the Global Kids blog. Criteria were suggested for evaluating the suitability of a virtual learning environment. The WWW version of the SL Library where I found the article is here.
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