Top 10 List Why (another take)

by Jeremy Kemp

Here is a starter list:

• Increases student engagement
• Allows rapid prototyping of learning objects
• Offers a flexible narrative
• Gives exposure with public relations and marketing
• Replaces place-based schooling with place-like settings
• Positions your school for next-generation media use
• Suits the needs of autism-spectrum learners
• Connects you with a vibrant community of educators already involved
• Provides a setting for experiential learning
• Helps teams gain skills with life-like activities

I started a wiki page if anyone wants to add/edit:
http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Why_Second_Life

Jeremy Kemp, M.Ed., M.S.J.
Assistant Director, SL Campus
School of Library & Information Science
San Jose State University

Top 10 reasons to use SL

Forward by Ed Lamoureux. Original post by Chris Swaine) (May 07)

Reasons to use Second Life in education

Learning Environment

As an alternative learning environment, it provides:

• an alternative and potentially neutral space away from the 'traditional' classroom, which can be socially inclusive for those learners which the formal establishment has woefully failed.
• enables real time interactions and global alliances which are not constrained by traditional 'location' based environments .
• In 20 years time, we will laugh at what we now call a VLE [Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle etc etc] as being very quaint and 2D!

Support Networks

• Formal and informal, multiple support networks - from peer to peer through to trusted intermediaries - through to synchronous and asynchronus communication channels
• Collaborative space. One of SL's huge benefits is the collaboration - both for learners and educational practitioners

Learning & Teaching Dynamic

• Enable all learners to experience a greater variety of teaching and learning styles - fab for kinesthetic and audio visual styles!
• Can help to blur the distinction between the role of the teacher and learner.
• Different opportunty for greater range of interactions with the teacher
• The traditional role of the teacher and the learner can become blurred, which potentially puts the learner more in control of their own learning [andragogic /heutagogic approaches]
• Allows different learning styles to be deployed and adopted - especially for kinesthetic and audio visual learning styles.

Assessment

• Alternative environment to support formative and summative assessment - from RARPA [recognising and recording progress and achievement in non accredited learning - http://www.aclearn.net/display.cfm?page=1290] through to virtual portfolios
• Fabulous opportunity to showcase work in an interactive 3D environment rather than a 2D website, or though paper portfolios
• Help learners to become more actively involved in designing and carrying out their own assessments.

Personalised Content

• Enables a 3D environment for curriculum areas from marketing and PR to fashion and design, languages to retail.
• Allows another technology solution to be deployed [working on the premise that the technology should support the learning and teaching and not the other way around!] It is also 'just another tool' that a teacher [or learner] can deploy as part of any learning episode.

Flexible Curriculum

• Enable the curriculum to be more bite sized and delivered anytime - anyplace - rather than the institutional and non flexible 9-5 Monday to Friday.
• Can link home/school – home / college
• Help to provide flexible learning pathways
• Enable learners to co-design, manage and access the curriculum in different ways

Downsides

Responsive Infrastructure

• Technical specifications for running SL are still very high for many users to effectively use SL to support learning and teaching. Therefore, there is a risk of supporting the 'digital divide' - those that have - and those that have not.
• E-safety - this is more about education that setting up yet more barriers [which I.T. departments revel in "How can we make it not happen"!] - but for organisations it is still a real issue from firewalls to learner safety.
• Connectivity - not all places have a decent broadband connection

Evidence and Evaluation

• I would very much doubt there is much robust [robust = key word] evidence yet that virtual worlds DO support learner retention, achievement or attainment. However, I also have no doubt that it is only a matter of time before that starts to filter through. The fact that the community is now over 6.2 million worldwide and at any one time over 20k are in-world suggests that something is good - and it isn't just sex!

Inspection Frameworks

• Certainly the UK, Educational inspectors through OfSTED just couldn't cope with Second Life - they can barely cope with the concept of email! Therefore, there will continue being a struggle using this technology as inspection is a major driver [along with funding]

Immersive Education and VLE's: Call for Participation

by Aaron E. Walsh

I am a faculty member in the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College and direct the Media Grid standards group that today released the following Immersive Education call for participation (to educators, students and professionals):

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Media Grid call for participation: Immersive Education and Virtual
Learning Environments
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High quality PDF and Web versions: http://MediaGrid.org/#NEWS
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BOSTON, MA - June 04, 2007 - MediaGrid.org launches Immersive Education initiative with an open call to educators, students, and professionals who have experience using virtual learning environments or video game technologies (such as Second Life, Croquet, Extensible 3D [X3D], Panda3D, Quake, Unreal, Torque Game Engine, and so forth). Individuals and organizations can visit ImmersiveEducation.org to select the next-generation Immersive Education platform, contribute to best practices, and establish standards for virtual learning environments and game-based learning platforms...

Full release at http://mediagrid.org/news/2007-06_immersive_education.html
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I'd like to personally invite faculty and students who have experience teaching and learning in Second Life to participate. Second Life wasn't a viable platform for Immersive Education the last time (2003) we selected a platform, but it's a serious contender today. Details on how to participate are provided in the news release above, or directly at http://immersiveeducation.org/ (see "Participate in the Immersive Education standardization process").

Virtual Worlds for Studying Real-World Business

by Rob Bloomfield (a.k.a. Beyers Sellers, Kingsfield Island Resident)

Some of you already know of my interest in virtual worlds as a platform for business research and education. I finally have a paper for public distribution, available for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=988984. Feel free to pass along to others.

If you find the proposal interesting, visit the Wiki website at https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/WFS/Home.

(The url www.WorldsForStudy.net will also take you there, and is easier to remember).

You might also consider joining my SL group, "Worlds For Study."

WFS is focused on the use of virtual worlds for education and research in business, law, economics, etc. , not Second Life per se. However, SL seems to be *the* place to find educators interested in virtual worlds, as indicated by the success of today's "best practices" conference.

By the way, if you are interested in using "serious games" for education in non-business settings, you will still find some helpful ideas . And everyone seems to enjoy the part where I describe my own experience in SL…

Article on teaching styles in SL

by Carol H Tucker

In Second Life Insider:

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/05/23/teaching-styles-in-the-sl-community-case-study-asl-hairmakin/

Miscelleneous notes from Jeremy Kemp

Check out this 2005 groundbreaking study on ways to maximize learning "transfer" in simulations: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/pdfs/CASfade.pdf

The key phrase is "concreteness fading" or the assertion that REALISM in a simulation is not in itself a key goal. Most helpful is a coordinated movement of the sim from realistic to abstract representations.

Time spent heightening realism in Second Life is often WASTED time. And we should focus more on the juxtaposition of easy verisimilitude (low load) with meaningful abstraction (making principles salient).

Example:

I have a script that illustrates the "Flocking" algorithm:
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=SL_Swarming_Script

You can make cool groupings of fish, water molecules, etc. Show this to a high school student and they might enjoy the spectacle (concreteness).

But by studying and dissecting the underlying script (abstraction), they might better master the concepts of mass, friction and force.

This paper asserts that students show less errors on future exams if they are presented the concrete representation FIRST followed up by the abstraction.

Second Life is uniquely effective at helping us instructional designers experiment with this technique because of its flexibility.

Take that to your administrators. :-)

--J

SLED Listserv, Jeremy Kemp, 14MAY07