SL's #1 problem for .edu is...

by Jeremy Kemp

...not sin (porn, gambling etc.)

...not accessibility (tech reqs, tools for the disabled, complex interface)

...not disruptive strangers (griefers, unaffiliated interlopers, etc.)

...not commercialism and corporatization

...not legal issues with Intellectual Property and the legally questionable Terms of Service

But the MOST troubling feature of this setting for education is the lack of affordances for reflective learning and asynchronous tools in support of learning communities.

Many class sessions in SL seem to wander into the realm of decorative chat.

But the vast majority of online learning at the post secondary level is NOT synchronous. Here at our university, only a small percentage of faculty add a chatroom tool to their LMS designs.

Students who flock to distance learning for flexibility and time-shifting are loathe to set aside a specific time for meetings - especially nano-band activities like instant messaging. I just can't imagine spending ALL my students' time in SL parking their avatars an nyawning through excruciatingly slow chat interactions.

Blending RL synchronous meetings and online asynchronous reflective activities such as threaded messaging and project work seems to be the most successful model. I've used the "book ends" approach in my elearning classes from 2002 on. Students meet for a longish in-person session on campus, arrange teams. This also allows for in-person pre and post assessments and also public speaking training at the final session. Students get the face-to-face benefits but are able to spend less time on campus tied down to a schedule. Each mode has its strengths and their work is tightly integrated RL/online.

So virtual environments for learning represent a two-legged stool when used by themselves. We benefit from an engaging feeling of presence and also from the visualization and modeling. But the missing third leg of the stool is reflectivity. The platform is woefully lacking ways to integrate in-world learning with existing distance learning tools for reflection such as threaded messaging, blogs, portfolios, assignment structures and assessments.

In my own class work, I'm struggling to create a multi-modal experience where my students may choose how they devote time to the class. Grading is a pain: How do you assign grades for a team when 1/2 of the members want to meet in-world to give chat presentations while the others cannot commit to meeting times and prefer building on their own and leaving items for the others to work with?

Does anyone have advice for instructional design in a multi-modal setting like this? For connecting your previous LMS instructional designs with this new synchronous-centric tool?

Ideas?

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

Machinima that shows off education in SL

compiled by Milo from SLED posts

Beth asks the list for, "really solid example(s) of machinima that outlines educational goodness in SL for both K-12 and college (or education in general)". The responses (from Ben & Alan)

SLCN
http://slcn.tv/ - TV in Second Life, check out the BPE conference videos

SJSU SLIS Second Life Campus
http://youtube.com/profile?user=jeremykemp

Ohio University Second Life Campus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA&mode=related&search

Case Western Reserve University
http://blog.case.edu/casenews/2007/04/20/secondlifearticle
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2066

Emergency Preparedness Training in Secondlife
(Google Video) an overview of the Play2Train sim
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8182785842131047047

Introduction to Second Life (blip.tv) covers a wide range of uses of Second Life, from business to education to art
http://www.blip.tv/file/74378/

Global Kids Educational Programs in TSL (HolyMeatballs.org) gives an overview of the educational potential of SL for teenagers
http://globalkids.org/olp/pod/05.mov

Architecture on the Double (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7bXu2ozXo0

NOAA's Virtual Island (YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is8YX32GAyQ

Slideshows from the SL Best Practices in Education Conference

Sarah Robbins (Intellagirl Tully) of MediaSauce
http://www.slideshare.net/intellagirl/engagement-in-second-life-learning/

Jonathon Richter (Wainbrave Bernal) of CATE, Univ of Oregon
http://www.slideshare.net/wainbrave/the-salamander-project/

Follow up: Second Life for Educators Class

by Bill Moseley

Thanks for a great conference yesterday - I enjoyed myself and came away very enthusiastic about the work of my SL colleagues. This email is a follow-up on the Second Life for Educators course that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. If you are not interested, then please forgive and ignore me. If you are interested, then there is one more week to join us.

The web site for the class (and registration) is: http://www.bmoseley.com/sl101/

FREE SL Office Residency on EduIsland II

by Laelia Laval

Nancy Sharoff (Laelia Laval - SL) and Kevin Jarrett (KJ Hax) are pleased to announce the launch of "SLolar Central" (SLolar = Second Life Scholar), a facility providing FREE, temporary "office space" (and other resources) for K-20 educators and school administrators exploring Second Life. Need a place to 'set to home'?

.

Kevin and Nancy met at the Google Teacher Academy in NYC. We are so excited about SL's potential that we decided to create our own community for fellow educators. So, we leased three floors in a gorgeous tower on EduIsland II, located at:
.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%20II/32/213/21
.

Here are some photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557125/
http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557089/
http://flickr.com/photos/kjarrett/502557063/
.

SLolar Central is a gathering place for educators committed to exploring the possibilities of SL, a place where avatars can experiment with modes of communication, building, movement, etc. to enhance their SL experience and find ways to use it in the classroom and as a means of professional development. Our vision is to create a community of learners devoted to exploring SL and sharing the experience. To find out more, please visit SLolar Central's Google Groups page at:
.

http://groups.google.com/group/slolar-central
1. Click on 'Files'
2. Click on 'Temporary Office Space Residency Application'
3. Copy/paste text into the body of an e-mail and send it to laelia
[dot] laval [at] gmail [dot] com
4. Don't forget to click on 'Apply for group membership' as well!
.

We are very excited about the potential for this community and hope that many of you will join us as we explore the infinite possibilities of SL. Space is limited, so act fast. Any questions? Let us know!

Workshop Materials

by Kim Hampton and James Rickman

Kim writes: I am creating a workshop Web site as part of a professional resource we are developing at Bedford/St. Martin's (an academic publisher). I am interested in providing a forum for teachers to exchange, share, comment on, and post workshop materials for community use. One topic I'd like to include is "Teaching in a Virtual Environment."

Has anyone created a collection of workshop materials that address this topic, specifically how to teach in SL? We would love to work out a deal where these materials could be posted to our site. Please let me know if you have anything you'd like to contribute.

James replies:

http://www.njit.edu/v2/CCCC/VC/Papers/Teaching.html

http://www.teachingquality.org/pdfs/tlnvirtualchat.pdf

Underlying pedagogical assumptions (Editorial)

by Owen Kelly

I find it interesting the way different strands of different threads can come together sometimes in an entirely personal way and trigger off something else entirely.

For example:

• People have been worrying about the right clothing to wear when appearing before your students in an SL class;
• Mechthild Schmidt leapt on someone she thought might be commercialising Teen Sl, when I read the post as indicating that a bright teenager was using Teen SL to rehearse his life as an adult;
• Kimberley Hampton has just wondered if anyone has "created a collection of workshop materials that address this topic, specifically how to teach in SL?" and would like to publish it;
• Birdie Newborn has just challenged Chris Swaine, saying that "the underlying assumption of your argument, Chris, seems to be to corral Second Life into traditional guidelines" while she thinks that "SL offers wholly new potentialities".

These all tie together for me into a topic that concerns me: what kind of pedagogy does Second Life support, or (more interestingly) what will happen to pedagogy once it has been metaversed?

Almost everyone in SL is a prosumer in Toffler's sense of the word: their consumption and production are inextricably intertwined. This necessarily includes their part in the production of the comunal meanings that they in turn consume. This must be especially true of so-called virtual worlds like SL where the very existence of the world is a communal fantasy: an act of communal production that is at the same moment an act of communal consumption.

This means that everyone in SL is (to one extent or another) self-educating (we can throw in terms like micro-learning, informal learning, if you like) and that puts a large burden on almost all traditional notions of pedagogy. In a knowledge economy mediated by digital interfaces you should be able to claim prior-learning credits for all the PlayStation games you have become familiar with.

I have several specific reasons for raising these general points now.

1. We have just finished a project in SL called Semano Semano, which was a pedagogical experiment that I have documented in two interlinking essays here:
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/15/semano-semano/
- http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/25/second-life-a-component-in-a-vle/

I would be very interested to have any reactions or comments either here or on the site itself. (Please note: I am not suggesting that our work is either interesting, important or right; merely that it is interesting and important to me and I would like to share it because I think it may be pointing in an interesting direction).

2. The fourth League of Worlds conference will be taking place in Sweden at the end of October (The first 3 were in Helsinki, Finland; Melbourne, Australia; and Boone, North Carolina. The fifth is scheduled to be in Mexico.) This conference arose from the kind of concerns that I am outlining here. If you are interested then you should find details at www.leagueofworlds.com This year we are planning to hold a shadown conference in SL and I will keep the list up to date with news about that.

Both 1 and 2 are attempts to wrestle with the question of how pedagogy will radically change in a world of self-training prosumers (of whom our teenage entrepeneur from Teen Second Life might be a good example). I suspect that we ignore this question at our peril.

And I teach in outfits borrowed from Zorro or the Matrix depending on my mood :)

Eduserv "Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007

by Nick Noakes (from Eduserv listserv)

Subject: Eduserv "Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007
Powerpoint slides and streaming media

The Powerpoint slides and streaming media from the Eduserv Foundation
"Virtual worlds, real learning?" Symposium 2007, which was held on the
10th May, are now available from the Eduserv Website at the following
location:-

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/presentations

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/

2007 Best Practices Conference Update

by Beth Ritter-Guth

IT IS ALMOST HERE!!!! Can you believe it?

On Friday, MAY 25th, over 600 educators will gather for 24 hours to share all of the educational goodness going on in Second Life!

To tease you....please feast your eyes upon the schedule of presenters!

To tease you even more....zoom your pixelated-red-eye to the NEW SERVICE being offered by MySLProject at http://www.myslproject.com/ed/ This was created for our conference and will be a resource that ALL of us can use!!! Please go ahead and sign up now (even if you aren't coming to the conference!). It is FREE!

BUT..who on earth would MISS this conference????

What does it cost? NOTHING! It is FREE FREE FREE!

What do you have to wear? Well...we have no dress code, but clothing is preferred.

What skills do you need? Well, you should go through orientation first before signing in, but other than that, we are chalk full of really sweet and nice people, so we will guide ya along.

If you want to attend, all you have to do is register (http://eloisepasteur.net/conference/attend.php) (so we can pass you some 100 freebies at the door) and land yourself at the Welcome Center upon arrival (SLurl http://slurl.com/secondlife/Beethoven/135/205/33.

Do you have questions? Concerns? Donations of freebie stuff? General praise, adoration, or pocket lint? Please im Desideria Stockton.

What can SL do for Education?

An SLEDitorial by Chris Swaine

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]

E-Portfolio Open Access

By Jonathon Richter (Univ. of Oregon; WainBrave Bernal)

Jeremy Kemp and I presented at AERA last month on the Virtual Portfolio or vPortfolio concept - extending and enhancing the ePortfolio notion into 3D space. The slurl for our work-in-progress spot is here: http://tinyurl.com/ytqjna and we'd really like to collaborate with folks from the Second Life Educators group on ways to build out this idea, literally! :)

While 2D portfolios have traditionally relied, in one way / degree to another on the metaphors of (a) Map, (b) Sonnet, and (c) Mirror - depending upon the purpose of the ePortfolio (who is the audience, who is setting the goals, who is reviewing it - and is it for summative or formative evaluation?) - 3D or vPortfolios may generate new metaphors for collections of student work for the purposes of teaching and learning:

1) the Portfolio as Quest: collections of work can now immerse the viewer in a story, retold when a user ventures through.

2) the Portfolio as built Community: students can "hang out" and create things in a formal or informal setting, making and doing (much like a number of sims in SL - like my home in Chilbo!)

3) the Portfolio as Museum: Students can create a walkthrough (or flythrough) of an interactive exhibit - on a large or small scale.

4) the Portfolio as Marketplace : Students can use an economic scale to see how well the artifacts that demonstrate their knowledge now bear out their own skills.

There may be others out there in SL and other Multi-User Virtual environments - but my belief is that you are using a relatively inexpensive Portfolio Tool with Second Life. There just hasn't yet been a lot of development in any of the above 4 areas - though there ARE examples, of which I would humbly ask folks to submit so we may showcase them at the vPortfolio build on San Jose State's place.

We also are experimenting with the use of SLoodle as a way to capture reflection (via chat and blog tools) so students have a way of narrating why they feel they have met particular standards.

As for 2D, I like Elgg for learner - centered and OSPI for institution-centered portfolios. I've used Adobe Acrobat Writer and HyperStudio (ahem!) as generic tools to create them at Montana State, where I was in a previous life.

TaskStream and Avenet are great proprietary options.

If you or anyone is interested in finding out more about our vPortfolio work, let me know!

How about an open source OBJECT repository to enhance education in SL?

A question by Fire Centaur: ...Since we have all of these fabulous educators making great 3D objects for their presentations, why not create a repository where everyone could submit and catalog the objects they've created for their presentations... then, the community would have a rick library of presentation aids to use and share... I think this would be a great way to enhance the current SL education offerings... what do you think?

Jonathon Richeter (Wainbrave Bernal) responds...

We're aiming to do just that! Creating a repository and searchable database of Learning Objects available in Second Life with the help of the whole Community of Practice is precisely the aim of a newly funded "proof of concept" project called SLamander or The Salamander Project.

We have recently struck a partnership with MERLOT ( http://www.merlot.org/) to develop a typology of interrelated dimensions that are useful for educators of all stripes using this mileu.

We are also working with the good people at San Jose State - particularly Jeremy Kemp and a new group of mentors to assist teachers in SL (Greylin) - to develop the concept on several fronts: Salamander Tool development in Sloodle and a Salamander HUD and in testing things out prior to an official launch.

Right now, for example, we are working on developing the best way to create a slurl nomination and survey-based description tool that would log directly to a database. We will then filter these - possibly asking folks for further info - and then starting to place them in the MERLOT search interface. Next friday we're presenting at the Best Practices Conference on the concept and plan to be releasing more information about the particulars when they are more concrete such that we have capacity for folks to be more involved.

We should be ready for a full public announcement in the Fall 2007 - though this is a way of "getting the word out" now. ;)

Our initial effort, prior to officially partnering with MERLOT, was done here: http://www.eduisland.net/salamanderwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Anyone interested in this is welcome to suggest ideas, or get involved by emailing me: jrichter -at- uoregon . edu

Cef^sl (Portuguese workshop in SL)

By Luis Francisco Pedro (Zes Garfield)

Cef^sl (Portuguese workshop about communication, education and training in SL)
Registrations will close next Monday (May 21st).

Next week (23-25 May) we will host a 3-day workshop at Aveiro University in Portugal.

Main topics are communication, education and training in SL and some presentations can be followed at Universidade de Aveiro island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Universidade%20de%20Aveiro/118/115/38)

Most communications will be held in Portuguese. However, we'll have 2 main events in English: a communication by Robin "Linden" Harper (24th May at 11.00 GMT) and an open discussion on education issues with the presence of Katherine Milton (Ohio State University - 24th May, 19.30 GMT). More information at http://cefsl.blogs.ca.ua.pt.

Second Life and Learning Object design

From Barry Spencer to the SLED Listserv (13MAY07):

Hi everyone Skipper Abel here and anyone that has met up with me in SL or teleported over to my beach house at Shimmer Island will know that I am looking at SL as an extension to my work in using the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment at Bromley College.

.

Just lately I have been thinking about how Learning Objects should be in SL. I have created a number of these in RL and used them in my teaching. In fact you will find two of them that I put together using CourseGenie in my C tutorials at the Island, but these are typically web based Learning Objects, and I am thinking that when it comes to SL, I should try to make them use some of the unique features that are available.

.

So I would like to invite anyone who has the time to pop over to Shimmer Island and try this first attempt out.

.

I have rezzed the object, a short computer history lesson onto the ground floor of the beach house with a sign board next to it, just click on the screen then stand back and watch. At the moment I am only looking at the media apsects of the project, which uses chat, textures and objects, stuff like navigation will come along later. If you do have time to come over and take a look, I would of course appreciate any feedback please, an IM would be fine , just let me have your impressions, the whole thing only lasts just over 4 minutes.

.

http://tinyurl.com/2tv3ah

Just Ask the Avatar in the Front Row

"Colleges and universities head into virtual worlds, and student learning and psychology are changed forever."

by Neal Starkman, published on May 1, 2007, in Campus Technology.