Shouldn't Schools Have Embraced Second Life By Now?
When it first launched, the tech and business worlds were transfixed on Linden Labs' Second Life as a new marketplace. Science fiction fans flocked to the site for its Snow Crash and Matrix-like neo-apocalyptic feel. And finally, educators arrived to build inexpensive and immersive learning environments. While the hype has certainly dissipated with Second Life, the librarian and educator community remains. Today Linden announced the first statewide roll out of a virtual learning environment. Funded by a grant from the University of Texas State's Transforming Undergraduate Education Program the company will provide a huge space for faculty, students and researchers to explore a virtual undergrad degree program.
This latest launch will include the design of 9 academic campuses and 6 health and science campuses. The combined sites will occupy over 50 Second Life regions and will be available to students 24 hours of the day. All teaching processes and design processes will be documented for future use by similar educational institutions.
ReadWriteWeb has already written about data visualization capabilities in sites like Second Life. Due to a fledgling economy, many suggested that these institutionally-branded education initiatives may also become popular. Nevertheless, apart from this recent endorsement by the University of Texas, mainstream educators still don't have the green light to teach in virtual worlds. Many argue that video teleconferencing and instant messaging have replaced the need for virtual world interaction. However, neither of these offer the same immersive experience.
While we know that face-to-face learning is currently the most successful teaching method, if you had to choose an online learning environment, would you consider a virtual world? Let us know in the comments below.
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We are planning to research teaching in Second Life this coming spring. There are definite benefits to a virtual environment that you won't get in a face to face setting. For example, space-time barriers in virtual worlds are eliminated. Likewise, identity barriers are eliminated. With these barrier eliminations come new experiences from which to learn; experiences previously unavailable to the majority.
However, all that being said, the future will most likely combine virtual reality with augmented reality, providing a hybrid platform for education in all arenas. I'm virtually certain. ;-)
This is a good article and I know first hand that these communities continue to thrive and grow and develop in virtual worlds, especially Second Life.
I think you should consider an article title change though, people may not understand.
I think time, costs, system requirements, and the learning curve (no pun intended) of getting used to virtual worlds are still barriers to full scale implementation by colleges. Teachers are just starting to find ways to use Twitter, Facebook, etc... to enhance their curriculum, that I wouldn't expect higher education to adopt Second Life or the like for at least a couple more years.
Today in Skoolaborate (a global school based virtual worlds initiative) a Japanese TV crew filmed an event in our worlds. Japanese students were building bridges from one side of a river American and Australian students were building from the other side. The task was to meet in the middle and have a bridge that looked fine aesthetically and structurally. Obviously this required building and design skills, creativity and artistic skills but more subtle was the use of the authentic purpose created by the activity as a base to motivate students for language learning. Common and simple phrases repeated until eventually they made sense, there they were, walking together, building together and collaborating in real time, seeing each others hair styles and cool but different taste in clothes, 'How did you make that?" 'Can you teach me' and the whole time enjoying learning. Or I guess we could make then repeat lists of 'Hello my name is Westley' hmmm think I will stick with the virtual worlds - thanks Second Life the learning we are seeing is simply brilliant.
We tried some "experiments" with virtual worlds but never really got traction with them compared to real world and web 2.0 systems. Virtual worlds just didn't seem natural (sorry...) there was always too much to get done before you could do anything useful.
I am aware of some exciting possibilities with virtual worlds when it comes to simulation e.g. walking through and manipulating molecules for chemistry experiments.
I'm wondering if Augmented reality will be more "natural" and useful in education.
Loyalist College in Canada is teaching and testing in Second Life. They are using Second Life for their border patrol program and have recreated the Thousand Islands border on a platform above their islands. Testing scores in the first year of operation increased by 28%.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCUWcpVPtMM
Yeah, and then we cannot distinguish what is virtual and what is real.
I think we are jumping to conclusions that virtual worlds are THAT engaging to kids. Most of my students know about Second Life but see it as high end nerd and not that welcoming or interesting to non-technically-gifted kids. I know a lot more adults that are excited about Second Life than kids... the same holds true for Twitter...
Schools embrace Second Life? This is the most ludicrous thing I've ever read on this site, which is saying a great deal.
Are you seriously suggesting that schools should support a virtual world whose most popular use case is cybersex?
Yeah, I know, the furry sex zone is separate from the rest, but even so....
But this is still very bizarre. Second Life is the home of some of the worst graphics and design of any existing virtual world, and performs no useful function whatsoever despite the endless hype it has received over the years.
Building in virtual space is incredibly time-consuming.
Doing course design is incredibly time-consuming.
Time is for most schools even rarer than money. Add to this the fact that there is not, and never has been, meaningful incentives for innovative course development and you have the answer to your question.
It's pretty much all schools can do to merely manage the load that has been given to them. Undertaking major initiatives happens mostly only when there's a grant involved. This removed SL from most public schools right off, and for universities it means we can create a spiffy initiative, but we cannot integrate it into the broad curriculum.
Look, for instance, at how learning management systems worked their way onto campus. Second Life cannot follow that model, so it will always be peripheral to mainstream teaching. This has less to do with f2f versus virtual and more to do with funding models, IT / academia relations, and fundamental attitudes toward rewarding teaching versus rewarding research and publication.
Having personally explored several schools in Second Life, I still do not see the advantage or true pedagogical use. I hear the most about Second Life from individuals looking to add another presentation or Educause article to their resume. Just as many businesses have abandoned Second Life for low return on investment (see articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/14/business/fi-secondlife14), I envision schools will eventually do the same.
Incidentally, if you look online for news today on second life, this is what you find:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/16/secondlife_alderman_class_action_lawsuit/
Is that really the ideal platform for classroom instruction?
What confuses me a bit about this announcement is that I can't really see how it is quantitatively different from what U Texas was doing in SL already, and for the last couple of years, in fact.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like all that's happened is that there's a new name and a new announcement on an old thing.
I'm an ex-Second Lifer that used to build and script heavily for that world. The problem with schools and Second Life there isn't a real viable way delivering content. It is very clunky, the best you can do is either upload pics, use a video to link to, or send a link to other avatars. There is no Power Point, no white board, no web pages in world. There needs to more integration with Second Life before I see this happening. I think a video conference is 10x more interactive than Second Life right now.
I think some folk commenting are a little out-of-date maybe.
1. Linden Lab are addressing the adult content issue by creating a separate continent. It won't be perfect but neither is the web and most schools teach on their own islands anyway.
2. Some people would see the absence of PowerPoint as a major gain though most save and upload images of their slides and there are any number of free viewers. The advent of functions that return prim positions is also leading to some innovation in tools. The current web integration is due to undergo significant improvement but even so some of the realtime collaboration sites such as Etherpad, Twiddla and Solvr are at least partially usable as things stand though you have to swap between web-on-a-prim and the internal browser for the first two. I know people have used Google Docs as well for collaborative writing.
I have heard that medical colleges are beinning to implement Second Life as a place to practice diagnosis and treatment in a setting where anonymity makes the process more realistic (i.e. they don't know if they are working with a fellow student or a professor). In this case I see it as highly applicable. I think certain situations could benefit in Second Life, but not all education situations are appropriate for something so cumbersome.
Pixels and Policy just did a write-up of your article, good stuff!
www.pixelsandpolicy.com
@craigk sl may not be about content deliver, you can use it effectively with other purposes - like to establish a way of communication and interaction with students... a way of exploring and having access to simulations of real life things (how interesting could it be to have your students inside a heart? living in the ancient rome... or even just learn a language just by talking with native people from a certain country... and so on...). to solve your content delivery issues you may take a look at sloodle tools (http://www.sloodle.org/moodle/), it is a very interesting project that helps a lot with classes in sl.
Perhaps there is greater benefit using SL for sex education leveraging a strength of the environment identified by post #9. Don't think I am suggesting you let the under 18's loose in the seedier parts of the world, but what a great way to explore relationships and sexuality in a more controlled way than perhaps exists with traditional methods.....
(I'd be surprised if this was not happening already....)
Interesting article, though I'd quibble with the title, as schools are one of the groups who really HAVE embraced SL the most. Educators are voraciously seeking ways to apply SL to the learning process.
I came from a community management background for sites like Splice and Aviary, but found the community culture in SL to be more interesting and left to do full time sim building for educators there. My husband is a university level art lecturer in the UK and his uni has embraced SL as a classroom. It makes a lot of sense with art students, and they're having some success with philosophy students, too, as they seem to enjoy discussing the nature of reality while ensconced in digital surroundings.
A great example of the potential for SL teaching over video conference is this: Imagine you're a history teacher doing a unit on Shakespeare. In SL, you could actually replicate the globe theater and dress your students as characters in the play. Clicking things in the surroundings could cause them to 'talk' and explain their historical value, etc. You can't do this on Skype.
HOWEVER, the trouble is that schools nearly always underestimate what it takes to BUILD such an immersive environment. It could take weeks to set up a scene like that - building objects, texturing them, scripting them. And what schools do to teachers is to expect them to be builders, too, which is just ridiculous. It'd be like telling them they can teach a unit on England in the dark ages but first must write their own textbook on the subject. For every subject. Or like telling them to set up a wordpress blog with beautiful CSS and SEO but without help from anyone in the IT department. I'm sure some of them can do it, but that's not what they were hired for, right? They should use their time for working directly with students, not with 3D objects.
I think there's a market for a major textbook manufacturer to set up a sim with scenarios to go along with units in their books. I'd love to see how that played out.
Also, people need to remember that SL is like a mini-internet. You do get all kinds, and if you are a good administrator of your digital space there, you can keep the nasties away rather easily. People being griefed by flying penises shows nothing but a lack of care on the part of the person being griefed. It's entirely possible to protect a learning environment there with the built in tools. In fact, most of my work on the grid can't even been seen by anyone outside of my clients because they are locked away from the public for the safety of students and educators.
Here is another application:
My husband is currently under commission to build a replica of the Ben Franklin printing press. He was given copies of Ben's original sketches and specs and is re-creating it piece by piece to scale. In the end, people will be able to come see how it works and also (in a blow-out example) how it was made. You could do this in real life (and people have) with the help of a master carpenter and blacksmith, but there are still a lot of limitations on how many people could travel to see it, or how many people it could travel to see. By doing it in SL, you enable countless people to come visit the press and learn about it in their own time.
I am an older educator in school counseling that was introduced to SL by our outstanding school technology specialist. I must admit that at first I thought of it as a stress relief, social, light type of venue. As I have continued to learn more about SL, I can see many beneficial educational uses. I would especially like to see a "virtual counselor supervisor" sight in SL that counselors could use to access the experts to discuss cases and receive valuable suggestions for helping our students. Attending conferences throught SL would be cost saving and allow educators to hear top presenters at a fraction of the cost. These are only a few of the reasons I agree, that SL has a valid use in the educational environment.
Second Life is more effective than any "educational flash module", or otherwise, that I have seen. There is enormous potential here. It is no different from learning new software in the office. Learning is what people are all about. Teachers will learn it, and so will the students.
I prefer to get my calculus from a rabbit. LOL
...not to mention the field day that sociologists are going to have. :)
Quote: "While we know that face-to-face learning is currently the most successful teaching method" ...
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EvaluationofEvidenceBasedPract/174235
"The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction"
I think it's really a matter of bringing SL to the attention of forwardly-minded professors.
I taught a workshop last fall on SL at the local University.
http://www.mansfield.edu/~art/MUartpages/MUeArts.html
It went really well. However, this is a school that is just starting the online course option, so asking them to ok a full course in SL would be a bit too large a step for them.
As far as the time required to set up a virtual university... I think they have the budget to buy whatever is required without having to make it themselves. It would likely be an aquisitions committee headache, but it's do-able. The trick is getting some content creators to shift to the education market. The Linden Prize was a good step in that direction.
I think that this article makes a lot of sense. Teachers should consider this virtual world a little more. If a teen or young adult can sit at home and go into this virtual world and learn the same things they would be learning outside of there house why wouldn't they?
I do suggest a better title. Doesn't make as much sense.
I was thinking more along the lines of using virtual worlds as part of the curriculum particularly in higher education.
You could learn presentation, sales, money management, work ethics, and other real world skills in the "real" world. Course projects and papers could be based on the results and interactions of a given situation. It could be great!
But for teaching in the classroom, I'm still very old-fashioned. Get yourself to the classROOM!
Can't say i'm surprised. The world is getting closer and closer to being "science fiction."
I personally think that this is a stepping stone or a pioneering effort for what's to come.
It's hard to imagine going to school while staying at home, but all i can say is I can't wait for gym class!
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Kelly
Fitness and Health gal
Several other things need to be considered. It'll take time for traditional instruction to absorb virtual classrooms as 'standard' method. Sending your animated self to an ethics or physics class may create additional 'filters' that complicate teaching/learning output/input assessment.
The interface itself will, too, have to undergo so much refinement in order to incorporate behaviourism, cognitive, even moral, and such factors that are essential to the mechanics of effective teaching/learning.
At the same time, the sooner today's kids are exposed to this academic resource, the better we can say they are ready cope with what the technology has wheeling towards them other than computer games.