EDUCAUSE | Course Design

Some Foundations for Second Life Pedagogy

HiredEd — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:47:30 -0500

Sex, commerce and stalking. In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns. Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS! It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses. And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life. In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Being a design-minded individual, my attention was more captivated by the unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by the Second Life medium. We were lucky enough to have Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins visit our campus to give a presentation on educational uses of Second Life. She described a lesson she designed on self-presentation and identity (or so I recall, I forget exactly how she herself positioned the lesson) where students had to choose bodies from a box or treasure-trunk, don them, and go out and interact in Second Life in those bodies. One group of students chose to go out as Kool-Aid men, and they went to a bar, where they bumped into people, angered them, got marginalized, tried to hide, sought solidarity with each other, and in general behaved like members of a visually conspicuous minority group. They returned to the home island a very short time after venturing out, having learned an enormous amount about size issues, discrimination and minority identities.

She also discussed programs like Global Kids in Teen Second Life, and related "Gaming for Good" projects, that put kids in the position of various kinds of decision makers - everything from authorities to commoners in famine zones or child soldiers (actually, she focused on the Darfur project, the other topics came up in my own web search - must apologize for some memory haze here...).

Reflecting on these instructional anecdotes, I find myself thinking that Second life is ideally suited for (at least) two kinds of learning activities - empathy-based learning and encounter learning.

Empathy-based learning design requires the instructional designer to create a habitus, consisting of physical markers and parameters, position markings, behavioural options and the like that enable someone undertaking the lesson to experience social or instrumental interactions in a way that allows them to experience reality from a perspective different from their own. Some offline examples of empathy-based learning include the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment, having people who don't usually use wheelchairs use them for some significant stretch of time, having kids take care of a fresh, uncooked egg for several days to simulate the demands of parenting, having people dress as if they are destitute and homeless and have them try to carry out everyday social and commercial transactions, etc.

Second Life is a rich environment for empathy-provoking learning experiences of this sort. One might imagine "empathy islands" devoted to offering an empathic understanding of some issue or situation. A course on the history of the Klondike Gold Rush might be greatly enriched by challenging students to undertake the journey to Dawson in Second life on an island that replicated the physics and energetics of the journey.

On an activist front, rich and engaging empathy-islands for current social issues could be studded with "PSAs" or "ads" for social service/change organizations, which could be virtual "change boxes" to gather donations for those charities - thus generating a micro-billing stream of real support for the empathic focus of the island. Other calls to action could also be woven into the experiential rhetoric of the island.

Discussions about the educational use of Second Life should thus include some sustained reflection on the role and value of empathy-building activities in education more generally. It is likely that in many cases, a rationale for the use of empathy-based learning will further support a rationale for the use of Second Life as the environment for that learning activity. Others may already be talking about this, but as I enter this conversation about Second Life, I do so with this issue on my mind.

Another kind of educational activity that Second Life enables is encounter-based learning. Second Life allows one to transcend physical geography and bring diverse people together. A blindingly obvious way to leverage this for education is to bringtogether learners from different language groups together for foreign language practice. I haven't though as much about the possibilities here, but again, a sustained examination of the uses and roles of encounter-based learning in general will end up offering an important framework for constructing Second Life learning activities.

Sex, commerce and stalking do not strike me as the main challenges to building learning activities for college-aged adults in Second Life. As I said before, these things already characterize college campuses, and must be similarly managed in either domain.

For me the most interesting thing about Second Life is that it is a primarily spatial learning environment, which means that instructional designers lose the inherent contro lover instructional *sequence* that a primarily textual or audio-visual medium offers.

Second Life is inherently a random-access, exploratory environment. It even adds the degrees of freedom of flying and teleporting to an already free navigational paradigm of just walking around. Of course, instructional sequence could always be controlled by constructing a castle full of hallways to walk down, or a roller-coaster-ride through the lesson materials, etc. But in the absence of any such special construction, Second Life is non-sequential, random access and exploratory.

That offers a third "E" to this list of educational modes that are natural to Second Life:

- Empathic/Empathy-Based
- Encounter-Based
- Exploratory

The design of exploratory learning is an interesting challenge. How do you design non-sequential instruction? In a blog entry I wrote earlier, I discussed a game-design book that offers some guidance on this design task. The book is called _Rules of Play_ . In that book, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe three layers of design:

- Rules: The logic and organization of possibilities within the system of the game
- Play: The human experience of the system - the constaints that enable people to move through the logic of the game rules in a structured and workable manner
- Culture: The larger activities, social and instructional contexts engaged with and inhabited by the system.

Without going into too much detail about this (which I couldn't do even if I wanted to), it seems to me that instructional design in Second Life must attend to these three layers of design. There is the logic or structure of the experience one wants to create, then one must attend to how learners will explore or move through this experience, and the fit between this experience and other social and instructional aspects of the course needs to be clear (enough) as well.

While it's not as dramatic as sex, commerce and stalking, the combination of:

- Empathy
- Encounter
- Exploration
   * Rules (Logic, conceptual/factual structure)
   * Play (Learning activity, processing)
   * Culture

...does offer a foundation for some pretty rigorous work on the educational uses of the Second Life platform. It's not the whole story, but it's a great place to start.

Game Design as Instructional Design

HiredEd — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:09:17 -0500

Most discussions of games in education focus on their utility as course components. Educators rarely take a step back to look at gaming as a design discipline. Taken together, game design and instructional design might perhaps both be considered sub-fields of engagement design - the design of engaging structured experiences. The scope of engagement design would include interface design, graphic design, maybe even advertising and merchandizing... theme park design... and theoretically each of these fields could cross-pollinate the others. But for now I'm just going to look at one classic work in game design that offers an interesting framework for instructional design.

In _Rules of Play_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman introduce an analytical framework for thinking about game design that could be transposed to the instructional design field, supporting the creation of better courses revealing a new way of thinking about instructional design that could be used to make courses more engaging. They suggest three cognitive schemas for understanding games:

- Games as Rules (essential logic or structure of the option space)
- Games as Play (human experience and activity within the option space)
- Games as Culture (the larger social context supporting/supported by the game activity)

Salen and Zimmerman correctly point out that these schemas apply to any kind of design (p. 6). In instructional design, we can differentiate:

- Learning Content (the target knowledge or activity/skill space to master)
- Learning Processes (learner experience and activity options within the space)
- Learning Cultures (the larger social context supporting/supported by the learning program)

With this shift, it becomes possible to essentially read the entire text of _Rules of Play_ as a treatise on course design. I'll list two key insights about game design below. I'll transpose the first into instructional design language, and I'll leave the second unglossed so that you can translate it for yourself.

"The goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play." (p. 33)
>>The goal of successful instructional design is the creation of meaningful learning experiences.

"Meaningful play emerges from the interaction between players and the system of the game, as well as from the context in which the game is played." (p. 33)
>> ...

The three schemas for understanding games include a systematic schema (Rules), an interactivity schema (Play), and a contextual schema (Culture). There is a 'fractal' reproduction of these three layers within the "Rules" category, giving us three kinds of rules:

- Constitutive Rules (the rules that make up the game)
- Operational Rules (rules of play/interactivity)
- Implicit Rules (rules of etiquette, good sportsmanship etc.)

It seems to me that this three-level analysis is a superb frame for understanding course design. There needs to be a fit between the subject matter, the lesson design and the context these are being designed for. So if a course was well-designed to support constructivist exploratory learning , over a fuzzy and interpretive knowledge area, but the target audience was busy executive managers wanting to learn about something specific, then the course might fail because the Content and Processes don't fit the Culture. One might either change the Content and Process, or seed the cultural context by repositioning the course explicitly as an "executive roundtable", or something else that would better set expectations and help participants self-select in or out.

Alternatively, if the target body of knowledge is minutely structured and stable, exploratory learning might be counterproductive, forcing students to incur search and trial-and-error costs that are not actually necessary for success with this material. In Salen and Zimmerman's terms, the Process level would poorly "integrated" with the Content level. Straight factual opposition and rote learning might actually be the best way for students to approach that learning target (especially if the surrounding culture is supportive of rote learning).

Instead of figuring out "one right way" of teaching, it becomes a matter of "fitness" or integration between three levels of consideration.

_Rules of Play_ contains 600 pages of analysis on how to design the interplay between these levels in order to produce compelling, engaging, even additive structured social activities. Recommended reading for anyone in the instructional design field.

ELI2007 Podcast: Connexions

Carie417 — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:19:44 -0600

In this 52-minute recording from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we'll hear from Richard Baraniuk in a session entitled Connexions: Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge. Baraniuk will explain how Connexions, an open source software tookit, is helping authors collaborate and publish; instructors rapidly build and share custom courses; and students explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines

Faculty Development -- Follow up screencasts

markmorton — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:09:36 -0600

I've received a few emails from people in the Educause community requesting more information about the faculty development program that I offer at the University of Waterloo, called The E-Merging Learning Workshop. Accordingly, I'll provide (below) three links to resources that give more detail about our approach to faculty development vis-a-vis learning technologies.

First, the home page of the E-Merging Learning Workshop, which briefly explains its goals and approach: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/programs/ELW/

Second, a seven-minute screencast that explains what the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW1.wmv (6 megs)

Third, a ten-minute screencast that explains how the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is achieved:
http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW2.wmv (5 megs)

These screencasts are in Windows Media format. I intend to also render them in Quicktime format, but haven't done so yet.