EDUCAUSE | Multi-Player Games

Podcast: The Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population - An Interview with Rachel Smith

gbayne — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:23:38 -0500

In this 9 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services for the New Media Consortium. The interview was recorded at the 2007 Seminars On Academic Computing Conference where Rachel Smith presented two session, "Games for Learning" and "The Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population".

Students are arriving on campus with a set of expectations and behaviors that differ from those of previous generations, including the faculty, who are faced with engaging them in the process of learning. Students' experience with new kinds of games and media has shaped their view of what learning is and how it occurs. This conversation will explore the changing way that young people approach playing, learning, and working and will examine how the concept of play can build bridges between traditional and emerging student populations.

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.

My Second Life

jeffvand — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:11:05 -0600

So about a month ago I decided I would check out the online world of Second Life for it's educational possibilities I kept reading about.

I logged in, created my own bald (looking only a few years in the future) avatar and started looking around. I was, of course, overwhelmed with the many, many 'adult' centered nations, but was pleased to find EduNation. I joined several Education centered groups and even went to a couple of online meetings. I started forming some virtual relationships with some really awesome educators.

Alas, work and other responsibilities called and I after about a week I returned to the 'real' world. I have not been back since. If I had a class I was teaching I might have some of my students meet there, or even look into using a classroom somewhere to teach a class as a test. For now I have just chalked it up as information to be passed onto a teacher at some point in the future.

Future of Second Life

Last night, however, I came across an article on CNNMoney.com entitled "Second Life: It's not a game" that really caught my attention... specifically one sentence. In pointing out the economic potential of the 'game' for businesses David Kirkpatrick says:

"It's the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net - this one in 3-D and even more social than the original - with huge opportunities to sell products and services."

Networking

This really got me thinking. When I was in the game I really did form some real relationships with people. Much like a chatroom I made contacts with people that were already using Second Life in the classroom. I was once just sitting around in EduNation by myself and a lady flew in (yes, you can fly in Second Life) and started chatting with me about some of her research. I left with some great links to some great research. I was able to talk with other educators and bounce ideas off of them. The people I talked to were not always the same as me either. They were people teaching in high schools, small colleges, and more often than not, foreign countries. They offered insights that neither I, nor my colleagues, could come up with by ourselves. Now, all of this could be accomplished in an educational centered chat room, but somehow this was different.

Personal Touch

There were several times when I met somebody and as I left they asked to be my friend (which was added to a list where we could track our Second Life online status). I don't know if it is just educators, but twice as I parted I was presented with a virtual gift (once a script and once some wings for wearing). Now I realize that the gifts I was receiving were probably just second-hand gifts from somebody else, but it meant something to me... in my 'real' life. I had a visual image of a person that was my friend. My favorite gift was a script that allowed me to play paper/rock/scissors online and do backflips when I won.

I also remember once when I was talking with somebody and I had to talk with somebody in real life I asked the virtual person to wait a second. A second turned into a minute and when I looked back at my screen her avatar was looking at her watch. There is the added non-verbal communication of body language that adds to, and makes those relationships even more real.

This morning I came in and was going through my daily reading list and saw an article printed in Campus Technology about a researcher at Harvard that is creating his own virtual space for students to come and explore the 1800's in a real life, collaborating and social atmosphere.

Conclusion

I still probably won't make it back into Second Life anytime soon because I don't have the real need right now. If, however, Second Life actually turns into the new net, which I could really see, I will have to re-evaluate. How was your Second Life experience?

(Original Article: http://www.edutechie.com/2007/01/my-second-life/)

Educational Gaming has to Engage the Students... but How? - EduTechie.com

jeffvand — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:37:04 -0600

If you have been following the news lately you have probably read about some of the educational efforts right now to integrate online multi-player games like Eve-Online, Second Life and World of Warcraft into classroom learning environments, or at least harness the popularity and power of the games in an attempt to encourage learning among users. It is not an idea peculiar to educational bloggers… Second Life even has an educational section devoted entirely to integrating the program into learning. There have even been several attempts to build a game that teaches a courses for you. (UNC-G economics course comes to mind - NPR article). So what is the future of all this?

Check out the full article here: http://www.edutechie.com/2006/11/educational-gaming-how/