EDUCAUSE | Interaction and Engagement

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.

ELI White Paper on Authentic Learning

ecoghlan — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:50:03 -0500

The Internet and a variety of emerging communication, visualization, and simulation technologies now make it possible to offer students authentic learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem solving. Explore authentic learning, what it is, how technology can support it, what makes it effective, and why it is important in Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, by Marilyn M. Lombardi, ELI scholar-in-residence and director of the RENCI Center and senior IT strategist at Duke University. This piece is part of the ELI white paper series.

Gary R. Bertoline on Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Learning Environments

gbayne — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:25:34 -0500

In this podcast of “ Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Learning Environments for Gen Z,” Gary R. Bertoline, distinguished professor of computer graphics and assistant dean at Purdue University, discusses the ways cyberinfrastructure is positioned to revolutionize learning as it has already revolutionized scientific research. He outlines how computation, visualization, storage, and high-speed networks can bring together the best of traditional pedagogy with new paradigms that reflect our times.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27–28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

Implementing Immersive Learning Environments—Panel Discussion

ecoghlan — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 01:06:26 -0500

This podcast presents a panel discussion with four experts on immersive learning environments (ILEs), covering the operational aspects of implementing an ILE, including infrastructure, user support, and pedagogical and policy requirements. The panelists for this session, “The Bar May Not Be as High as You Expect: Considerations in Implementing an Immersive Learning Environment,” were:

Phillip D. Long, Associate Director, Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, MIT
Jeffrey K. Sarbaum, Assistant Professor, Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Heidi Trotta, Instructional Designer, Seton Hall University
Moderator: Alan Levine, Director, Member and Technology Resources, The New Media Consortium (NMC)

The discussion was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27–28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

Constance Steinkuehler Presentation on Virtual Worlds

gbayne — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:39:44 -0500

In this podcast of the presentation " Cognition, Learning, and Literacy in Virtual Worlds," Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses the intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds (for example, collaborative problem solving, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and digital media literacy) and the way these coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in context of pop culture.

EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional: Net Generation Students and Campus IT Panel

llarsen — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:56:02 -0500

Summary: Net Generation Students and Campus IT: Supporting Student Success in the Age of Multitasking, Facebooking, and Instant Messaging

The session was recorded for podcasting and will be available as a part of the conference proceedings.

General Session
Southeast Regional Conference
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Atlanta, Georgia

Moderator:
- Jeanna Marie Mastrodicasa, Honors Program Associate Director and University Scholars Program Director, University of Florida
Panelists:
- Joan Collier, Student, Georgia State University
- Chris Davis, Student, Georgia Perimeter College
- Irakli Gabruashvili, Student, Georgia State University
- Anu Parvatiyar, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Olivia White, Student, Agnes Scott College

Abstract
What do we need to know to support student success in all facets of their higher education experience? IT services affect the success of students from the day they begin searching for a program or school to their eventual departure and beyond. What do students want us to know about them, and what we can do to make their educational experience successful? This facilitated panel of college students will cover current trends and needs of today's students, as well as how to make their educational experience more successful.

Introduction
Dr Mastrodicasa has been working on a national survey of college students and has found that most own a variety of technology such as laptops and cell phones. IM is used by 76% on a regular basis; 15% are on essentially 24X7. Facebook is used by 69%, where they login twice a day on the average. Only 28% have a blog, but 44% read blogs. She also noted that students today want to have 5 assignments at a time to work on rather than one at a time.

Panel Question and Responses
Topic: use of email - how you use university or other accounts?
- Chris is required to use his university email account and doesn't like it.
- Olivia didn't think she'd use it much but has found that she uses her university account to communicate about university activities and has discovered that she uses it more than her AOL account.
- Joan has multiple email accounts and she checks her school account about 3 times a day.
- Irakli forwards all mail from all of his various accounts to his yahoo account.
- Anu forwards all of her various email accounts to her gmail account. However, she only gives out her university account address and that's the address on the reply

Topic: value of email - how do you decide what to open and read?
- Most of the students look at the subject line only to decide whether to open it or not.

Topic: format of email - Do you prefer one email with ten ideas or ten separate emails?
- Olivia said that repeat emails are okay as reminders
- Chris said one concept per email is easy to put on the calendar.

Topic: Social networking - What social software do you use?
- All use Facebook, three use MySpace, and they check them several times a day.
- What they check for: birthdays, messages, (check "important" messages first) pictures/photos and if you've been tagged in a responsible way, social info - who broke up - finding friends from the past, talk to people you can't talk to in person. It's a great way to keep in touch with peers.
- Irakli's communicates with his friends in the Republic of Georgia and his friends in the US and has noted that there is a change in the way people build their relationships. You can now see your friends' friends and can develop relationships with them. This is happening with his two sets of friends. He said the whole world will soon know each other.
- Anu looks for her email messages first and then Facebook. She thinks the best is keeping in touch with friends which her older brother couldn't do because the technology wasn't available for him when he was in college.
- Olivia appreciates the ability to see photos from friends studying abroad and have a very real sense of their experiences there.
- Dr. Mastrodicasa said that as a faculty member who uses Facebook and uploads photos and labels, she is amazed by the number of students who view and comment on them. She creates a group for each class and this helps her know who her students are.

Topic: Social networking - How do you use instant messaging (IM)?
- Irakli indicated that IM was the "best" for him and his purposes
- Olivia said that IM was distracting so she gave it up and uses the phone.
- Chris thought that IM was good for working with others on projects and easy to cut and paste
- Anu leaves it up but might not talk on it. She said Google chat was taking over.

Topic: Web - Tell us about your web surfing.
- Most students use it for finding resources as they study. Wikipedia and other resources can be good places to start.

Topic: Social networking - (undergraduates using social software) How do you feel if and when instructors get on Facebook (your world)?
- Anu indicated that it opens up an approachability of the professor yet keeping it separate from academics shows s/he is a real person
- Joan doesn't want her professors to be her "friends" on Facebook - professors ask to be added as a friend but she doesn't want it used for judicial and other issues - it's private space
- Irakli said it depends upon personality of the professor. If there is a relationship already in place then it is not a problem at all.
- Olivia found more deans on Facebook than professors. She said it was no problem but could be awkward if you have to censor yourself.
- Chris sees staff members on Facebook but not professors. He'll always add them.
- They agreed that it depends upon the professors intent.

Topic: Online professor evaluations - Do you participate?
- Dr Mastrodicasa wasn't sure if it was okay that she was not "Chili Pepper" (hot) on ratemyprofessor.com.
- Chris has rated professors online
- Olivia doesn't look at them anymore as she found many had personal biases that did not translate to her own experiences
- Chris said he has to look at them with a grain of salt. He had a great math professor but that professor had bad ratings.
- Anu said that GATech has an inhouse system. Data is more representative of the full student body and is more even.
- Dr Mastrodicasa indicated that their survey found that incoming freshman are excited about the ability to see professor ratings in the beginning but then it mellows with the experience

Topic: Text messaging - Should it be used for emergency messages?
- Some systems allow students to opt-in and opt-out
- All of the students use text messages
- Joan uses all of her 1500 each month
- Irakli is a regular user but not to the extent that Joan uses it.
- Olivia uses text messaging less frequently than the others.
- Chris uses text messaging constantly, but sporadically, to replace IM

Topic: Text messaging - Is text messaging a second-language - do you use all of the abbrieviations?
- Most students use full words and not extensive abbreviations

Topic: Social software, safety and privacy issues - Has your institution provided information on social software, safety and privacy issues?
- Dr Mastrodicasa indicated that the University of Florida is heavily into social software and gives presentations on social software and its issues to students

- GA Tech and GA State have information and awareness programs. The other students did not remember having this information available.
- One general rule is to only put up what you want your grandmother to see
- Joan was familiar with a stalking incident where an individual had to be blocked. She was also concerned about inappropriate language and distortions.
- Anu put together a task force at GA Tech. They discovered that it is mostly freshman who put out inappropriate information so the student group (not IT or the university) does an orientation session for incoming freshman.
- Being "cool" is a factor in what goes online
- Joan said when her sorority reviews applications they also look at Facebook entries.
- Joan also suggested that they would like something that stops others from tagging you in a photo or otherwise, esp. inappropriately.
- Dr Mastrodicasa said that the UFL orientation staff will look at Facebook sites and advise students regarding the use of Facebook by Corporations. She is aware that some corporations use their current interns to snoop on their future interns.

Topic: Laptops - Does your university or college have a laptop requirement? And do you really use it?
- GA Tech and UFL have laptop requirements but few students bring laptops to classes. They do use laptops for non-education process.
- Chris said it depends on the professor and/or the topic in his situation.
- Anu, from GA Tech, does have the laptop requirement and they also have lots of computer labs. However, in general, professors discourage "distracting " behavior (working on your computer) during classes.
- Chris says laptops are best used in the classroom for taking notes.

Topic: Peer-to-peer filesharing - Does your university have a filesharing policy and what are your thoughts on this topic?
- Olivia - has heard discouragement from the campus -
- Virus issues make it self-regulating

Topic: Faculty using technology to interact with students - How can the faculty interact with the students most effectively? What do you think about wikipedia?
- Chris loves wikipedia and finds good user written content. For him it is a great place to start and it would help students learn from each other. He believes it should be integrated with everything we do online.
- Irakli said it was easy to understand and to the point which is good for students
- Anu agreed that it was a good place to start in finding basic information quickly and noted that it was quickly updated because so many people are reading and up-dating it.
- Jeanna noted a New Yorker article on wikipedia that was amazingly accurate.

Topic: Large Lectures - Social networking, social bookmarking, what kinds of suggestions/ideas do you have to make large courses more engaging and foster collaborative work and foster a better faculty-student relationship?
- Irakli suggested that using technology to move students closer to the real world, in his case to do day-trading. Practical applications of technology are necessary to do this.
- Anu thinks we should design courses where the larger group is broken into smaller groups and given a problem that they need to resolve that week. Students are more independent and do work on their own
- Chris said powerful tools (now used for assistive technology) would be great for regular students as well. He fast-forwards long slow lectures to pace them better and make them more interesting. Students could fast forward recorded lectures to speed up what the professor is saying
- Anu suggested the use of YouTube with academic materials uploaded.
- Dr Mastrodicasa uses YouTube frequently in her teaching.
- Chris said the choke point for implementing technology in the classroom is the professor. He suggested that we need to help them, make their life easier. If things aren't easy for the professor then they won't be easy for the student.

Topic: Textbooks - They are so expensive - how can technology help? How can we fix the problem.
- Universities should reduce the selling price and increase buy-back price
- Use JStor
- Chris talked about a student-run book buy-back & sales effort
- Olivia said there was a Facebook group for buying/selling books - the trouble is trying to get the right edition. She suggested there is conflict because bookstores don't want the students doing there own sales.
- Chris asked why he should use a text book when I can get the information elsewhere and why do they come out with a new edition of Ancient History every year?

Topic: IT Services - What do you want to tell the audience about campus IT services?
- Olivia we need wireless everywhere and in the dorms
- Special software is needed at all labs not just in limited locations.
- Iraki wants more online courses from other universities available to him to broaden his options.
- Anu talked about moving away from WebCT and choosing to move to SAKAI. They don't want multiple sources for their technology. They would like it all put in one place with good integration: calendar, messaging, courses, all in one place and relevant to YOU
- Uses Blogger.com if you don't have something like it on your campus.
- Olivia said blackboard is okay for those professors who use it but many don't use it.
- Chris repeated his approval of wikipedia because students can teach each other which uplifts and bolsters the professor
- Dr. Mastrodicasa talked about Gatorpedia which is available at UFL.
- In general, Joan likes what GA Tech offers
- The Student Learning Center at the University of GA at Athens is a great facility

The session was recorded for podcasting and will be available as a part of the conference proceedings.

Phillip D. Long on Virtual Learning Environments

gbayne — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:06:45 -0500

In this podcast of the presentation “ Virtual Learning Environments in 3D,” Phillip D. Long, associate director of MIT’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, looks at the evolution of online interaction from text-based collaboration such as wikis to 3D virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life. He discusses the potential of these immersive 3D VWs to serve as learning spaces and to become persistent new home campuses.

Richard Van Eck Presentation on Digital Game-Based Learning

gbayne — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:56:38 -0500

In this podcast of the presentation "Generation G and the 21st Century," Richard Van Eck, associate professor of instructional design and technology at the University of North Dakota, discusses the theory behind the effectiveness of games in teaching and learning; what the past can teach us about if, how, and when to implement digital game-based learning; and what this will mean for colleges and universities.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27-28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.