EDUCAUSE | virtual learning environment

ELI In Conversation: Second Life and Virtual Worlds - An Approach to Active Learning

gbayne — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:03:28 -0600

In this 31 minute podcast we feature a conversation from the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. The topic is Second Life and virtual worlds. How can virtual world participation help students become active learners? How can instructors approach virtual worlds with an eye toward their own curriculum. Are there any privacy or safety issues that must be breached in getting your students on Second Life? Particpants in this discussion include:

Sarah Smith Robbins, PhD Candidate at Ball State University, who presented a plenary session at ELI 2008 entitled, "Virtual Worlds as Web 2.0 Learning Spaces".
Teshia Roby, Assistant Professor of Educational Multimedia at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who presented a session at ELI 2008 entitled, "Second Life for the First Time: Learning to Use a Virtual World on a Real Campus".
Chris Johnson, Adjunct Assistant Professor at The University of Arizona who co-presented a session entitled, "Implementing a Presence in Second Life: Pitfalls, Procedures, Policies, and Promises".

ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session: View Full Program and Register

pkurkowski — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:12:43 -0600

The full program is now available for the ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session, "Real-World and Technology Rich: Learning by Doing, Learning in Context," being held March 18–19 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Register by February 19 to save money with low, early-bird rates.

Some of the featured sessions and speakers will include:

Making Learning Real: Turning Sim City into "Sim Science"!
Tuesday, March 18, 1:45–2:30 p.m.
Diane Jass Ketelhut, Assistant Professor of Science Education, Temple University
Authentic Learning in History and Social Sciences: How "Real" Can We Make the Classroom Experience?
Wednesday, March 19, 8:15–9:00 a.m.
Scot A. French, Associate Professor/Director, University of Virginia
Authentic Critical Reflection: Critique_It in Second Life
Wednesday, March 19, 9:30–10:15 a.m.
Michael Connors, Associate Professor, Digital Printmaking, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Other focus session offerings will include student perspective videos, digital documentaries, project parlors, and more. View the full program for more details.

CNI Podcast: An Interview with Julian Lombardi, Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium

gbayne — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:36:51 -0600

In this 15 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Julian Lombardi, Assistant Vice President at Duke University and Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium. Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.

Dr. Julian Lombardi is the Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support with Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS), and an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science. He is also one of the six principle architects of the Croquet Project, executive director of the Open Croquet Consortium, and a co-chair of MacLearningEnvironments.org. A former biology professor, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems and began designing and developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D environments in the mid-1990s. He eventually founded VIOS, Inc. in 1999 where he acted as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Software architect. From 2002-2005, he managed a learning technology research and development group in University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of Information Technology.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & IT at The University of British Columbia

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:21:27 -0600

In this 21 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has recently been involved in a project called Ancient Spaces at UBC, which uses gaming and virtual world technology to recreate locations from antiquity. He also participated in a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "Indigenous Cultures: From Observing to Experiencing, from Videography to 3D VR Immersion".

Ulrich Rauch organizes the implementation of educational technologies for instructors, students and staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. As the director of a technical and an instructional support unit, and as trained sociologist, Ulrich combines his experience as an instructor with his perspective on learning technologies to research and apply e-learning strategies in support of collaborative learning.

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.

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.

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.

Second Life: Its not always bright and shiny

AJKelton — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:58:17 -0500

It would be disingenuous to present only the good things about Second Life. The lagging, inventory issues, downtime, etc... One thing I've heard from a few people is that getting a response to an email is a challenge. Now, however, I have some proof of that. The most recent entry (top one) is from a few minutes ago.

***** ***** *****

Ok - trying again.

You say to write to this email address, but it doesn't seem as if it is being monitored. And if it is, why have I not even gotten the decency of a response.

On 3/19/07 5:14 PM, "AJ Kelton" wrote:

> Hello again,

> > I never received a response to my email and the problem continues. I was, > just now, sitting next to the computer that has SL running and saw the pop up > come up, I went to click on OK right away, but got the second "you are not > logged off" message.

> > Look forward to a response.

> > aj

> > On 3/14/07 11:44 AM, "AJ Kelton" wrote:

> >> Hello,

>> >> For the first few days, I'd get the blue "you will be..." pop up and then a >> few minutes would go by before being kicked off. Lately, however, I've been >> getting the "you will be..." at the same time as the "buh-bye!"

>> >> It also seems fairly random. Sometime I'll get booted if there is no >> activity >> for 15-20 minutes, other times I can hang our for hours without getting >> kicked >> off.

>> >> aj

>> >> On 3/1/07 12:32 PM, "Sam Linden via RT" wrote:

>> >>> Dear Second Life Resident,

>>> >>> Thank you for your recent enquiry! Unfortunately, we've gotten a bit>>> behind in responding to these in the last few days; so please reply to>>> this e-mail (or call one of the numbers below) if your problem or>>> request is still a concern.

>>> >>> **HOWEVER**

>>> >>> Below are some tips and commonly-requested answers that may help you>>> resolve your issue. Please review them to see if your question can be>>> answered here.

>>> >>> Sorry for the delay in getting you a personal answer,

>>> >>> Sincerely,

>>> >>> The Second Life Customer Support Team

>>>

Second Life: My iTunes in by RL and SL?

AJKelton — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:27:12 -0500

"It's been said that there are two types of computer users: Those who get this joke and those who don't."

Taken from the web page of Dot.Tunes, which you can find at http://dotpad.com. This application allows you to publish an iTunes playlist (or lists, or the entire library) to a web page for distribution to any device that can get music from a URL - such as an X Box, PDA, or, hopefully, Second Life.

If this works, it opens up a lot of possibilities for faculty members. The alternative that SL recommends is over $200 and is a full-featured application. It appears that Dot.Tunes does just enough so that it will work for what is needed. The possibilities are as limited as whatever the faculty members can put into iTunes.

There was no manual online (I was told its in the works) but they did have a forum to post questions into. I posted a question only to find that the first time you post, the posting needs to be moderated – a safety precaution I suppose. Within a few hours I got a note back from someone at dot.tunes indicting they would like for this to work and what was SL looking for in the feed. I provided the person with everything I new, or could find on SL, including URLs from services that already stream into SL. That was on Saturday and I’ve heard nothing since. TO be honest, I was surprised to hear anything over the weekend anyway, but I was hoping that they would at least post my request into the forum. Perhaps there are others out there who can help solve the puzzle.

In any event, I’ll wait and see what today brings. The full version of this application is $30, but if you buy it during the 15 day trial period, its only $15. I was able to get the LAN and external URLs to work, and to stream the music, now its just figuring out how to get SL to play nice with that.