Category Archives: research

Philosophers Philosophise in Second Life

Posted on by

What happens when you take 6 online philosophy students with and average age of about 50* and attempt to run a discussion session on ‘identity’ in Second Life after only two short orientation sessions that not everyone could attend?

Well against my expectations they actually spend the majority of the time ‘really doing philosophy’ (to quote the tutor) and then 4 of them arrange to continue the discussions on a regular basis after the official ‘Open Habitat’ project pilot has finished. General enthusiasm all round and many constructive comments on how future sessions could be organised and formatted.

So the initial question I ask myself is not “why did this work?” but “why did I think it wasn’t going to work?” The answer can probably contains an number of things that I didn’t consider until it was clear that the sessions were going ok.

  1. The majority of the participants were experienced philosophers. They did not have to grapple with the environment AND the subject. Once they had learnt how to text chat, move and sit down (an activity they all seemed to enjoy) the rest was home territory.
  2. The tutor involved was enthusiastic, had experience of teaching online distant students via a VLE and had a clear understanding that Second Life was going to be different and required a new approach.
  3. I was on hand through the sessions to IM anyone in difficulties and more importantly I was in the same RL room as the tutor who was also new to Second Life.
  4. We were flexible with the teaching format and adjusted activities to fit the flow of the discussion and the speed of response from the students.
  5. The participants who signed up for the pilot self selected as those willing to investigate a possible new format. This was not a mandatory part of a course. In other words they were open to a new experience.

Philosophising as the sun sets

The debate begins

One of the most successful aspects of the sessions was breaking into small groups. We had placed simple breakout areas within view of each other but just out of the 20 meter range of local chat to avoid cross talk. The tutor could wander between groups much in the same way she would in RL. It was a format that the participants could relate to and it utilised the socio-spatial nature of the environment.

Small groups

The ‘red’ group with the ‘blue’ group in the background.

Another interesting technique was circulating a transcript of the chat after the session with annotations from the tutor. I could see this working very well for a rolling discussion over a number of sessions.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, some of the participants found the flow of the text chat too fast and too ‘bitty’. By the time they had formulated their thoughts things had moved on and a paragraph of text in the flow of a text chat can appear self indulgent. Of course this is a problem inherent in text chats as a format rather than an SL specific issue. The other major challenge seems to be facing in the right direction when sitting down or, at one point, sitting in a seat that has not already been taken.

Have we met?

Have we met?

We now have a lot of data to sift through and many more questions to answer but my initial reaction is that this could become a very effective part of a distance programme blended between VLE and SL. The SL part providing a social underpinning to students who never get the chance to meet face-to-face.

Sunset discussion

The setting lends a noble atmosphere to the discussion

As to ‘technological barriers’ and ‘SL pain barriers’ it’s true to say that one of the perspective participants simply could not get into SL at all (a victim of SL graphics card brutality). However, with a little hand-holding the participants who could get in didn’t have too much trouble using the environment to philosophise and did not seem to get tied down by the platform as a technology.

 

*This is not meant as an ageist comment as I think the Prensky-esque notions of the digital native generation are a misnomer (by that I mean “completely wrong”). My point is that these participants are not ‘high tech’ nor are they ‘tech geeks’. They will only use a technology if it aids them in moving their learning forwards.

Initial Impressions from the first Open Habitat Pilot

Posted on by

As the first Open Habitat pilot with Art & Design students draws to a close it’s worth reflecting on how the process has gone before we dive into the formal analysis of interview transcripts, surveys and building work in Second Life.

After 3 weeks of working infrequently in OpenSim and Second Life some of the Art and Design students seem to have got to that self motivating stage at which their creativity and their curiosity combine and the tutor facilitates when needed rather than leads by the nose. The atmosphere in the computer room and in Second Life (3 of the students were working from home) was relaxed and chatty. Not too much sign of the noob paranoia that could have bloomed from the first couple of teaching days.

A few informal impressions that I have come away with are:

1. Maybe ‘collaboration’ in these MUVE environments is more about discussion than construction. When people collaborate in world they are rarely to be found wrestling over the same polygons/prims. It’s more likely that one will be building while the other muses over what direction the build should take. In this way students can use the specific skill they are best at in a larger build (modelling, texturing, scripting etc) not unlike the RL equivalent of the trades.

2. Just how much of a motivator is knowing that there is a potential audience for your work in world? Does seeing those little green dots on the map inspire an individual to create or simply make them feel a little lonely? I can’t say that I have ever felt lonely using Adobe Photoshop (no map, no green dots) but as some of the students alluded to it’s an odd feeling knowing that there are people in world who have chosen not to talk to you.

3. If the students that have been inspired can produce work like the example below in three weeks, what could they achieve in three years? It’s the length of a degree after all and it’s worth remembering that even the most experienced Second Lifers (the penal inference here may be apposite) have only been in world for about this length of time.

PART III by Mark O’Brien

Part III by Mark O’Brien. Work produced as part of the Open Habitat pilot with Leeds Metropolitan Art and Design students.

Where are planners now?

Posted on by

Much of the last little while has been spent writing our final documentation for this phase of the Phoebe project. Although report writing is not my favorite task it has been a really valuable experience to take the time to reflect on what we have a achieved with Phoebe specifically and how our understanding of design for learning has progressed over the last few years. It feels like a very long time ago that IMS LD came out and seemed to capture something about e-learning focussed on activities rather than content, making it the first standard to address the real issues….and depending on your interpretation acted as the catalyst for a lot of the work that has come since.

Over the next few weeks, I will try and blog about some of the conclusions we have reached as a result of Phoebe, but as a very good place to start I am going to point to what other people are saying about this area.

I think the first people to mention are the team working on Compendium LD at the OU. Grainne Conole has several presentations on this subject at Slideshare, although perhaps the best place to find out what she is saying is though her blog, and more specifically her posts on learning desgin. Martin Weller, has also blogged a fair bit on this, with lots worth checking out.

There is also a lot of useful information available on the site CETIS created after our planner review day. You can access all the presentations and I would really recommend reading Helen Beethams Breifing paper, an excellent summary of a complicated space.

Lastly a lot of us will be presenting at the European LAMS conference in late June. It is worth noting while a lot of the papers are focusing on LAMS (as you might expect) many explore learning design more widely. Finally there is a whole day on pedagogical planners which if it is anything as good as last year will be a great chance to find out more about state of the art thinking in this space.

Making the transition from the practical to the social.

Posted on by

There were two significant transition points for the Art & Design students involved in the first 2 days of Open Habitat’s first pilot. Take a look at Ian’s post for a description of what happened from a teaching practitioner’s point of view.

Here is my perspective on events with my researcher hat on:

This sequence of events slowly expanded the amount of technical and social options available to the students. They started in a safe, private, stand alone OpenSim environment in which they could learn building skills without getting tangled up with issues of identity and communication. The first transition point came when we paired the students onto OpenSim islands (i.e. each student was on an island with one other student). There was a distinct shift in atmosphere as they experienced the effect of being co-present in world and the real life room suddenly had a buzz in it as the students ‘met’ each other in the virtual world. This was amplified when a game of hide and seek was suggested and avatars started to dash around the screens in XY and Z dimensions (an excellent ‘quest’). The students flicked between real world and in world chat as the games progressed. One pair discovered that they could throw objects around in world and appeared to be attempting to trap each other inside large spheres in what looked like a surrealist version of a fight between two super heroes. This was transition point one, when the activity shifted from simply learning a piece of software to co-habiting the same virtual space with all the attendant social effects.

The second, less satisfying transition came when the students moved into Second Life. The ‘gateway’ of orientation island jarred the movement through the planned activities. The pilots suddenly became more about Linden Labs Second Life platform and a lot less about Art & Design. This is not to say that the students floundered, in Second Life terms their OpenSim experience had pushed them past the ‘Second Life pain barrier’. In fact one of the students started to give a new Second Lifer advice after being in world for about 2 minutes! The problem was that the Art & Design focus had lost its flow. Later on in day 2 of the pilot, once all of the students had been grouped and found their way to LeedsMet island, the Art & Design angle re-emerged. The students took-up plots of land and started to build. 

So the pilot had created a smooth expansion of possibilities by initially separating the creative aspects of the MUVE from the social aspects. We do of course hope that these two areas will become intertwined as the pilot progresses but like most siblings it would seem that it can be healthy to separate them at times. The question that is hanging in the air after the first 2 days of the pilot is: once OpenSim has reached version 1.0 (currently 0.6) why use Second Life? Or in more constructive terms: maybe the educational institution should use OpenSim to control the flow of options to the students and provide a jumping off point which they can use to go into Second Life if they choose to?

Clearly there are advantages to being part of the wider community of Second Life but we need to develop methods of making the transition to the big complex world of a public MUVE smoother. At the top of the list of possible solutions is finding ways of getting into Second Life without going via orientation island.

Learning from the Games Designers

Posted on by

The designers of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games face a significant educational challenge. They need to efficiently and subtly teach new players how to use their game. This involves teaching players about the environment and the interface whist keeping them motivated and drawing them into the challenges of the game itself. This is situated learning in which the games designer is the ‘master’ and the player is the ‘apprentice’.

This educational challenge is similar to the one faced by those intending to teach in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) such as Second Life. There are a significant amount of basic skills that need to be mastered before students can successfully engage in meaningful collaborative activity. The traditional ‘orientation’ process in Second Life is didactic and generic, teaching skills in an abstract technical manner. This has come about because unlike an MMO, Second Life has no shared goal, its possible uses are many and varied. However, a teacher who wishes to use Second Life should have a defined set of goals or learning outcomes they wish to achieve. They should be able to define task orientated activities which are relevant to the students motivations, for example, Art and Design students can be asked to compete to build the tallest monolith as a focus for learning building skills in Second Life rather than being given general instructions on how to create, scale and texture objects. In teaching terms this seems like an obvious approach but often when faced with a complex new platform teaching practitioners will often fall back on a basic instructivst style which may not align well with the approach generally taken at HE level for that discipline.

This is where we can learn from the MMO designers who are careful not to fall into this trap as it is likely to make a players initial engagement in a game seem like a chore. For subscription based MMOS such as World of Warcraft this would mean a high drop out rate and a massive loss of revenue, something that the HE sector can emphathise with.

The JISC funded Habitat project intends to learn from the game designers by capturing the processes in World of Warcraft in its initial stages and mapping the styles and types of task to the learning outcomes they fulfil. The data will be captured using pre and post activity questionnaires and video screen capture synchronised with video of the player at the computer. This data will then be used in the process of designing appropriate orientation sessions for pilots in Second Life with students from two disciplines: Art and Design & Philosophy. The Habitat project recognises that some of the most sophisticated collaborative learning spaces online at the moment are MMOs and that the design of these games can be a relevant model for the pedagogical structures that we put in place for the educational use of MUVEs such as Second Life.

Keep watching http://www.openhabitat.org to see how we get on.

The Beauty of Ad hoc Project Meetings

Posted on by

On Tuesday evening the Habitat project had one of its most dynamic project meetings. It was ad hoc and spontaneous but what was said was very useful. It reminded me of those happy students days when I’d find myself in the pub with all my friends talking about ‘interesting things’ almost by accident. These days I need to plan 3 weeks ahead to get in to the pub with people I actually like who all have families and jobs (what can you do?).

Anyway, 5 of us happened to be in Second Life (yes, I left this fact late in the post deliberately) at the same time and a discussion took off. In fact it took off so well that I’m still having trouble (with my project managers’ hat on) working out what it all meant. In this way it is very like those student pub sessions 🙂

The Habitat team is based in  Leeds, Canada, London, Oxford, Essex and Brussels so we have more chance to get together online than face-to-face. The Second Life platform was great for us because we shared some visual designs during our discussion which were projected onto blocks that we could all stand around and muse over. Plus, we did all feel ‘together’ which is important for any team. When I logged out I personally felt like I had spent time with a bunch of people rather than a stream of text.

So, what of those in the team who didn’t happen to be in Second Life? Well I suppose I can mail round the transcript of our discussion. Also, how do I get the best value from this’ happening’ for the Habitat team and for JISC? Plus, let’s not forget the question: ‘What is the relevance for our users/students?”.

The Habitat Project Launches

Posted on by

No, not an opportunity to test stylish yet knowingly kitsch home furnishings but a research project piloting the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments (think Second Life). TALL heads up a large project team on the project which runs until March 2009. Read the official blurb below or visit www.openhabitat.org for more info.

———

The JISC funded Habitat project is a collaboration between TALL at the University of Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan University, King’s College London, Essex University and Dave Cormier of Prince Edward Island University. It will take an innovative approach to encouraging creative online collaboration in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) – the online 3D spaces in which each user is represented by an ‘avatar’ or 3D character.

The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.
During discussions with members of the Emerge community, teaching staff and students, it became clear the MUVEs offer a number of interesting opportunities for teaching and learning. These include the ability to collaboratively design and build objects/structures and the sense of presence or ‘being there’ that comes across when interacting in an MUVE.

The Habitat project will build on these principles by running a number of pilots which are integrated into the teaching of art & design and philosophy.

A competition to build a structure in the Second Life MUVE which reflects their current practice will be set as part of the first year art & design undergraduate degree based at Leeds Metropolitan University. Parallel to this the project will facilitate discussions in an MUVE with students who have attended one of the University of Oxford’s online short courses in philosophy. The art & design students will have the opportunity to meet face-to-face during the pilot in contrast to the philosophy students who are distributed around the world.

The pilots are designed to explore the effects of working in an MUVE on collaborative group work and on the effects of being represented as an avatar over and above using text, sound or video to communicate. In addition to this the pilots are designed to encourage communication between the two disciplines to assess the potential of MUVEs to bring together diverse student groups.

Habitat will predominantly be using the Second Life MUVE because of its ubiquity and relative stability. The project will also be experimenting with OpenSim, an open source MUVE and a MUVE provided by IBM. These are representative of the widening range of 3D collaborative environments which are emerging across the web and which afford intriguing opportunities for teaching and learning.

Where to look for reusable content?

Posted on by

As we kick off the Mosaic project (trying to develop a short course in early English literature using at a majority of preexisting content) I am trying to develop a list of places to start looking for this content that we want to re-use. I know that Sandie (our subject matter expert) has already identified lots of excellent resources using her knowledge of the discipline, but with the growth of OERs (Open Educational Resources) and portals and repositories to access them, I should hopefully not just be able to identify some likely looking content, but also content that will be easy for us to reuse – in terms of permission and copyright.

I have been clipping this area for about 3 years so had a list of about 65 things tagged free content and about 75 tagged OERs. A lot of these were the same thing tagged in different contexts or commentaries on the phenomenon more generally, rather than links to specific content, this got rid of a lot of links. A lot were very specifically K12 or focussed on a specific discipline that was not our course (at the moment it seems to me there is a lot more on the sciences and social sciences than on the humanities). There seemed to be a lot of initiatives that had a very impressive front page but very little behind it, or ones that did have a lot of content but clearly even I (as a non subject specialist) could tell there would be nothing appropriate for our course.

So now I have a list of things I want Sandie to check out and …..it consists of 12 things…..

To be fair some of these are VERY big portals to a lot of other content, but I am kind of disappointed. Also having had a quick search around I am already almost totally certain that it is sites that are not as explicitly focussed on reusable learning content that are going to be the most useful. Sandie will be doing more digging on this in the next few weeks, and will let us know what she finds. In the meantime here are the links i think it is worth Sandie following up:

 

  1. Intute –http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
  2. The OU –http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
  3. Jorum –http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
  4. Merlot –http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
  5. Rice Connexions –http://cnx.org/
  6. MIT OCW –http://ocw.mit.edu
  7. Open courseware consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org
  8. OER Commons – http://www.oercommons.org/
  9. Jisc Collections –http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/
  10. Directory of Open Access Journals –http://www.doaj.org/
  11. UNESCO List of Open Educational Resources –http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_useful_resources
  12. Google OCW search – http://opencontent.org/googleocw/

So if you know somewhere else we should be looking let us know.

 

Finding the real need for planning tools

Posted on by

The concentration needed to develop our pedagogic planner tool Phoebe has necessarily brought our gaze inward during parts of the project. Over the last few weeks we have returned to looking outward, and have been talking to various people from other projects in the same space, particularly Jeff Earp from the ReMath project, Andrew Brasher from Compendium and Helen Walmsley from the Best practice models of e-learning project . It has been interesting to catch up and see where we all are, and to get a sense of how the themes that seem to be emerging from Phoebe resonate (or not) with other projects in this area. Added to this is an on going dialogue with our “sister” D4L funded Pedagogic Planner the LPP.

A key focus of all the current projects has been to develop tools that are fundamentally informed by the needs of our future users, rather than implementing a vision that is divorced from actual practice. Our current evaluations have been focusing on the practitioner level, but as our two projects come to the end of this phase of funding JISC are using this as a chance to address these questions more strategically.

As part of this Phoebe and the LPP will be at the centre of a review meeting that the JISC are organising in Birmingham on the 4th March. This will provide an opportunity to share and discuss our work with key stakeholders, and to explore how they might use the planner tools in their communities.

Google ♥’s the social semantic web

Posted on by

The semantic web is making steady progress in the social networking sphere via microformats like XFN and FOAF, which provide standard ways to describe me, friend, and other relationships between websites – and by proxy, their owners.

Lots of websites and tools already support these (e.g. WordPress, ClaimId, last.fm), but there’s a lot of duplication of effort required from users with, for example, having to find and add your friends in multiple social sites – adding the same relationships multiple times.

Google’s Social Graph API looks set to help solve to this by providing an easy way to identify the relationships found in their index of webpages. Social sites can ask about any URLs a user gives (e.g. their blog), and the API it will tell them about any other URLs that relate to it via the microformats, and use those to link up all the user’s me pages, and set match up other users on the site who are identified as friends elsewhere.

This API, along with other efforts such as OpenSocial, really help the web’s network effect, and make it a lot more interesting and useful.

I don’t think we have any projects in TALL that will use these tools yet, so I think some of my next tasks for my band’s website with be to see if I can automatically a) set up some relationships, and b) push out gig listings from our database into social sites like MySpace…