JJ Drinkwater: March 2010 Archives
I gave a keynote this week for a Mixed Reality event at UM Dearborn, which was sponsored by the Department of Language, Culture and Communication, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of that campus. The title of the event was "Campus Past and Campus Future: Legacy and Imagination" and my talk, following suit, was ....
For such as may be interested, below are some roughed out notes for the talk:
There has been a lot of hype about SL for education, and the predictable disappointment when SL turns out not to be as good at certain things as the tools that were designed for them.
SL is very poor “courseware”, when what you want to do is exactly what courseware does. If what you want to do is hand out and collect written assignments, push content out to students, and track group participation, CTools (Blackboard, Moodle) is a much better tool.
So SL isn’t great for Distance Education as it’s normally understood, you won’t have much success if you take your usual Distance Learning course and put it untranslated into SL.
So what does SL do well? Well one way to find out, is to look at what’s grown up in SL outside the hype. I want to name 3 things…
1) Immersion and Sense of place: SL is good at promoting a sense of being somewhere - of making locales feel real. That was one of the first things I noticed about SL - the sense of being somewhere is palpable. SL is good at *places*, and contains the tools to make places vivid and memorable and meaningful.
2) Icons: SL turns out to be very good at embodying iconography, of using symbols and props to telegraph meaning. Think of all the things in SL that convey mood, or shades of attitude.
3) Presentation of a constructed self: SL has a rich set of tools and materials for inventing yourself, tools built in by the designers of the software, and materials created by residents. Everyone engages in a kind of bricolage, in SL, in putting together their appearance. In any circumstances, you “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”, but in SL, which privileges the visual, this becomes a sovereign way of announcing who you are. And, because the tools are to hand, you're not confined to one "presence" - you can experiment with being various people, various sorts of people. This us useful, for instance, for getting students to think about identity.
Putting all that together, one thing SL does very well is providing a place which gives us a context to interact as our constructed selves.
So, how to turn that to the end of learning? SL promotes a sense of contact with others in environment. This can add up to engagement, to a sense that a real conversation is being had - very valuable for students who are scattered in RL.
Here’s my equation: SL provides a context for learning, which is to say environments that make you engage, which is to say environments that make you feel like you know where you are.....
Take a look at this Seaside scene, with its deck chairs, bathing machines, and brick facades in the background. This is an example of an environment that makes you feel like you know where you are. It's clear what goes with this....colored rock and promenades along the harbor, sandpails and shovels. So, imagine, for instance, giving students an assignment to read a Victorian novel that takes place at the seaside, and then use the descriptions in it to build the environment - this would be a singular way of getting them to pay attention to the setting of the work.
I want to draw a lesson from Anne of Green Gables. Anne is a dreamy child, and is always talking about what provides scope for the imagination. There is some doubt in her environment, the small Prince Edward Island community of Avonlea, as to whether "that imagination of hers" will allow her to be a proper scholar in the local school. In fact, her imagination, or some quality of mind associated with it -- quickness of perception, sensitivity to impressions, a general mental liveliness - makes her not only a very good pupil but, in time, a good teacher.
I bring this up because SL, as an environment, provides a vast deal of scope for the imagination, and I want to consider with you what that means for SL as an educational venue.
We want students to use their judgment and to be diligent, of course, but we also want then to use their imaginations, to become engaged, to take initiative in learning.
What should a virtual campus offer, in order to promote learning?
How can a campus environment engage the creative faculties?
Let me repeat my equation: context for learning = environments that make you engage = environments that make you feel like you know where you are and what kinds of things you can do there
All this makes much more sense when you think of SL as a world, as its expert users do, rather than as, say, a platform for delivering services. I think the fact that SL users talk about being “in-world” is very important to pay attention to. Treating SL as a world, experiencing it as a world, lets SL do what it’s good at.
So, a virtual campus should have clear reference points - it should use readily understood symbols and icons to tell the student that this *is* a campus, that this is a place to work and to engage with others as part of a learning community.
When I say "readily understood symbols and icons" you should understand that everything one encounters in SL is to some extent a symbol or an icon.
So it should be recognizable as a campus, it should set the stage, and orient the user. This is particularly useful for students new to virtual worlds, it gives them some grounding in what can be a dizzyingly strange environment.
But it shouldn't stop there. Recreating RL certainly doesn't offer enough scope for the imagination. One of the most vibrant artistic communities in SL takes as its rallying cry "Not Possible in Real Life." They make beautiful, interesting, and sometimes literally fabulous things. Their work is so successful, in part, because they conceive their work in SL's own terms, as though they do their imagining in SL...they don't do it in RL and then decide to build it in SL.
And this is exactly the kind of thing students should also be exposed to - things that diverge from the metaphor of the physical world, that escape from the conventions of gravity, buildings with doors and roofs, objects you can't walk through.
The virtual campus needs to offer tools and encouragement - encouragement in the form of space for "What if I...?"
SL doesn't reward passivity. My experience is that the people who are the happiest here are the "makers" - whether they make simulations or buildings, or conduct book discussions, or institute church services. It’s a place where work meets play.
SL is good at encouraging and accommodating informal learning - learning by doing, and acquiring new skills as you need them for a project
In my opinion, the best thing you can do for students here is to use SL as a *world* to get students enthused about SL as a tool for making art, making literature, making environments, making things that one way or another speak to those who encounter them. Then give them the tools and training and the space to build some of those things.
That's my take on how to have a successful virtual campus.
Gentlebeings, your servant
JJD
For such as may be interested, below are some roughed out notes for the talk:
There has been a lot of hype about SL for education, and the predictable disappointment when SL turns out not to be as good at certain things as the tools that were designed for them.
SL is very poor “courseware”, when what you want to do is exactly what courseware does. If what you want to do is hand out and collect written assignments, push content out to students, and track group participation, CTools (Blackboard, Moodle) is a much better tool.
So SL isn’t great for Distance Education as it’s normally understood, you won’t have much success if you take your usual Distance Learning course and put it untranslated into SL.
So what does SL do well? Well one way to find out, is to look at what’s grown up in SL outside the hype. I want to name 3 things…
1) Immersion and Sense of place: SL is good at promoting a sense of being somewhere - of making locales feel real. That was one of the first things I noticed about SL - the sense of being somewhere is palpable. SL is good at *places*, and contains the tools to make places vivid and memorable and meaningful.
2) Icons: SL turns out to be very good at embodying iconography, of using symbols and props to telegraph meaning. Think of all the things in SL that convey mood, or shades of attitude.
3) Presentation of a constructed self: SL has a rich set of tools and materials for inventing yourself, tools built in by the designers of the software, and materials created by residents. Everyone engages in a kind of bricolage, in SL, in putting together their appearance. In any circumstances, you “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”, but in SL, which privileges the visual, this becomes a sovereign way of announcing who you are. And, because the tools are to hand, you're not confined to one "presence" - you can experiment with being various people, various sorts of people. This us useful, for instance, for getting students to think about identity.
Putting all that together, one thing SL does very well is providing a place which gives us a context to interact as our constructed selves.
So, how to turn that to the end of learning? SL promotes a sense of contact with others in environment. This can add up to engagement, to a sense that a real conversation is being had - very valuable for students who are scattered in RL.
Here’s my equation: SL provides a context for learning, which is to say environments that make you engage, which is to say environments that make you feel like you know where you are.....
Take a look at this Seaside scene, with its deck chairs, bathing machines, and brick facades in the background. This is an example of an environment that makes you feel like you know where you are. It's clear what goes with this....colored rock and promenades along the harbor, sandpails and shovels. So, imagine, for instance, giving students an assignment to read a Victorian novel that takes place at the seaside, and then use the descriptions in it to build the environment - this would be a singular way of getting them to pay attention to the setting of the work.
I want to draw a lesson from Anne of Green Gables. Anne is a dreamy child, and is always talking about what provides scope for the imagination. There is some doubt in her environment, the small Prince Edward Island community of Avonlea, as to whether "that imagination of hers" will allow her to be a proper scholar in the local school. In fact, her imagination, or some quality of mind associated with it -- quickness of perception, sensitivity to impressions, a general mental liveliness - makes her not only a very good pupil but, in time, a good teacher.
I bring this up because SL, as an environment, provides a vast deal of scope for the imagination, and I want to consider with you what that means for SL as an educational venue.
We want students to use their judgment and to be diligent, of course, but we also want then to use their imaginations, to become engaged, to take initiative in learning.
What should a virtual campus offer, in order to promote learning?
How can a campus environment engage the creative faculties?
Let me repeat my equation: context for learning = environments that make you engage = environments that make you feel like you know where you are and what kinds of things you can do there
All this makes much more sense when you think of SL as a world, as its expert users do, rather than as, say, a platform for delivering services. I think the fact that SL users talk about being “in-world” is very important to pay attention to. Treating SL as a world, experiencing it as a world, lets SL do what it’s good at.
So, a virtual campus should have clear reference points - it should use readily understood symbols and icons to tell the student that this *is* a campus, that this is a place to work and to engage with others as part of a learning community.
When I say "readily understood symbols and icons" you should understand that everything one encounters in SL is to some extent a symbol or an icon.
So it should be recognizable as a campus, it should set the stage, and orient the user. This is particularly useful for students new to virtual worlds, it gives them some grounding in what can be a dizzyingly strange environment.
But it shouldn't stop there. Recreating RL certainly doesn't offer enough scope for the imagination. One of the most vibrant artistic communities in SL takes as its rallying cry "Not Possible in Real Life." They make beautiful, interesting, and sometimes literally fabulous things. Their work is so successful, in part, because they conceive their work in SL's own terms, as though they do their imagining in SL...they don't do it in RL and then decide to build it in SL.
And this is exactly the kind of thing students should also be exposed to - things that diverge from the metaphor of the physical world, that escape from the conventions of gravity, buildings with doors and roofs, objects you can't walk through.
The virtual campus needs to offer tools and encouragement - encouragement in the form of space for "What if I...?"
SL doesn't reward passivity. My experience is that the people who are the happiest here are the "makers" - whether they make simulations or buildings, or conduct book discussions, or institute church services. It’s a place where work meets play.
SL is good at encouraging and accommodating informal learning - learning by doing, and acquiring new skills as you need them for a project
In my opinion, the best thing you can do for students here is to use SL as a *world* to get students enthused about SL as a tool for making art, making literature, making environments, making things that one way or another speak to those who encounter them. Then give them the tools and training and the space to build some of those things.
That's my take on how to have a successful virtual campus.
Gentlebeings, your servant
JJD
Mr. Drinkwater