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“[Second Life] experiences can provide opportunities for teachers to observe and assess students’ understanding of concepts based on their performance.” – Weusijana, Svihla, Gawel, and Bransford.
There seems to me three major obstacles to using Second Life successfully for education:
1. Administrators (and many faculty) think the virtual environment should ‘resemble’ the classroom environment.
2. Most people who are new to the medium believe Second Life is ‘just a game’ and do not take educational opportunities that occur in the environment seriously.
3. Second Life is technologically inaccessible for many users.
The first two obstacles are ‘merely’ misperceptions of the technology and how digital learning can or should take place. These misperceptions are why research happens and why instructional designers have jobs.
More specifically, administrators and faculty who think virtual environments should resemble classroom environments are lacking in imagination and possibly direction from others who know better. In addition they are confusing Second Life with a simulation of real life; which it is not, or at least should not be. Of course it’s name ‘Second Life’ does make it sound like a simulation and won’t help instructional designers sell it to administrators and faculty. Maybe the creators of Second Life thought it WOULD be a simulation and had no idea of its educational value – that’s ok, it still has been proven to HAVE educational value is used correctly. So instructional designers will just have to work harder to persuade.
The second misperception is that Second Life is just a game and is not to be taken seriously. This, I think, is a completely natural reaction. If all you’ve seen or heard about Second Life are pretty screenshots or flying around naked, what else are you to think?
This, again, is a misperception that instructional designers simply need to correct by SHOWING application of learning in Second Life. We need to dig into repositories of examples of educational use of Second Life for applications of learning showing students using the book and lecture knowledge they have gained to form connections and create new understandings. I am convinced that once they see this happening educators will mostly have gestalt moments of understanding about this technology.
Of course once we’ve educated our constituents on the perceptions they should have about Second Life we have to help them actually create useful virtual environments for their students and that is time-consuming; which leads me to the final obstacle, which, I believe is the most significant and has nothing to do with instructional designers.
Second Life is a massive program. Not only does it take awhile to download, install, and setup, but the process of creating an avatar you are happy with is time-consuming and requires some getting-used-to. Many students will not have a computer capable of running Second Life or the bandwidth to make running it enjoyable. For this reason, occasionally, having an expert run a Second Life demonstration IN A REAL CLASSROOM while students give directions is often the best approach. This is great where it is possible, but as a distance education instructional designer I have to say this dismays me because I don’t see how it would be possible to actually use Second Life in a distance-based course at this time, unless of course, you were willing to invest a great sum of money for development only to have a smattering of students occasionally use the virtual environment. I think we can all agree that is not going to happen.
What makes students complete their schooling? Why do students drop out during or after the first year of college? These are questions of persistence. There is not one reason why students stop their educations; generally speaking the reasons are as varied as the students themselves. However when you get down to particulars it appears – thanks to research done by Vincent Tinto over a decade ago – that a large section of potential drop outs can be motivated to finish their schooling regardless of other mitigating factors IF the academic/social environment is structured in a particular way.
I was interested in Tinto’s research because of a talk given by a lecturer at the Sloan-C Emerging Technology Applications conference in San Francisco (June 2009). The presenter was Thomas Downey of Embanet and his overall presentation focused on a multi-dimensional approach to assessment. However his discussion of Tinto and persistence is what resonated most with me.
What struck me most about Tinto’s research is how far ahead of the curve he seems given when he was writing. I found one of this papers online going back as far as 1998 – assuming the HTML document is correct. Moreover, the stuff he is talking about applies just as much to distance education as it does to the face-to-face classrooms he talks about.
You can’t just expect students to be engaged in their educations if it’s entirely academic – classroom-based – experience; or, conversely, if it’s an entirely social experience. But students do need to be involved – preferably both intellectually AND socially. How though? He doesn’t approach a solution to this dillemma in the way you would expect (make them do stuff); he says you need to get them EXCITED about doing stuff – the actual doing of the stuff will come on its own if you get them excited.
How do you get students excited?
Students need to feel involved in what they are doing otherwise they will find something more engaging. Students need to have contact with eachother and also with faculty. If they see those interactions as POSITIVE and that these interactions make them feel INTEGRATED into the institution the more they will be likely to persist. This integration can take place inside or outside of the classroom – preferably both (but not necessarily).
It’s all about shared, connected learning! Tinto says you can increase student persistence as much as 25% if students are made (or rather allowed) feel included. Students need to feel part of the group; go figure.
When looking into using e-books for something productive there are some criteria that must be met to make a satisfying reading experience. The hardware and software must include the following for optimal performance:
- You must be able to easily flip pages back and forth.
- It must be pleasant to read on the device.
- You should be able to enlarge text.
- You should be able to highlight material.
- Battery life must be reasonably long.
In addition, for use in an educational (distance learning) environment the device should:
- Have pages numbered similarly to the paper copy.
- There should be a sharing feature so readers can share notes.
- Ability to cut and paste to word processor such as MS Word.
Given the above criteria the Sony Reader PRS-505 fails. I cannot fathom reading an entire book on this medium nor would I require students to do so. Here’s my breakdown of how this device fails:
- While it’s true you can somewhat easily flip pages back and forth the screen refreshes itself at every flip in a very annoying manner by turning the usually white pages entirely black for a split second and then back to white again. This is so glaring I find myself growing distressed by page 3 or 4.
- Given what I just said it is not pleasant reading on this device; although assuming that error didn’t exist I still am not sure I like the lighting.
- You can enlarge text several times.
- You cannot as far as I can tell HIGHLIGHT material but you can bookmark items which I suppose is almost as good.
- Battery life is not great.
- I very much doubt the pages are numbered the same as text copies as the reader starts on the first page of actual content and numbers till the last page of actual content (ex. 1 of 699).
- No sharing features that I could see.
- No ability to cut and paste or use anything done on the device with anything else as far as I could tell.
Would like to someday take a look at a Kindle and compare. Although given my experience with the Sony Reader I have doubts I will be impressed.
Northwest Missouri State University is offering e-books for rental to their students, instead of selling them books. They seem to have had mixed results. They soon plan to be offering larger versions of the Kindle with textbooks in mind.
Google is supposedly going to soon be offering an online e-book store.
Ok, so I attended the 2009 Emerging Tech conference put on by Sloan-C in San Francisco. I want to start by saying it’s the best conference I’ve ever attended. Don’t read too much into that however as the only other conference I’ve attended was the 2007 eLearning DevCon in Salt Lake City and that was dreadful.
As for the Sloan-C conference, it was hosted in San Francisco which besides being unusually sunny and warm while I was there is just a gorgeous city. Lot’s of great places to eat and lot’s of things to see and do, assuming you have any time, which I had very little of. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency in downtown San Francisco because that’s where the conference was held. It’s a beautiful hotel but very pricey and with TERRIBLE (and pricey) wireless Internet service. I learned two things from this experience alone:
- Don’t stay at the conference hotel because of the price
- Don’t stay at the conference hotel because of slow Internet
The conference itself was quite good. There was a good mix of presenters and categories of topics including pedagogy, emerging technologies, administration, programming, and several others. I really enjoyed most of the presentations I attended and met some interesting people – instructional designers, administrators, and faculty.
I do have a couple of criticisms:
- The social networking site used for this conference was abysmal; hardly anyone used it. There was also a twitter feed that worked somewhat better and I’ll talk about that in a moment.
- The conference was – to my mind – a bit corporate; but maybe they are all like that.
Now for the good stuff. The keynote speaker – Richard Katz (of Educause) was very engaging and interesting while talking about cloud computing. The twitter feed was a very engaging and fun to use, although I did get distracted while using it from one of the presentations I was in ; but the conversations we had on twitter and the understanding I gained of the value of twittering while I was distracted, I think, was also valuable learning. I made a lot of twittering friends at this conference.
I learned about some amazing things some universities such as Tufts and Empire State are doing with their distance education programs including classes offered by mobile (Tufts) and complex applications for math and science (Empire State).
I also discovered some awesome technologies for screen capture that would be very useful for me in my work as an instructional designer but also potentially useful for faculty and students as well including Jing, Camtasia Relay, LiveScribe, and Animoto.
Finally I spent quite a bit of time learning about and thinking on subjects that have recently become of interest to me in general and in my work at the Center for Distance Education including: alternate reality gaming and mobile blogging.
Google has a fairly new feature called FriendConnect that ostensibly helps website owners easily provide social features on their website. By simply copying and pasting a snippet of code in your website HTML you open the door to the possibility that other FriendConnect members will find your site and, assuming they like your content, follow it, and possibly meet like-minded people there.
When implementing FriendConnect on your site you can choose what functionality you desire such as user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews. It reminds me of Yahoo Groups or a traditional forum except taken out of that limited (and boring) context.
One nice feature of FriendConnect is if you have a FriendConnect account you don’t have to create new login details or profiles for every site you join – assuming of course they are FriendConnect-enabled sites and don’t continue using proprietary login systems. Also, like most social sites you can invite your contacts from your various address books (Facebook, Plaxo, Google Talk) to join as well. Thus, a person could join a site and have conversations with friends or like-minded invidividuals they just met about the content of that site.
I have yet to see any really good examples of sites that have grown their traffic or been made more social by using FriendConnect. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, just I haven’t seen it yet. Also, I’m pretty new to FriendConnect so that’s another obvious possibility.
Am I wrong to think this technology is like reverse-RSS Feeds?
I’m only posting this because of a funny conversation about hippos we had in our design team meeting last week. This video and information is for mainly for Carol but the whole design team (and others?) is welcome to enjoy the funny:
At first glance, these wallowing river-horses appear to be bulky, lazy beasts and not the fearsome predators you would expect to have a habit of mauling humans. However, with gaping mouths that can open four feet wide and swinging sledgehammer heads, as well as the fact that they can outrun us on land, these highly aggressive animals have plenty of scope for destruction and are considered one of the most dangerous of African animals.
An estimated 100-150 fatalities a year.
Can be found in Lakes, rivers, wallows – in fact any water – in Africa.
Hippos will charge, trample and gore victims with alarming ferocity, often when they are blocked from deep water or someone is standing between the hippo and their calf. They have also been known to upturn boats and canoes without provocation and feast on the victim within, despite being herbivores. Nasty.
Source: http://www.painfulbite.com/the_hippopotamus.php
I was reading a recent article in Innovate about using Facebook in the classroom. I really like this idea because Facebook is popular with students and might make it easier for them to interact with each other in a familiar and meaningful way. Instead of, for example, interacting in a forum where their responses for the most part get lost in cyberspace never to be read again when the course is over.
But everyone recognizes the futility of forums in online education, right? right? mmm, well anyway, blog too are problematic: as useful as I’ve found them in my courses over the past three years they have serious limitations. The first of these is, many of my students have their own blogs while those who don’t are either completely new to it but interested in it or completely new to it and not interested in it. I get occasional complaints about privacy concerns, how some never asked to take a blogging or writing course, and so forth. Students who are experienced often have customized blogs with readership on blogging platforms my newbies are not using. Thus they tend not to comment on each others’ blogs as some still require you to sign up for an account with them in order to comment. My newbies are not interested in signing up for more than they have to.
Second, it’s a struggle just to get them to read each others’ blogs, let alone form a community of interest or practice. I find most of my students blogs go virtually unread by the other students despite my prodding. And, when the class is over they usually just let their blogs sit idle, eventually to die in the giant Google Blogger trash dump, thus ultimately rendering their posts and comments as meaningless as if they had used a forum. So really I wonder to myself why even bother teaching them to blog in the first place?
Finally they just aren’t that exciting as blogs yearn to be customized for writing style and look and feel and many students simply do not have the time or inclination to improve their blog writing or the appearance of the blog itself. I’m usually lucky if I can even get my students to format their blog posts in a readable way. Given that my courses are not ABOUT blogging it seems a bit of a waste of both mine and the students time.
After having read that article about using Facebook I’ve decided to give that a spin. I think I might try and create a Facebook group for my summer semester students for my new Windows users course. Will use as a pilot and see how it goes. Finally, I’ll let you know the results when I have them.
New legislation that is certain to be passed by Congress includes a paragraph about requiring distance education providers to spy on students to make sure it is actually them doing the work.
As readers of my column in this blog are probably already acutely aware I love picking up bits and pieces of knowledge from ‘The Economist’ magazine. Well this post is no different. In the June 7th – 13th, 2008 issue there is an article entitled ‘Rummaging through the Internet’ that discusses new techniques of navigating the web and gathering information online. The article was fascinating to me as an IT professional and instructional designer.
One new piece of software is particulary enticing. It’s a project called Hyperwords and is being developed by a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland. Hyperwords, once installed, turns every word on every web page into a link and furthermore gives you menus and submenus for what you want to do with that link. In essence it makes the curious more easily able to satisfy their curiousity about the things they see and read online (they dont have to open another tab and browse to google and google it anymore).
Another interesting technology called Previews allows you hover your mouse over a link and see a popup window that shows a preview of the web page the link links to. Another app from Cooliris, PicLens allows you to fetch images from flickr, videos from youtube, etc. and paste them up on a full-screen, 3-d wall that allows you to quickly navigate among the various elements and make decisions faster.
But those aren’t the only tools worth looking at. A new 3-D browser called E15 uses a special mouse to let users move around in 3-D space. Second Life is introducing a new feature that allows users to put web pages up on walls where users can view them together and talk about them together. Another browser 3B intends to make browsing the web itself social. Even Microsoft is getting in on the action with a new 3-D browser called Deepfish for mobile devices.
In a new article in the Economist magazine titled ‘from literacy to digiracy‘ the author attempts to explain why reading and writing ability has declined among young adults in recent years. The author helpfully goes through the various reasons given by experts why this is a deplorable condition, but ends up explaining why many believe it doesn’t really matter whether children are as good at reading and writing as their forefathers. As the author puts it, students react with disinterest to traditional modes of learning because “they are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.”
The author goes on to explain what this means for teachers in the 21st century: “Teachers must recognize that our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed to survive in a world where people are always connected to everyone and everything. In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.”
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