Building as pedagogy

At the session yesterday we spoke a little about the need for students (and others) to have a positive first experience of SL. This came up more than once in the discussion and I agree it is very important.

Of course... it's an easy statement to make but it does rather assume that we know what positive means in this context. I’m not convinced that we yet understand well enough what people like about SL to be able to guarantee a positive first experience.

Thinking back, my own first experience was pretty negative actually. I found Orientation Island confusing and pointless. The very first words anyone said to me in SL were "You are ugly". Don't worry, I was big enough to take it on the chin :-). Anyway, they were right, I was ugly… and I had a big chin! I’d made a bad choice of first avatar and then hit the randomise button and not known what to do to recover! :-) Finally I left Orientation Island and went to some random location where I walked around in your typical kind of SL wilderness – virtual tumbleweed being blown across the scene would have completed the experience. To make matters worse, the only person I met ran away! :-)

So what turned the experience round for me? Well, it was four things really…

Firstly, I met up with someone I knew (Paul Miller as it happens) on the then very new Cybrary City sim. We chatted for a bit, and bumped into one or two friendly librarians that I didn't know. But overall it was a very welcoming experience.

Secondly, I realised that I could make my own tee-shirts very easily. And I found that giving away the results gave a nice warm glow.

Thirdly, I discovered scripted objects, building and the joy of generally wasting time in sandboxes (even when they are empty) and then blogging about it.

Finally, I realised that I liked adopting a different character - my in-world avatar. I liked the fact that I could speak as Art Fossett rather than Andy Powell. I know this sounds weird - but for me, it is part of what makes SL work.

In the meeting yesterday I tried to push the idea of 'building as pedagogy' in Second Life. Again, I'm on very thin ice here, since I consider myself to be a lay person in these matters, but bear with me. By building I really mean doing – so 'building an object', 'scripting', 'designing and making a costume', 'creating textures', 'running an event', 'putting on a play', 'role playing', 'making a video', and umpteen other things all come under the category of building as far as I'm concerned.

For me, a positive first experience is about helping people to recognise that building in SL is a key part of its fun. I think the same applies to learning in SL – it has to be centered around 'doing', not 'receiving'. As Babbage Linden said yesterday – SL is the Chemistry Set not the chemistry lecture.

Being where the students are

One of the mini-themes that came up in the symposium follow-up session yesterday was about if and why students are already in SL. I made the point that one of the arguments quite often put forward around the importance of universities (and, for example, libraries) getting into SL is because that is where the students are.

I’m not sure I buy that argument. Are students really in SL already? My minimal experience says, no, they are not – at least not in any significant numbers. Not yet.

That leaves us, as educators (I include myself in that group very loosely!), in an odd position it seems to me. Not only have we got to be convinced that 3-D virtual worlds will allow us to impart learning better than we do now, but we also have to convince our learners that there is sufficient benefit to joining SL as well. A pretty tall order right now - or so it seems to me?

Babbage Linden made the point that only about 1 in 10 of people get SL anyway. I don’t have any reason to doubt this figure. So in a tutor group of 30, only 3 will naturally understand what SL is about - the rest will not get it, some will give up, some will persevere without really liking what they are being asked to do, some will be totally bemused... you get the picture.

Why do so few get it? I can’t answer that question... I do get it, or at least I think I do, but I can’t easily verbalise why (though I have tried) - so I’m at a loss as to why others don’t.
What are the comparable figures for other Learning 2.0 applications? How many people get blogs, or Twitter, or whatever?

I guess that is why applications like Facebook do so well currently - because the percentage of people who get what the application is all about is significantly higher.

What does this mean for educators in SL? Well firstly, it gives us a pretty steep hill to climb. No worries, I enjoy climbing - so I don’t think it is a reason to lose interest entirely, though it might make us modify our expectations a little?

I think it probably also means that we need to give up thinking about SL as an inclusive activity for all students. Instead, we should see it as one option among many - a valid way of completing an assignment, but not the only way. I think that means that we need to think quite hard about what kinds of assignments we give to people. For example, a given bit of group work might be able to be completed by using a face to face discussion, or by collaborating thru blog writing, or by an in-world activity, or by some combination of the above - with the resulting coursework being submitted as a jointly authored traditional essay, a set of blog entries, machinima, … whatever. There are, of course, significant implications for assessment - and our understanding of the expected learning outcomes of any bit of work is, as always, absolutely paramount.

Professionally, I’m out of my depth at this point. I speak only as a lay person - and I should therefore probably shut up. But the overall point is that we need to reconceptualise "being where our students are" as "engaging with out students in ways that are meaningful and useful to them" and we need to remember that SL currently only fits the bill for a small proportion – for others it will be blogs or in Facebook or...

And for some it may continue to be in the lecture theatre! :-)

Suffern Middle School in Second Life

An interesting blog from Peggy Sheehy at Suffern Middle School in New York, primarily because it shows real use of Second Life for learning by children.

I'm no expert, so I can't comment on the pedagogic aspects of what appears to be happening there, but it is very nice just to see practical examples of learners in world and engaging with each other.

Good stuff...

Holodeck teaching/meeting space on Eduserv Island

I liked the concept of a Second Life 'holodeck' so much (see my previous post on An English Village) that I decided to experiment with building my own version on Eduserv Island.

I used the idea of a flexible meeting/teaching space in an unused corner of Eduserv Island as the basis for my experimentation.

First I built up three differently configured seating arrangements for the available space, one with 10 seats arranged in a circle, another with 20 seats in a square and a final one consisting of 40 seats laid out theatre style with a screen at the front.

For each arrangement, I linked all the prims together to form a single seating object which I then copied to my inventory.

So far so good...

Next, I created a touchable object, a white post with a ball on top, that is used to hold each of the seating objects and that rezzes those objects on demand (i.e. when it is touched). The post contains a simple script, as follows:

integer controlchannel = 999;
integer current;
integer num;

default
{
 state_entry() {
  num = llGetInventoryNumber(INVENTORY_OBJECT);
  current = 0;
  llSetText("Touch to\nrearrange\nseating",
            <1, 1, 1>, 1.0);
 }

 touch_start(integer total_number) {
  //llSay(0, "Touched.");
  llSay(controlchannel, "kill linked objects");
  vector eul = <0, 0, 180>;
  eul *= DEG_TO_RAD; //convert to radians
  rotation quat = llEuler2Rot(eul);
  llRezObject(llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_OBJECT,
              current), llGetPos() + <5.25, -5, 0>,
              ZERO_VECTOR, quat, 0);
  current++;
  if (current >= num) { current = 0;}
 }
}

What this script does is to query the post's inventory to find out how many seating arrangement objects there are (llGetInventoryNumber()). Each time it is touched (touch_start()) the post sends a simple chat-based message to the currently rezzed seating object, telling it to delete itself (llSay()), then rezzes the next seating object in the list (llRezObject()).

Each rezzed seating object also contains a simple script, as follows:

integer controlchannel = 999;

default
{
 state_entry() {
  llListen(controlchannel, "",
           NULL_KEY, "");
 }

 listen(integer channel, string name,
       key id, string message) {
  if (llToLower(message) ==
      "kill linked objects") {
      llDie();
  }
 }

 on_rez(integer param) {
    llSetPos(<35.384, 22.658, 25.126>);
 }
}

This script listens for incoming messages from the white post (llListen()), kills itself on demand (llDie()) and positions the seating object in the correct location when it is first rezzed (llSetPos());

It's a pretty simple approach, but seems to work well, at least within the fairly trivial set of functional requirements I set myself.