Starting the ball rolling

4 Comments

Comment by Eloise on May 12, 2008 at 12:39pm

In the absence of other comments, let me try to provoke some more thoughts.

In the UK we have campus universities (Keele, Loughborough would be really obvious examples) and city universities (Liverpool, Manchester would be two obvious examples) as well as ones that sit somewhere in the middle (York, Oxford for example).

If we compare these to virtual worlds education sites, campus universities would be like the places that aim for complete isolation from their grid, or a separate grid or vw. The city universities would be more like educational settings on the mainland in SL, or fully integrated into their world, rubbing shoulders with the neighbours, whoever they may be. Those in-between might best be thought of as similar to settings with their own islands. There are definitely other benefits to your own island that might make this part dissimilar in some respects, but in terms of access the public can get there, but probably don't get there by accident.

Do you see benefits to being tucked away and "safe" from the outside world? Do you see more benefits from being able to mix with the "natives" so there's little or no town-and-gown divide?

Ignoring, for the moment, teaching children do we serve young adults ("traditional students" aged 18-21) better by letting them see the seamier side of life in a limited and supported fashion or by locking it away? Does locking it away give it "the lure of the forbidden" or keep them safe?

Having as a neighbour an adult mall, or a club or similar may not be desirable for reasons of lag and the like, but how hard is it for your RL students to find adult content around them IRL? That might be access to pornography, drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, violence, 18 or NC-17 rated movies or more. Why is having access to those things in real life close to your institution acceptable whilst having it close to your institutional build in Second Life or elsewhere unacceptable?

Comment by Troy McConaghy on May 13, 2008 at 12:07pm

One may want to make an isolated, stand-alone educational virtual world simply to get the highest-possible performance from the simulator server. Being connected to a giant virtual world can slow down search and retrieval (e.g. of assets or profile information). Another advantage is that you wouldn't be as worried about unplanned downtime - or if it did happen, you'd be in control.

Comment by Michael Lange on May 15, 2008 at 4:30pm

I think there could be good reasons for having closed educational settings, especially for education with teens, but you will also loose a lot of oportunitys. I don't believe in classroom settings in virtual worlds. There are great possibilities for informal learning in virtual worlds and that will only work in open spaces.

Comment by Milton Broome on May 17, 2008 at 8:34pm

I agree with Michael. I've visited all of the real life Universities you mentioned and I've visited most of the major campuses in Second Life. I’ve taught in both and attended lectures and seminars in both. I've never chanced upon a class in a real life university by accident and I've never flown into one by chance in Second Life either. Most are prescheduled and well-prepared for and griefers are simply ejected at the click of a button. I know teaching exists because there are grand buildings, both in the real world and in the virtual, so the infrastructure must be built for a purpose. That purpose, I'm assuming, is their function and it is the function that they serve their purpose - to educate. However, I think that it serves a better purpose to mentally challenge, motivate and critically inform and in doing so educate; less important is the place or forum this might take place in. This will happen outside in the pubs and in the lecture corridors and in the student dorms and everywhere else BUT the place where the information is received. At that early stage it's being processed, filtered for relevance and encoded. Cognitively, it doesn't matter where or how this goes in! Just that it goes in a meaningful way. It will happen when people are making a cup of tea after a good talk, whilst they internally reflect on their day, or whilst they fall asleep at night or any other time when the brain has time to shift the information around so it can make sense of it. The teaching itself is not the learning and it is the learning that is the goal. If we need to use a $50,000 campus in a virtual world to feel we have justified our position as educators we are doing our students a disservice, in my opinion. I think that when it comes to teaching and learning in the formal sense, the technical side of SL education can be a red herring. There are exceptions such as experiential learning. We should focus on the student outcomes not the process. As long as we motivate to think about educational issues (I'm not including skills-based learning here) students will form opinions, and in thinking they will accommodate the message. For me, that is learning and teaching. The 'campus' metaphor for mainland/island/grid learning is a good one but I'd suggest it doesn't matter - as long as we have our students’ attention and can get them thinking about what we have to say we could teach in the car park of our local supermarket or in the middle of a Second Life Tringo hall. If the students are genuinely there to learn then they will tune in to what we say, if not, then they either shouldn’t be there or it is our fault. To be overly thoughtful of the classroom is to lose the point of the teaching. The message is more important than the envelope.

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