Donn King's Corner

We know that Second Life isn’t a game. Got that. Wish I could get more people to understand the difference. Nevertheless, the fact that SL uses game software for non-game purposes, and that we can take advantage of the game skills students bring, makes this article of interest for SL folks.

Beyond Blowing Up Enemies: The Future of Games for Learning follows the two-day Games for Change festival at New York University. Among the observations:

No doubt assessment will be key to this mission. And games could transform assessment. Scratch that: games could be assessment. One powerful form of it, at least. Instead of slaying pixel-painted dragons, for instance, I discovered that you could navigate a mid-air obstacle course using the laws of physics in a quest of save the world (that’s a game in the works at Vanderbilt University) or try out different ways to save the real-life lake that is dying in your real-life town (a game being developed in Madison, Wisconsin, starring local Lake Mendota).

We have many conversations going on in the Pellissippi State community concerning what constitutes acceptable or effective or “real” college education. I came across an interesting article that adds fuel to the discussions, potentially boosting velocity in several directions. When you first start to read “How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education,” you might assume it is a whole-hearted endorsement of “delivering” education as a commodity via the Web. This assumption will likely be exacerbated by the realization that it is published via Fast Company’s Web site, i.e., a business publication.

Read further. You’ll find that the article observes the need for caution in that assumption through statements such as Brigham Young University’s David Wiley. Keep in mind that Wiley is one of the “architects of education 2.0.” He has written, “If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020.” Although the article predicts that unless higher education folks adapt, they will join newspaper chains and record stores in near-extinction, Wiley also makes it clear he speaks not of simple packaging and commoditizing.

“If you didn’t need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university,” Wiley says. “We all realize that content is just the first step.” In other words, education is more than the mere mastery of information. To truly educate yourself, you will always need a teacher. But the nature of those interactions may come in many forms. Let’s face it, the classroom itself was at one time an innovation, a way to deal with the need to connect teachers and students in larger numbers. Few can afford the luxury anymore of wandering among the hills in small groups of one teacher and four or five students engaging in Socratic dialogue.

The question remains, though, how to maintain the quality that makes education more than mere aggregation of information. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of answers to that question, you will likely find material in this article that will both delight you and enrage you.

Dr. Matthew Trevett-Smith, a visiting professor of performance and communication arts at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., says Second Life Provides Real-World Benefits. He’s an anthropologist with a real sense of how our subjects intermesh in a liberal arts education, and he sees SL providing a means of bridging the traditional challenge of teaching critical thinking skills and broadening outlook/experience with the modern challenge of reaching “digital natives” who “will turn to Google rather than visit the library, or search Wikipedia instead of asking for a reference librarian.”

Virtual worlds engage my students in higher-order intellectual activity by requiring them to make and defend judgments. Ultimately, they are left with more questions to answer, a key outcome of liberal arts education. And as they immerse themselves in another culture — even a virtual one — they have physical emotional reactions to what’s happening on their screen.

Dr. Trevett-Smith isn’t arguing for us to replace study-abroad trips or other forms of education with SL; rather, he simply points out that SL is another tool in our toolbox, one with benefits that may not be more apparent without some deeper exploration.

This post is now three weeks old, which is ancient in the blogosphere, but it points out some useful info for educators who use Second Life, and it’s still valid, even though the “beta” has now been officially released.

While the article talks about five new tools for educators, I think the most significant one is the arrival of the long-talked-about “HTML on a prim.” The official name is “Shared Media,” and it’s simple to set up. The Second Life wiki has a good resource on the “how to,” which will eventually wind up in the Knowledgebase.

The gist of it, though, is that the “old way” involved setting the URL via something on the Land tab. In other words, the URL was tied to the parcel. Shared Media, on the other hand, is set in the object itself via the + symbol at the bottom of the Texture tab in the Build menu.

The upside: it’s easy.

The downside: unless you are using the new SL 2.0 viewer, you are completely unable to view the Web page. It would have been nice if somehow they could have enabled people with older viewers to at least see the page, but I understand why they couldn’t. (If it hasn’t clicked for you, look up a couple of paragraphs: the old way tied the URL to the parcel; the new way ties the URL to the object. Therefore, the older viewer has no way to understand an object with a URL tied to it.) Users of the older viewer will simply see the texture you choose for the tie-in.

So I’m going to make a texture that says “If you would like to see this Web page, please make sure you’re using Viewer 2.0 and then play your streaming media.”

Someone who does so will see not just a picture of a Web page (which is what the old style, in essence, did), but a fully interactive Web page, subject to the security restrictions the builder puts on it.

I think this will open up a whole new dimension for using SL as a tool of education.

This isn’t a new video, but it’s new to me, and has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. Sir Ken Robinson, a very entertaining speaker, makes solid points about the nature of the public education system and what needs to change about it. Take a look at “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity” on TED.com.

Though the video dates from 2006, CNN just published an opinion piece by Robinson about the video’s impact.

Children’s Memorial Hospital Chicago has demonstrated and documented a process that provides a viable component of real-world training: Second Life. In Case Study: Children’s Memorial Hospital Chicago Uses Second Life to Conduct Emergency Training the hospital’s report is summarized (and linked, for those who want to see the actual study). As Amanda Linden reports:

Training doctors, nurses, staff, administrators, and patient families at a hospital is a daunting task requiring real life context. That’s where Second Life comes in. A year ago, Children’s Memorial Hospital Chicago approached Centrax, a Chicago e-learning company and Second Life Solution Provider, to create a mirror image, or an exact replica, of their hospital so that they could train everyone through a variety of scenarios—all safely behind a computer. Within four hours, they had run a team—most had never been in Second Life—through the entire training exercise successfully.

Lest this be misunderstood: no one is suggesting that such training can completely replace real-life experience. Nevertheless, I saw something in this article strongly related to my own experience and contention of some years now: I don’t know exactly how it does it, but the virtual experience does an amazing job of making things “feel” real, e.g., actually being in the presence of another person. I was impressed by this quote from the report:

Kathleen Fortney, Centrax Director of Client Services, observed the training while sitting with the security participants, who were “very enthusiastic.” Fortney explained, “One of them, in describing the virtual ‘suspicious package,’ said there was a strange odor emitting from it. I interpreted this to mean…that the experience evoked prior knowledge, which is something that instructional designers strive to achieve in their designs.

If it can work like that for working professionals, it can likely provide useful educational experiences for college students.

Elizabeth Bernstein shares observations with implications for modern communication in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendships.” Do you see implications for your own use of online social media?

Here we are with a new academic year starting, and among other things this year holds, I’m getting back into Second Life again. Much has changed, and much remains the same. I’ll be sharing observations more frequently than in recent months.

One thing that caught my eye today: Paul Sweeney has noticed an implication of recent announcements by Linden Lab, i.e., that “Second Life [is] getting closer to real life.” Part of that announcement revolved around an upcoming viewer upgrade that will allow the viewer to handle HTML, Flash, and embedded browsers, and it may even be able to talk to real world applications like Excel. Such capabilities will make virtual meetings seem/feel more like real-world meetings, making them feel somewhat like face-to-face (where it’s so easy to just say, “Look at this!”) while retaining the advantages of using the Internet for distributed meetings rather than having everyone hop on a plane.

That has implications for distance education as well, of course.

Friends know that I’m about as close to Web secure as you can get without being flat-out paranoid. I’ve hardly ever gotten a virus, despite doing a lot of exploration. I have effective email filters set up, and I’m adept at spotting those emails that appear to come from people are know, but really aren’t, i.e., spoofed.

Nevertheless, the only thing that never changes is that things change. I’m being tested right now via Facebook. I’m pointing to this post from there, in fact, as a fuller explanation for my FB friends, and also as a general warning to everyone else. Here’s the background, and the potential benefit to readers. Read more »

Still confused about Twitter? I think I “get” it, but I still find myself not bothering to tweet. Guess I think I’m not that interesting. Jason Hiner explains The four stages of the average Twitter user effectively.