Second Life Bits
Morning :)
I've been trawling around SL (thinking of doing a research project there. More about that some time soon) secifically looking at the region called 'The Campus' where a number of educational institutions (eg Harvard and Stanford in the US and Surrey, Derby, Uni of Wales, Paisley and the OU over here)have 'learning centres'. These vary from wholescale 'virtual unis' to single classroom settings and projects. The Campus has massive Libraries and Resource centres and some social spaces too. Quite a few of the campuses are restricted to the institutions students only but quite a lot are open access. I thought you might like to have a look. This is the URL for SL Education Wiki on which you can see a list of some of the SL education projects and classes. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki ....and here's the easiest route to get to the Campus.http://slurl.com/secondlife/Campus/154/140/28/
Take a look around and let me know what you think about it and its potential for our Uni?
Oh, and lets see pics of your avatars there! As I said, I'd like to compile a virtual yearbook of the Class of 2006 (garbed in the avatar finest while snooping around SL) Here's one of Hetty Harlequin exploring Campus (and apparently she stumbled down the rabbit hole into Wonderland!)
Debbie
I've been trawling around SL (thinking of doing a research project there. More about that some time soon) secifically looking at the region called 'The Campus' where a number of educational institutions (eg Harvard and Stanford in the US and Surrey, Derby, Uni of Wales, Paisley and the OU over here)have 'learning centres'. These vary from wholescale 'virtual unis' to single classroom settings and projects. The Campus has massive Libraries and Resource centres and some social spaces too. Quite a few of the campuses are restricted to the institutions students only but quite a lot are open access. I thought you might like to have a look. This is the URL for SL Education Wiki on which you can see a list of some of the SL education projects and classes. http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki ....and here's the easiest route to get to the Campus.http://slurl.com/secondlife/Campus/154/140/28/
Take a look around and let me know what you think about it and its potential for our Uni?
Oh, and lets see pics of your avatars there! As I said, I'd like to compile a virtual yearbook of the Class of 2006 (garbed in the avatar finest while snooping around SL) Here's one of Hetty Harlequin exploring Campus (and apparently she stumbled down the rabbit hole into Wonderland!)
Debbie
7 comments:
I think it's an interesting concept but I don't really see it catching on. E-learning using voice, video and web is quite established now and I can't see what more a virtual environment offers. Maybe as the technology improves we'll see benefits that make it worth switching over but as it stands there are better alternatives for distance and e-learning.
Training (as opposed to classroom style learning) is a different matter. I've heard of VR environments being used for training in the military, in medicine and architecture. There's bound to be loads more. All very specialised applications but it's getting more common. I'm told BSM do virtual driving lessons on a simulator now before they take you out on the road in a real car.
For training and simluation: yes. For academic teaching & learning: I'm not convinced.
Sooo..if I said I could recreate the environment of the Stanford Prison Expt for you to participate in it in a virtual (and safe) manner and (kind of) experience the effects deindividuation? Or if I provided an online demonstration of bystander apathy using avatars in an SL street and you were one of the crowd? Or conformity classics? Or if I built a psychology lab with various testing rooms where people could set up cognitive expts or collect data from questionnaires? You would still think it had no use within psychology teaching? The potential benefits of this software for assisting in 'phenomenology' is mind-blowing. I can think of a couple of dozen applications for experiencing / assessing the effects postuated in classic social psychological studies, cultural psych, developmental psych and abnormal psyc, even research methods (not to mention cyberpsych!). And yes, it can be utilised as a means of purely simulating or demonstrating, for example, cognitive psych phenomena.
You're right about technology needing to improve for it to be a truly incomparable asset to teaching though. And it's getting there.....chdck out SLoodles, for one. Much better option than WebCT for resources, interactive exercises, assessments and discussion / chat. Add to that that they reckon by 2010 these venues will be photorealistic and I think you may be underestimating its potential.
I think you're missing the main advantage of using 3DVRs for teaching. The fun and exciting side. In HE we quite often have problems getting students to seek out and engage with materials, to form study groups and communicate, to immerse themselves freely and of their own volition in their subject beyond the level of jumping 'assessment hurdles'. If we can provide an environment which people actively want to explore, whether it being taking part in an 'experiment', replaying a PP or flicking through a flash animation in a 'movie theatre', visiting a virtual library and browsing the shelves till something takes their interest or simply meeting up with others in a study room to chat about stuff (maybe even psych stuff!), then they may incidentally absorb information and, more importantly, may develop a 'love of' and deeper engagement with their subject.
That's what excites real life educators about this software.
(Check out the SLED forums for ideas of where these developments are going....or the New Media Consortium in SL)
"Sooo..if I said I could recreate the environment of the Stanford Prison Expt for you to participate in it in a virtual (and safe) manner and (kind of) experience the effects deindividuation? Or if I provided an online demonstration of bystander apathy using avatars in an SL street and you were one of the crowd? Or conformity classics?"
you can't compare the results from virtual worlds with real worlds. The 'affordances of cyberspace' (to quote your term) would confound the results. In the Stanford Prison exp, my behaviour might be even harsher than the original study because of disinhibition. The bystander effect might be amplified in a virtual world, after all, it's only virtual characters. If one of them gets "hurt" and I do nothing, where's the harm? Who's suffered but a bunch of pixels?
"Or if I built a psychology lab with various testing rooms where people could set up cognitive expts or collect data from questionnaires?"
web-based questionnaires are already used to very good effect. In some ways, they're faster and easier than paper-based surveys. As for cognitive experiments, we do that using computers and networks already. What benefit does a virtual environment bring to that? Why is it better for virtual me to do the towers of hanoi puzzle in cyberspace on a virtual computer than for the real me to do it on a real computer? Same goes for questionnaires.
"You would still think it had no use within psychology teaching?"
I think the use of virtual environments in teaching psychology is limited to teaching about the psychology of virtual environments.
"I think you're missing the main advantage of using 3DVRs for teaching. The fun and exciting side."
It's fun and exciting *now*, for *us*. In 10 years time, when today's kids grow up and go to uni, it won't be anything new. It'll be taken for granted, so then where's the appeal? I'll go out on a limb and say that I bet people were making similar predictions about the use of TV and Video in education back when they were becoming mainstream. As entertaining as they are, how much have countless OU programmes revolutionised learning?
As for the rest of your comments, what you say is all very valid as far as *potential* uses go but that's all it is until you see widespread adoption. 10 years ago, they were telling us that in 10 years time, kids would study partly from home by video phone, that every classroom would have games consoles with educational games, that schools would issue pupil's with their own laptops and we'd all be learning foreign languages by visiting cyber-classrooms in foreign countries. All of that has happened to some extent but nowehere near as much as all the advocates predicted when the technologies were emerging. The difference between actual and potential is really quite large.
"You can't compare the results from virtual worlds with real worlds. The 'affordances of cyberspace' (to quote your term) would confound the results"....
But are a step up from reading about it in a book. You minimise the effects of immersion and dissociation that 3DVR undoubtedly brings. There's something about the 'physicality' of actions in these environments that psychologically validates the relevance of what you do there. Text-based anything just can't compare.
I take your points seriously but this wasn't a shot in the dark claim; it's happening widely now and people are reporting the benefits of it (remember the psychiatrist who demonstrated the shciozophrenic hallucinations to his students?; experientially very different from reading about them or 'seeing' them in a TV programme).
The advantages of providing opportunities for people to do 'The Tower of Hanoi' etc, in a virtual world rather than via pen and paper or a traditional website? If we provide a collection of such demos and tests (for, for example collecting data for honous projects) in a central 'lab' within this essentially SOCIAL space, we have the opportunity of attracting a wider, more stratified sample. Not only psychology students (on which, rather worryingly, most honours dissertations
are currently based); not even just 'students'. All kinds of people(ethnicity, occupations, education levels) wander through Campus apparently.
We could, for example, eventually have a UoB research projects lab; engineering, art, CET, health, sports as well as psychology, etc. Even if just *our* students are encouraged / motivated to participate in the research of other disciplines while completing the research of their own, it will be a remarkable step up for us in terms of the quality of the data we're getting.
As for the precious predictions on pedagogical methods? I think you're right that in 10 years time kids won't think this is anything novel. Mostly because, for the past 2-3 years universities (and uni staff from their directorates)are being positively ordered to develop distance e-learning strategies to minimise the necessity for so much f2f contact between tutors and students. The government simply can't afford to meet their 50% widening participation targets with current numbers of academic staff employed...and not only VCs unwilling to maintain current levels of staffing, they are strategically planning reductions. (At the UoB we're curently going through a voluntary severance process)
Unless student fees increase dramatically (as per the US) then it seems that a massive shift in delivery methods / the student experience is on the cards.
We can either sit back and resign ourselves to packaging material into in WebCT / Moodle modules...or we can attempt to simulate, as best we can, the pedagogical methods and social experience...the 'community' of universities currently.
I know which one I'd rather my children had. And it isn't the 'solitary' perusing of WebCT links.
Oops....that should read 'previous predictions' not precious! Blinkin' C and V next to each other. :D
"not even just 'students'. All kinds of people(ethnicity, occupations, education levels) wander through Campus apparently."
you're just swapping one demographic and it's limitations (as far as generalising results) with another. Students may not accurately represent the population but cyber-participants wouldn't either. How would you describe a typical SL user? Young, interested in technology, an early adopter, competent computer user, lots of free time (because SL is primarily a leisure pursuit). Wouldn't those factors and others common to SL users create just the same problem for researchers as using undergrads?
Granted, 3DVR might let you recruit more participants in the same way web surveys let you recruit more P's than paper based surveys, but to say that it'll solve the problem of getting more representative samples is a little optimistic I think.
Hal, could it ever get any more circumscribed a sample than 'psychology students' attending a particular university? I don't think I conveyed clearly my argument for trying it out as a medium for gathering data....It's primarily a social space. Not a place where just students go. Or those interested in psychology. Or even those interested in technology, as many struggle with the technology yet are motivated to go there for the experience of being in a 'VR'. The potential audience is more varied than, for example, 'Psych Expts' or 'Online Social Psych'. Here, we have the opportunity for serendipitous recruitment of totally non-psych / non-HE oriented people. You might say that could be done on other 'social' forums. But do THEY not only allow it but positively encourage it there? How many? I can't think of any.
(And your choice of descriptors for the demographics of potential SL research participants just lessened the validity of your proposition. I visit SL, not rarely but not excessively, and I'm neither young nor do I have much free time...plus I'm an early adopter, as are you, but are we similar in many other ways? Am I similar to a 35 guy from Cali I met a few nights ago, a musician, who was nearly sobbing with frustration at not being able to get to grips with the features?) Who knows? Possibly? And possibly psychology students are dissimilar enough for it to fail to affect variability aadversely.
Only time will tell if the data from online research in places such as SL resembles that gained offline (and whether participants bear the same or different demographics) That's what we're currently in the process of planning to do.
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