man is god

so much is happening; those of us that are students of social media and transcendent web technologies cannot scan the transformation without each other. We are each others' filters, as increasingly the web becomes the source of knowing. We must count on each other; collaboration must be cherished, the new sacrament. see the film to the right. pass it on, hehehe.

Mac madness

OMG, new university job has brought so many changes. From 10 years of corporate fire-fighting to a more deliberate pace. From reactionary to proactive, from anxious to calm. And an interesting Mac flood. The uni does not want me using my personal MacBook Pro, for a variety of reasons. And i had to turn in my moto to my prior employer after the university supported iPhone came in. Then in an Apple training on running multiple platforms, I win the raffle..So in 48 hours, I get a new MacBook Pro, a new iPhone 3, and an iPod touch. "Finding my footing" is what I'm telling people when they ask me about the new job. Inside, I think I'm experiencing PTSD :)

Web 2.0 goes squared

and overwhelms me! I'll have to admit, I'm a higher ed admin and student affairs guy, who has enjoyed chewing on the margins of emerging technologies for a few years, but I've never TOTALLY understood any of it enough to say I am more than peripherally aware of these tools. Love'm, and know little about them. I'm way to old to be a real geek, and I say that as I wish I could. And now I've been declared as "uniquely qualified" for a student affairs position that includes integrating emerging technologies into student services delivery. It's a new position, so I'm winging it. And hoping that someone comes to my rescue to point me to best practices. But..may never happen, and I'm ok with that, but frightened all the same.

and the last of Michael's project summary

I’m told by the veterans that an institution interested in using SL should take time, get everyone imaginable involved, and of course look at the best examples. We are advised by the instructional technologists to start with the desired learning experience, and build the world that is the best environment for those objectives, and by the seasoned skeptics and evangelists to get the institution decision makers in-world and be patient and prepared for lots of conversation and data collection. Island owners advise that we attend to legal issues as well, insure that we develop the faculty, and contemplate how teaching and learning are integrated into our institutional culture. We must understand in very profound terms how this very large idea might resonate with our long-term plans and missions, our vision for the future.
Residents of SL that use the world for teaching and learning agree that it is an evolutionary step and a cultural experience that may set the standards, if not for educating in virtual worlds, then for an understanding of the cultural complexities that are necessary for creating such a richness of experience. Virtual Worlds and Learning Management Systems will evolve together to create virtual worlds that are designed for specific experiences for specific disciplines. SL represents what educating can be in 3D for the short term, but new virtual platforms will make educating using the 3D web something completely different. The larger metaverse will be one in which people driving avatars will populate a variety of worlds, making and keeping connections that are real relationships, across a myriad of virtual existences. The metaverse of the near future will be one in which open source technology will prompt institutions from around the RL globe to link their own virtual learning environments to form an amazing tapestry of learning environments, one shared by hundreds of millions of teachers and learners with direct and personal access to each other and their resources.

continued

It seems that the choices we make in SL about how we are represented in-world are an important ingredient in the recipe for the social context of living a virtual existence, and contributes to a great extent in a sense of ownership and connection that a driver has with his av. There is a moment, after a time traveling in SL, that one can believe the rest of the avs and their drivers when they say that SL is not a game, and as a result of a personal and shared experiences, is a real world. The av then becomes an extension of the self, and the membranes between worlds and lives become permeable.
The sense of place offers students a suggestion that they are “actually there,” but may or may not influence their engagement in learning. In and of itself it is not as significant an influence as educators using SL might think or hope. Some educators believe that the comfort offered by the familiar surroundings presented by a campus replica can be comforting to students, while the believability of such environments are usually less than desired. A place in SL, like a college campus that is designed to be familiar, a replica, or a classroom with a roof and chairs in a world where they are completely unnecessary, may increase a student’s level of comfort and feeling of safety. When I return to my cottage on the island of Necros, I know that I have a home base at which to log off, a place that I’ll remain until I log back into SL. There is familiarity and ownership that is comforting. These effects, at Necros or in a in a learning context contribute to a feeling of being somewhere with others. In this I have lots of company in the body of scholars and researchers that work and play in SL. In an environment designed for learning, this feeling of being somewhere with others will influence students’ engagement in learning.
I’ve found that the terms “telepresence” and “co-location” more accurately represent the praxis of the senses of embodiment and place that contribute to the knowledge that one is present and in the presence of others. A feeling of co-location does enhance engagement in learning if the learning objectives are written to embrace the social context. Telepresence is a hot topic that is worthy of future research, one that is rich in a growing body of academic literature.
The educators I interviewed were as generous with recommendations to their colleagues as they were with their time. SL is far from the edge of the envelope, nor is it representative of what resident generated virtual environments will be in a few years. It may be a sample of the experience of living and learning in virtual worlds, but is not the model. It is important to push the boundaries of creativity in order to reap the benefits of the 3D web for education. The status quo, no matter how familiar and warm, should not be a template for how we will teach in synthetic worlds.

Michael and Terrans' learning, continued

Twitter is a recent social media tool that is catching on quickly while spawning different and better widgets throughout the last few months. It is an IM based mini-blog that is audible (with chirps and dings and tweets) and viewable as an ongoing conversation between “friends” in a variety of browsers and forums, including within the SL viewer. Many educators using new media, especially those who are fans and residents of virtual worlds are avid users of Twitter, and share web links to academic articles and other Web 2.0 media such as Slideshare, Flickr, personal blogs, and interesting happenings in second life.
A few weeks prior to this writing I saw and heard a tweet pop up that told of yet another Relay for Life event in SL that was taking place on an island designed as an amusement park, a message that told the “tweeterverse” that several of the most revered and popular female avs were positioned in kissing booths in order to raise money for the American Cancer Society. I had been to a previous event in-world a few months prior at which some of my educator acquaintances were auctioning themselves off as virtual dates. Hoping to participate in this noble philanthropy once again and looking forward to buying a kiss with one or more of the metaverse’s most stunning avs, I teleported directly from Twitterific (the desktop Tweet tool I now prefer) into SL to enjoy a few moments of diversion from this writing. As I arrived, I found myself at a teleport station on one side of the island that happened to be surrounded by a dance party. Activating my streaming audio, I walked the perimeter of the island to classic Motown tunes in search of the kissing booths.
As I walked through the 3D environment I barely missed getting squashed by a fifty foot T-Rex who was taking a similar tour, and spent sometime watching five of SL’s most attractive avs raking in two-hundred Linden dollars for three chances to throw a ball at the paddle that would activate their dunk tank. I paid my money, but never quite figured out how to throw the balls. Other fair-goers were doing quite well, and I spent a few moments enjoying the ladies and gents getting wet, some of them wearing bikini’s and Bermudas while other’s wore their Elizabethan finest. I found the kissing booths, and paid another two hundred Linden to enjoy a sustained kiss in the hands of a lovely av, who chatted amiably with me throughout that moment. Terran Timeless, my av who is gaining familiarity in academic circles in-world, toured these fairgrounds in three dimensions, walking through crowds of people and admiring the amazing textures and colors on the leaves of trees dappling gently in the breeze. My four hundred Linden (about $1.35 on the exchange rate for the day) added to a US dollar amount of four million dollars that SL efforts for Relay for Life have raised since the New Year. I logged off of SL to return to my work having been somewhere, in the company of others, having experienced a few unreal things that were as real as my fingers tapping keys and the good work that was being done.

if anyone really wants to read this, the "episodes" go from bottom up

I was interested to discover what my participants thought of the requirements for a working virtual community. This sort of list, as little as three years ago, was composed of a wish list of features that the flat web could have in a more perfect world. With the advent of the 3D Web, these needs are no longer considerations for the educators already using SL. These educators tell me that a primary ingredient of a virtual learining environment is a common purpose, some glue that holds the tapestry together. Another interesting common requirement for these educators is the ability to socially construct the community: to build and to collaborate. Effective communication was a missing ingredient a few years past. SL provides near synchronous and synchronous communication. From a cultural perspective, a community will develop shared memories, traditions and artifacts, one that can persist with use. For some of my respondents, a sense of support and acceptance is important. Lastly, most agree that, through the lens of the teacher, a true facilitator presence is essential. Someone must guide the experience; someone must lead.
In the early stages of my research I believed that the sense of embodiment provided by being the driver of a highly animated and mobile avatar was one of the crucial features that inject a synthetic world with reality, and thereby influenced student engagement in learning. I still believe so, but fear that in my ignorance I asked the wrong question, so this relationship remains to be seen. The question begs two more; engaged in what, and how do we know and measure this? With regard to embodiment and its direct relationship to student engagement, there are mixed opinions. If I were to ask an educator who drives an avatar how that representation influences their engagement in the virtual environment, they would answer that it is a significant influence. As to engagement in learning, a sense of being there seems to be more important than the sense of being-with-others until one-to-one communication becomes the focus, when embodiment may enhance the feeling of emotional presence and thereby enhances the sense of place. It appears to be true that the experience of embodiment may be less important to traditional age students to other adults as well. My colleagues, most of them at least approaching middle age and many of them proud grandparents, admit that they enjoy driving their avatar while seeking new experiences more than their students. Many educators find that for the traditional student avatar embodiment may be as much of a distraction as it is an enhancement as it applies to student engagement in learning.
It is possible, speaking from recent personal experience, that as a participant in an intentional immersive learning experience, my embodiment may improve my focus and attention to task and the collaborative work that it entails. As my sense of play is teased out, I begin to find the virtual environment more believable, for the moment, and that, in Buddhist terms; “mindfulness” is cultivated.

Michael's Summary: virtues and challenges of teaching with SL

The educators that I spoke with have a variety of mixed feelings about the virtues of SL as a teaching and learning tool, but have no problems listing those that they appreciate, acknowledging that they may be powerful characteristics albeit with questionable instructional value. A student and teacher may find useful applications for distance learning, a sense of shared space, a social and emotional presence and co-presence, a feeling of connectedness, the ability to engage with others from different cultures in different languages in an un-sanitized environment, immediacy, designing experiences that would be impossible in a RL classroom, the immersion, role play, the ability to collaborate and build in a dedicated environment, shaping content to educational purposes, a lack of diversity issues, easy communication, a creative and safe space, interactive teaching, and flexible learning. These responses confirm my own conclusions regarding the value of virtual environments for teaching and learning. I’ve sat in classes, taken field trips, built new things, and felt that I was there, in a place with others, sharing the same experience at the same time.
The challenges inherent in using SL as an educational tool are not so numerous and provide problems to solve. The learning curve is a mountain that many students and some faculty would prefer not to climb. The time one must invest to be comfortable living and learning in a virtual world can be substantially more than finding a room number and an empty seat. The digital divide, varied levels of computer literacy and the technological requirements that an institution must meet are problematic. The infrastructure is often not up to the task. Gaining institutional support is a frequent challenge, where budgets and faculty resistance to change can be barriers to successful implementation. These challenges will, for the most part, be moot within a few years, as an institution upgrades to technology that supports the 3D web and students and faculty find more comfort in using the environments as tools

Sprouting

more:Michael's research summary:how students react to learining in SL

The reactions of students to learning in SL is as varied as the type of student, and perhaps has more to do with the instructor variable than their prior experience in VWs, their technical expertise, the technical limitations, or their inclination to use play in learning. Some love it. Some hate it, while some don’t know why it’s part of the teaching. The general opinion seems to be that we are preparing for the next generation of students, those that have been living in VWs for a few years, and those to whom it makes perfect sense. It seems that one concern among a portion of current student users is that it takes work to learn in a virtual world. The teacher is asking them to learn new skills, be engaged, move about the world and work with each other. As Kevin says: some students just want to be taught to. They suit up, they show up, they paid for the class, don’t ask them to do stuff. buridan would point out that if SL was being used as a distance classroom, then that is what it will be. If the instruction is aimed at learning objectives that are unique to the virtual environment, those that are present to learn will enjoy all that it entails, while others will take the opportunity to catch up on emails, watch television, and text with their friends, because that is what they would do in a physical classroom anyway.

More of Michael's summary: "classroom" communicating in SL

All of the educators do seem to agree that the collaboration and helping behaviors that students exhibit through design and as a by product of the virtual environment represent benefits that are near to impossible to realize in the “flat web world” (two dimensional Learning Management Systems). It feels like a place where students from differing time zones and cultures can feel a “togetherness”. And many speak of the sense of presence and heightened level of social comfort afforded by the near anonymous and playful nature of the av as a representation of the self. Nearly all of the educators I spoke with agree that using a virtual 3D identity, as an extension of RL. will be common in the near future. It is just where we are going, and becoming proficient at living and learning in a second life will prove to be a survival tool.
I was interested in the extent to which courses taught using SL were completely in-world. The answer to this question is “it depends”. Most of the educators using SL as a teaching tool or environment seem to do so as a supplement to some RL classroom experience, although as educators become experienced using synthetic environments and new pedagogies move toward guided collaborative learning as the standard, a significant and growing number of courses are completely scheduled in-world, especially those that lend themselves toward distance learning technologies, with students and instructors participating from around the globe. The need for a RL location for anything more than an administrative center is diminishing.
Before I had any experience of educating in Second Life, I thought that the form of communication was a significant notion, one that might influence the appropriateness of using a virtual world. My question was born of my prior research into distance learning, and my assumption that asynchronous communication was a barrier to student engagement in learning. Not every undergraduate can feel in touch with his or her classmates when the mode of communication is much like email. It appears that the chat generation has already conquered that barrier. In SL, there are two nearly synchronous channels of text communication: one public, and one potentially private. In addition, Second Life introduced voice communication in 2006, which has evolved to the level of high quality synchronous voice-over-internet.
There is no common mix of these channels in use during on in-world class, but there almost always seems to be a mix of all three. The Web2 student is proficient at managing multiple near synchronous chat conversations in addition to real time voice, and they use it all. Much as a RL brick and mortar class might, SL classes come to quick and organic agreement about the mix of signals, and who controls the voice. It is common for the instructor to hold the control of voice until students are invited to join, while the public chat is the formal classroom conversation and the private IM is the “backchannel”. Because for the next few years not all users will have the same voice technology available to them, some educators use text exclusively to insure that every student is receiving the same messages. An additional benefit might be gleaned by using the private IM channel as a group channel because an av can choose to have this chat saved to text, providing automatic lecture notes. Programs that activate gestures and mouth movements when an avatars driver uses voice are in development; these may change the dynamics of class communications somewhat.

Michael/Terran's learning continued

As I met and interviewed the kind and generous educators who were the subjects of this research, I found that they represent institutions of every size and character. Tiny private colleges, community colleges and systems, and major research universities have presences on Second Life. Some of these presences are vast archipelagos of linked islands taking up miles of virtual landscape, while other institutions have a cottage and a sandbox on 520 meters of rented land. Intellagirl Robbins wrote on her Second Life Researchers (SLR) listserv in March of 2008 that there were 4700 members of the SLED (Second Life Educators) listserv, and another 1200 members of her researchers list, and that there were 1300 regions in SL involved in education and training.
The types of disciplines that use SL represent the full spectrum of higher education, while it appears that education; instructional design, library science and media studies have the heaviest proportions. It appears that every sort of course taught in RL has at least one early adopter experimenting with using virtual worlds. There is little in Second Life that places limits on the sorts of learning that can occur. The lack of “hands-on” learning that one might find essential for some courses is balanced by the incredible opportunities for constructivist and experiential learning, simulations and immersion.
Not all educators in SL are of the same mind about the role that it plays in courses taught in-world. It has been refreshing to be associated with a community of researchers and educators who agree to disagree while making ongoing dialogue and a push toward innovation in teaching their common causes. SL may play a role as a technological enhancement of RL classroom activities, an experimental pedagogical tool, or the actual topic of the course. It may provide the environment: one that is on one end of the spectrum a replacement lecture hall or amphitheatre, and on the other end a well-designed learning environment that leverages all of the features of a synthetic world. SL does act as one large simulation, albeit one that is actually alive and organically functioning. It is a model for how virtual communities form and prosper, how economies develop, and how a new sort of culture is born and matures. Some educators hold great hope for ethnographic and other sorts of field studies in SL, while others have been pleasantly surprised at the social context, the in-the-hall or commons experiences that even brick and mortar institutions seem to be loosing as the undergraduate demographics change.

More of Michael's summary

And so in my first year I explore and wrote about distance learning and engaged in the ongoing dialogue about the value of a college education without the college experience. My arrogance quickly gave way to a scholarly examination of the problems to which distance learning was a solution, and I began to nurture a hope that the features of a learning community that were inherent in the on-campus experience could perhaps be available to those students who chose to pursue their degrees online. I found that the notion of an online learning community was a robust topic of academic research and conversation, and that many educators believed that technology would provide the leverage to offer the essential characteristics of community and collegiality that prompted young students to be truly engaged in their learning.
I was privileged and pleased to be able to work with my concerns about the apparent lack of a sense of place and presence in a student experience in my graduate practicum, and became aware of the myriad of issues around the use of space and campus design. I learned that four years of undergraduate education on a physical campus did not necessarily provide the benefits of immediacy and personal contact that has been a part of the narrative of the “college years”, especially for the growing non-traditional student population.
So it was with some trepidation and curiosity that I chose to examine educating in virtual worlds as a solution to what I had perceived as handicaps to engagement in learning. My image of distance learning as two-dimensional, asynchronous, and private was quickly dissipated as I began to discover the emerging educational tools that Web 2.0 and the concurrent innovation in instructional design were offering teachers and students.
I heard about Second Life in 2005 on a late Saturday night drive home from a DJ gig, and found myself enthralled by the image of a full-blown virtual reality, with shops and homes, museums, libraries and universities that were engaged in teaching: in three dimensions, in a place, with synchronous communication and an acute awareness of others. Three years later I have no regrets that I chose this phenomena as the subject of my most time-consuming and immersive educational experience to date. This project has been an adventure. I have learned more than I could imagine from literally hundreds of teachers and students whose teaching and learning occur online, in virtual learning communities on Second Life.

Michael/Terran's master's project; SL and higher ed

Now that my MA project is done, I think this a good space and opportunity to share some findings. I'll start with my end-of-project reflections, a chunk at a time. Please feel free to fill in some blanks in my understanding, or correct faulty assumptions or preconceived notions.

When I set about to discover a topic for my final Masters project, I floundered about well into the first few weeks of my proposal writing workshop without a clear idea about what sort of in-depth study would keep me interested and, in the spirit of SoTL, contribute to the body of knowledge in the field of higher education. I remembered several pieces of advice that were offered to me throughout the past three-plus years by my instructors and advisors that I used to guide my choice. I was advised to keep my eye on a specific area of interest throughout my graduate student years in the hopes that the things I chose to study and write about would provide material for later research. I was also advised to look at notions that I was completely ignorant of and those that I might not be in agreement with in order to insure that I would study with a keen curiosity, a lack of arrogance, and an argument in mind. As I looked back at the ideas that I had chosen to study and write about, I remembered again how I was drawn to explore the notion of distance learning and its role in higher education. As a first-year graduate student I recall feeling a righteous indignation at the rise of DL as a substitute for in-class learning, aware as I thought I was of the benefits of the face-to-face in-class experience of learning, where students would be in immediate and simultaneous proximity with each other and the instructor. The richness of the environment and the immediacy of these presences were, I thought, integral to the education of the whole student, and essential for the traditional-age college student who needed to be immersed in the brick and mortar learning community in order to mature and develop as students and young adults.

in reply to a thoughtful post by GoSpeed

I wonder about, and sometimes obsess, from the academic perspective of post-modernism; Eco,Derrida,the deconstructionists, and the Buddha inside me, about what these identities mean and how they are as ephemeral as our RL selves…moments..

but the boundaries fascinate me, between the you and i and the individual and the community, the avatar and the driver, the avatar and other avs..

I’ve reached back to a concept that my psychedelically influenced mind caught a glimpse of as a pre-med wannabe who was enchanted with connective tissue and chemical and electrical communication across membranes. These are usually selective (voluntarily) permeable membranes that are a staple in Terran physiologies..sometimes not of course!

and these are the thin veils that I believe we adress/acknowledge/construct/build in everyday life as we decide what is the “me” and what is the “other”, and contemplate the locuses of control and influence. Shinran Shonin, a 13th century bodhitsadva, said all this was completely incomprehensible to humans. We are most likely completely ignorant to the the reality that drives us…as we drive our avatars. We are “bonbo”; stupid deluded creatures with little understanding of our place in the narrative.

And so the permeable membrane becomes the object of my desire, the invisible but profound boundary that i must accept and understand as the limiting film of tissue that my face keeps whacking into whenever I try to see something new.

and so the relationships we have with our avs, and between our avs, and the complex tapestry of relationships between the uses and the thems and the now that is only for the moment is what interests me.

let’s talk more… all of us.

reaching for reason

I've been wondering if, during every moment that we rush through (or is it the moments that rush through us?) there is any chance that relinquishing our grasp...our hold, on any sense of control or thirst or hunger, without feeling an aching void. The Buddha taught that all life was Dukkha...suffering, and that all suffering was a direct result of grasping instincts and urges. This is very often a comforting thought to me; but not always. This is the variability of human mood, ephemeral and ubiquitous, and married to how I feel about me in this instant.

permeable membranes

life leaks both ways, sometimes intentionally, other times naturally