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.