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.

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

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.