Several articles have been published recently on the use of MUVEs in education. My mate Steven Warburton's article appeared in the British Journal of Educational Technology earlier this year. He takes a critical approach to the evaluation of Second Life as a learning environment. Here's the abstract:Second Life (SL) is currently the most mature and popular multi-user virtual world platform being used in education. Through an in-depth examination of SL, this article explores its potential and the barriers that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching. The context is set by tracing the history of virtual worlds back to early multi-user online computer gaming environments and describing the current trends in the development of 3-D immersive spaces. A typology for virtual worlds is developed and the key features that have made unstructured 3-D spaces so attractive to educators are described. The popularity in use of SL is examined through three critical components of the virtual environment experience: technical, immersive and social. From here, the paper discusses the affordances that SL offers for educational activities and the types of teaching approaches that are being explored by institutions. The work concludes with a critical analysis of the barriers to successful implementation of SL as an educational tool and maps a number of developments that are underway to address these issues across virtual worlds more broadly.
Warburton S (2009) Second Life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3), 414-426.
Another good friend of mine, Palitha Edirisingha and his colleagues at the University of Leicester, have also published an article on the potential pedagogical power of Second Life. Although it's a small scale project, the findings may yet be far reaching, particularly around our understanding of social presence in 3-D virtual environments.
This paper reports findings of a pilot study that examined the pedagogical potential of Second Life (SL), a popular three-dimensional multi-user virtual environment (3-D MUVE) developed by the Linden Lab. The study is part of a 1-year research and development project titled 'Modelling of Secondlife Environments' (http://www.le.ac.uk/moose) funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee. The research question addressed in this paper is: how can learning activities that facilitate social presence and foster socialisation among distance learners for collaborative learning be developed in SL, a 3-D MUVE? The study was carried out at the University of Leicester (UoL) within an undergraduate module on Archaeological Theory, where two tutors and four students took part in four learning activities designed to take place in SL within the UoL Media Zoo island. The learning activities and training in SL were based on Salmon's five-stage model of online learning. Students' engagement in SL was studied through interviews, observations and records of chat logs. The data analysis offers four key findings in relation to the nature and pattern of in-world 'socialisation' and its impact on real-world network building; the pattern of in-world 'socialisation' stage in Salmon's 5-stage model; perspectives on students' progress in-world through the first stage of the model—'access and motivation'—and perspectives on their entry into, and progress through, the second stage of the model—'socialisation'—and the role of identity presented through avatars in the process of socialisation. The paper offers implications for research and practice in the light of these findings.
Edirisingha P, Nie M, Pluciennik M and Young R (2009) Socialisation for learning at a distance in a 3-D multi-user virtual environment. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3), 458-479.
Related links:
Kamel Boulos, Wheeler and Toth-Cohen Designing for Learning in 3-D Virtual Worlds
Kamel Boulos, Hetherington and Wheeler An overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical education
No comments:
Post a Comment