Latest MUVEs

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

What you see is what you get

Human perception has been explained in many ways, from Decartes, through to the 'top-down' experiments of Richard Gregory, then J.J. Gibson's ecological 'bottom-up' model and a host of other theorists. Each clamours for our attention, attempting to explain the way we represent our version of reality inside our heads. The plain fact remains: What you see is what you get. You simply make your own interpretation of it, and believe what you want to believe. This is what allows illusionists and street 'magicians' such as David Blaine and Derren Brown to maintain their popular appeal.

Yesterday I took my second year teacher trainees over to our Virtual Immersion Cinema where for an hour they watched high resolution 3D images projected using a fish-eye lens onto the ceiling of the dome. There were a few inertia-sickness issues, but mercifully, there were no technicolour yawns. The wow factor was high though, and many were left afterwards with questions about how they could use such a facility to enhance the teaching of science, history, geography and other subject areas.

After this we went back to the classroom and I demonstrated the art of illusion using nothing more than a simple can of baked beans and my index finger. If you are sqeamish, don't watch this video. And please don't try this at home. You probably won't be insured.

Click To Play

Making a MUVE

If it's Wednesday, it must be Berlin. I'm off in a few hours to catch that old orange and white bird again, this time to the heart of Germany, to speak at Online Educa Berlin. It's been over 8 years since I last spoke at Educa, when I gave a live demonstration of the then fairly new web streaming kit that multimedia company PictureTel had introduced. I did a live video link to London and spoke about the pedagogical potential of the system. On a wing and a prayer, the whole session went perfectly - and delegates crammed into the room to see it and ask questions. And of course, streaming media and videoconferencing are now a part of the fabric of many education institutions.

Online Educa is a much bigger affair now than it was in 1999, and most probably the largest e-learning event in Europe. I'm on a specialist invited panel with Graham Attwell, Steve Warburton, Helen Keegan and David White, all of whom are probably a lot more expert than I in the ways of Second Life. But, I will give it my best shot, and tell those assembled about our sexual health education and public information SIM. We will of course, be talking about whether MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments), like previous innovations, will one day become common place in education. Time now to make a MUVE...

Published ...and unjammed

Very pleased to see that our article on Second Life for medical education has finally been published today in Health Information and Libraries Journal. Seductively entitled 'Second Life: An overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health education', it was co-written with Maged Kamel Boulos (my mate from the Faculty of Health and Social Work, here at the University of Plymouth) and one of our graduated students Lee Hetherington, whose VNEC (Virtual Neurological Education Centre) project features heavily in the article. We also discuss the learning and teaching potential of SL and how it can be harnessed by medical and health educators (and indeed any other teachers) who want to give it a bash. One thing we didn't mention in the paper is our Second Life sexual health project, which is going from strength to strength, but was born too late to feature. That project will be discussed in future papers - (promise).

I hadn't expected the paper to be published until next month, but that's the beauty of online publishing, as I said in my previous blog 'publish and be jammed'.

I have several other e-learning articles on the boil, but it will be a long time before some of them see the light of day, as they will probably be published on printed paper and take an absolute age to appear... Ah well, I guess if there's a world wide power outage, people will still be able to read the articles ... if they are in daylight. Gets me thinking ... what does my avatar do in SL when I'm not there to keep him in check??

At the bleeding edge

Came across an interesting blog on mobile technologies today, called Learn on-the-go. Whilst the title of the blog might be a little twee - (I had disturbing visions of someone reading a book on the toilet) - the content is pretty good, with a review of Marc Prensky's keynote address at the recent Handheld Learning 2007 conference held in London. Whilst not entirely glowing about Prensky's 'Keeping up with change' speech, even labelling him as 'obselete' at one point, this blog writer has some interesting things to say about mobile learning, change management and technology in general...

Here's a top quote from the blog:

'While slower, less progressive educators may still be comfortably exploring e-learning on learning management systems or off CD-ROMs (or, indeed, still doing chalk-and-talk), educators investigating mobile learning are very much at the cutting edge of educational innovation, along with other educators investigating other areas such as the use of social web tools for education, and the use of virtual worlds as learning environments.'

Well, yes, I agree - change is always with us, and shift happens. And I have to nod in agreement that the bleeding edge of learning technology is found in the study of ambient forms of learning, along with 3-D virtual worlds and social networking tools. I'll be bookmarking this blog and paying a return visit or two.

There or thereabouts ... Metaplace launched

Critics of Second Life and other 3-D virtual worlds found online should prick their ears up at this one... A new pc based (and simple to set up) 3-D virtual world generator is available, thanks to MMORPG Ultima Online creator Raph Koster. Announced on the BBC online news service today, the software, called Metaplace, apparently works from mobile phones too. Users can make virtual worlds in seconds using simple 'building blocks' very similar to SL prims, and without having to know a thing about scripting or programming. Sound like a dream? Maybe, and if they can keep it simple, it may be a winner.

One of the main criticisms of Second Life is that it takes so damn long to set up a 3-D environment, and for many moving around is a little like learning to walk all over. Another criticism is that SL is a bit like a 'ghost town' with more than 8 million subscribers worldwide, but very few actually in evidence in world. Whatever has been said already, it looks like Linden Labs (and There.com) have a serious rival. Anyone with experience of Metaplace - let us know how you have got on. Oh, and thanks to Helen Keegan who drew my attention to it this evening...

Top 7 topics at this year's ALT-C

In preparation for the forthcoming ALT-C 2007 conference, I glanced over the content of papers, posters, workshops and symposia on offer. It interested me to see that some key topics have emerged as the front runners for discussion. A quick trawl of titles and keywords revealed these top 7 favourite topics:

e-Learning 31
Web 2.0 Social Software 25
VLEs 24
Blogs 20
Mobile learning 19
Social networking 18
Wikis 16

No surprises really.... There are also a number of other papers dealing with accessibility, e-assessment, student perceptions, and various learning applications use such as VOIP, videoconferencing 3-D virtual worlds, podcasting, mini-games, e-portfolios, and of course ‘learning objects’ (whatever they are…) Even GPS and Interactive Whiteboards have a small presence. I was also interested to note that there are only 6 papers featuring the term ‘distance learning’ (although several more imply it) – but ..... could this be a sign of the decline of this old term? Has distance education now been overhauled in the glittering world of learning technology? We shall see….