In the run up to LILAC 2009 (and also because it was taking place just around the corner at Strathclyde), I thought the CETIS-Eduserv-VW2009 would be of interest in relation to previous posts on Second Life and legal education, especially as Martin Jones and myself will be giving an overview of our own experiences at LILAC later this month.
Specifically, the event aimed to explore the following issues:
- What are the teaching situations for which Virtual Worlds are best suited?
- What are the policy issues which arise from using Virtual Worlds for Learning and Teaching?
- What are the technical characteristics/constraints of Virtual Worlds which have an impact on their use in Learning and Teaching?
The first speaker, Sheila Webber owns the Infolit iSchool in Second Life, and is at the University of Sheffield in real life! Much of the presentation related to Inquiry-based learning illustrating that educators will go into SL with their own approaches to teaching, and not all teaching situations can be brought about in a virtual world.
Second up was David White from the Open Habitat project at Oxford University, who presented a really interesting diagram on the relationship between shared endeavours and the sense of being part of a group. I'll try and get a copy from slideshare after the event closes (here it is!):
What I took from the diagram is that some tools encourage 'eventedness' (the sense of being part of a shared endeavour) and others may be good at giving participants a sense of being with others (co-presence). So, for example, discussion forums can only go so far in terms of participants feeling that they really belong to a group, but can go reasonably high up the collaborative and productive scale. MUVEs, however, can range from really good experiences to really bad experiences! This means that the educator has to take the role of making sure that students are heading towards the top right of the graph so that they experience as much as possible, the sense of belonging and communal collaboration.
I was also inspired by the concept of 'latent presence'. Often, when the user leaves the virtual environment there is no trace of their presence or activity unless resources are built or developed. This suggested to me that we should aim to be constructive in terms of ensuring that something should be retainable from a virtual world session. If it is purely seminar discussion, the the transcript could be kept for further reflection and analysis on an individual level, or as the next group activity. Perhaps a blog or other commenting mechanism could be used to record the activity in real time.
Before the lunchbreak, Fiona Littleton from VUE at Edinburgh University looked at learning spaces - Holyrood Park on their SL island can be booked out for other university groups to use by booking slots. This is something that would be far less common with real rooms and real resources, but can be commended for virtual spaces which perhaps have other resources built-in to enhance the use of virtual spaces.
After lunch, an overview on policy was given by Ren Reynolds from the Virtual Policy Network. Looking at the concept of fear, the following were addressed:
- Parental fear
- Student fear
- Fear of students
- Fear of law
- Establishment
Newspaper reports and negative editorials were discussed with the audience and seemed to be common concerns across universities. Codes of conduct and the transference of common or sharable 'blogging standards' into virtual worlds may need to be facilitated.
Some of the twitters from the event can be seen here, and the tag #cevw09 was used so many other blogs and reviews can be identified as they appear. The session was also run concurrently in Second Life and here's a snapshot of the attendees:
Recent Comments