Phd

Quantitative learning outcome of the MIL course

Mariis1 Comment

12 students participated full time in the MIL course, one student divided his attention between SL and the second analytical object, the serious learning game, Global Conflicts, and 2 students who also chose Global Conflicts attended some SL activities ad hoc. The official learning goals of the course (regardless of choice) according to the MIL curriculum were;

The intellectual competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • identifying, reflecting on and appraising the scientific basis of ICT and didactic design formulating
  • analyzing and assessing problems within ICT and didactic design.

The professional competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • understanding and appraising theories and methods relating to didactic design
  • analyzing and assessing ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments on the basis of theories and methods relating to didactic design.

The practical competence goals are that the student attains competence in:

  • analyzing and assessing ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments on the basis of theories and methods relating to didactic design.

Besides these official goals, I stated that it was my hope that this SL course would force the students to reconsider familiar didactic elements and think out-of-the-box. When trying to articulate his learning outcome, one of the students suggested that this could be done in answering the following 3 questions; 1) What is your most significant learning outcome? 2) Has it been hard? And 3) How does this course differ from other MIL courses?

I think the second question is rather interesting and closely connected to the last question, but also to SL as a medium itself. It is widely recognized that SL has a very steep learning curve and that it takes a lot of time and effort to get accustomed to SL. Based on the general course findings and especially the many interesting discussion I had with the students I will return to this matter in a future post. In this post, I wish to focus on the course design and what this meant for the quantitative learning outcome in general.

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Didactic Design Discussion … on embodiment

The course is accredited with 4 ECTS points, which means that there is an expected workload of approx. 100 hours. MIL students are used to working hard, so I was a bit surprised when the student posed this particular question. On the other hand, I knew that this course was quite different from other MIL courses because of all the synchronous activities. Initially I told the students that I only expected them to participate in one synchronous activity in-world during the course, but all of them chose to participate in several. One of the major challenges of conducting distance education for further studies is to maintain a high level of flexibility. The MIL students are all attending the programme in their spare time from work and life in general, and most activities are asynchronous so that the students can chose to participate whenever they can fit it into their busy schedules. Since I knew that many of the students wouldn’t be able to attend on specific days, I tried to plan the activities covering most days of the week, including the weekends so that they had lots to choose from. From November 5th to December 15th there were a total of 25 activities with duration between 1-3 hours. The flip side to this was of course the risk that some students felt that they missed important stuff whenever they weren’t able to attend our in-world meetings. Furthermore the assessment criteria (a minimum of 3 postings in our asynchronous platform) of the course conflicted with the general workload. The students were asked to post their reflections in 5 different conferences covering essential didactic elements;

  1. Didactics and target groups – 32 postings by 12 students and me (8). Approx. 40 A4 pages.
  2. Orientation and navigation – 8 postings by 5 students and me (1). Approx. 8 A4 pages.
  3. Interaction – 0 posts!
  4. Learning processes – 68 posting by 11 students and me (21). Approx. 83 A4 pages.
  5. Audio-visuals – 9 postings by 2 students and me (4). Approx. 15 A4 pages.

Given that the official criteria was 3 postings corresponding to 3 A4 pages the degree of student activity has been uniquely high also considering the fact that besides these asynchronous discussions we had many, many long discussion in-world! I must say that I’m quite impressed :-)

Even though all students didn’t comment in all of the conferences it was clear from our in-world discussions that they had been reading and reflecting on all of the postings. We also had a general meta conference, which I mainly used to inform the students of upcoming activities and the students posted thoughts they could not fit into one of the 5 above mentioned conferences – there was a total of 232 postings there! Finally there was a conference where the students presented their avatars.

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Visiting The Connectivism Course in Chilbo …

MIL students are generally recognized for their huge engagement, but I have to say that this course has exceeded even my highest expectations and it quite funny since the students initially expressed anxiety and fear of not meeting the official criteria.

The assessment criteria and the workload were topics we discussed eagerly during the course, and these are didactic elements that I need to reconsider, not only because the workload may prevent some students from choosing this course in the future, but also because 3 asynchronous postings may not be the best way to show learning potential and outcome of SL. I will return to this in a future post where I’ll be evaluating the different in-world activities also. For now I’ll plunge into the students own articulations of their qualitative learning outcomes and return asap … but based on the course activities I think its safe to say that all the students reached the course goals admirably!
/Mariis

Visit to Pop Art Lab/ Claus Uriza

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On Thursday November 20th the MIL students and I visited Claus Uriza, CEO of Pop Art Lab. As usual we met in the Holodeck before going to see Claus. Two of the students had been shopping animations and Franko could not help showing off his new swimming moves :-) I have to say that I truly appreciate this ability to attend meetings in new ways. Even though we’re engaged in serious academic studies, I do not really get why it always has to be so conservative and boring … show me hard evidence that learning only occurs when it hurts, and I might change my mind! Until then … let’s have fun while working!

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Swimming … or rather floating moves :-)

At 11:30 AM SLT we showed up at Pop Art Lab, which has just been redesigned so that Claus and his team can start having live music events recorded by SLCN.tv – I think they start out on December 5th, but you can always check out Claus’ blog for updates.

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Checking out Claus’ office in-world …

Claus gave us a tour of the Lab while talking about his project in-world. Claus’ mission is to give residents musical experiences combining the latest music releases with live events, the latter usually during weekends.

The Pop Art Lab consists of 4 Domes playing the latest releases in different genres – here we are in the Pop section listening to Grace Jones still going strong :-)

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When planning the in-world activities I was initially completely focused on showing the students educational sites, but I quickly realized that such a focus would deprive the students of valuable lessons and most likely they would not be able to grasp the huge potential of SL.  So I’ve arranged for us to meet with various personalities and in many different settings. Visiting Claus not only provided the students with factual information on how to manage sound in-world, it also showed the students the sort of dedication and community, which I personally find most appealing about SL. Also it was an opportunity to talk a bit about the SLCN.tv – not many newcomers realize that we actually have our own TV station … quite remarkable for a virtual world!

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Part of the studio where SLCN.TV will be recording live music events

We ended the tour in an underwater world below the Lab, and this really was Franko’s right element!

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When Claus left we debriefed the visit and I tried to explain some of my didactical thoughts and arguments, and it seemed as if the students appreciated this type of visit very much. I guess they too can become a bit tired of speaking about education all the time :-) It was also the first time for most of the students to meet and talk to somebody other than me (and our 2 guest teachers Dr. Asp and Heidi Ballinger), and of course that’s always interesting. Most of the students are still a bit shy when it comes to connecting with others in-world and I tried to explain how I felt when first entering the world.

Earlier on Claus had expressed his sentiment of SL being a very friendly and easy going place – and I agree. For sure we sometimes hear of unpleasant incidents and I too have been griefed, but in general SL truly is a nice place to be.

These first weeks of the MIL course I’ve arranged for us to meet with Danish in-world friends, and I want to thank them for helping me out. Next week we’ll start visiting some of my international friends, and both the students and I are looking forward to doing that :-)

/Mariis

Challenges of flexibility and facilitation

Mariis1 Comment

Last week we had a 3 day f2f seminar at the MIL programme, where my colleagues and I introduced the 4th module on Ict and Educational design – the module in which I facilitate a blended in-world course. Saturday afternoon I started out by giving a lecture on remediation and redidactization focusing on respectful and radical design in SL both regarding people, places and processes. After the introduction we had a hands-on workshop where basic SL functionalities were explained and tested. 13 students out of 25 signed up for the course, and 5 other students, who chose to analyze a learning environment different from SL, wish to participate informally which I allow.

The course in fact started on November 1st but the period up until the seminar is mainly reserved for the students’ preparation (reading, creating an account and joining the in-world group). I did however plan some “Get off to a good start” in-world activities before the seminar, but only a few students attended these. All the different activities in-world are voluntary and I only demand that each student participates at least once in scheduled in-world activities during the course. The argument is that the MIL programme is intended to be flexible in order for the students to be able to participate even though the majority is full time employed, and several mandatory online activities would challenge that flexibility. Furthermore as part of a problem based pedagogy the students are expected to explore and investigate on their own and in their study groups. This pedagogical strategy is possible not least because the students are adults, highly motivated, comfortable with taking responsibility for their own learning and in most cases appreciate the freedom of choice. Last year when I did the same course, a handful of the students chose to participate in several of the activities, and I expect that to be the case this year also.

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Meeting on November 16th – showing some students the Connectivism Village

Promoting and ensuring student autonomy is a cardinal point of my (and MILs) pedagogical philosophy, nevertheless this strategy poses some challenges as seen from the facilitators point of view. I’ve planned roughly 3 activities pr. week and they last between 2-3 hrs, and so far I’ve been the only facilitator. (This week we’ll start having activities with in-world colleagues). One of the challenges of this “buffet pedagogy” is that I never know how many students will attend, and since the sessions are relatively long some students choose to participate in parts of the activity only. Not knowing the exact number of participants calls for flexible planning thus challenging me to let go of my usual need for control and structure.

A different challenge of this flexibility for me as a facilitator is that I constantly have to be aware of new students joining and try to include them simultaneously during the sessions. A good feature for this of course is the IM, which makes it possible to text without interrupting the whole group. This is something not possible in real life, and I do think that it is quite smart, but I also have to say that it is fairly demanding on the facilitator. I suppose the ability to text chat with several participants simultaneously is a skill that “just” needs to be learned, but I can’t help wonder if this rather complex way of communicating would discourage some potential teachers from trying out SL or similar environments.

The last 2 Mondays I’ve been attending Metanomics meetings with students, and on these occasions I had respectively 10 and 12 active chat windows, so my immediate impression was that I spent most of my time paying attention to the chats rather than the speakers. The main reason for attending these Metanomics meetings was to show the students this particular way of communicating, “Constructive Cacophony” as Bloomfield calls it, so the content wasn’t all that important. I will return to the content issue in another post, but for now I just want to reflect on the possibility of using text and voice simultaneously. At the Metanomics meetings Bloomfield is assisted by moderators, and if we transfer this to an educational setting the solution could be to have more than one teacher or perhaps a TA.

Another option is to limit the text chat and ask participants to use a certain group chat only. This might work well, and we’ll experiment with that down the line, but here in the beginning of the course, I believe that it is very important not to limit the students’ use of IMs to the facilitator. It’s my clear impression that the IMs serve as an invaluable support giving especially less confident students a communication channel where they do not need to “expose” their inexperience and/or insecurity. The trick here – just like in real life – is to create an atmosphere where no questions are too small or too stupid. On the other hand, it is also my impression that the students choose IM because they experience this as being more polite than interrupting the activity with personal /individual questions, and this may be because we have not yet reached consensus on how to communicate in these in-world situations.

Finally, from another perspective this possibility to pose individual questions during group activity may enhance inclusion in a way not possible without technology mediation, and this is truly where I begin to see SL as a strong learning environment … even though it initially challenges both the students and the facilitator :-)

/Mariis

In-world course next 5 weeks

Mariis8 Comments

From November 1st – December 15th I’ll be facilitating a blended course using SL at The Danish Master programme in ICT and Learning. This course serves a primary case in my PhD-project, and I did a pilot study using the same course last fall together with 22 students. This is a brief description of the course as I’ve planned it this fall.

Educational setting – Master programme on ICT and Learning
The Master programme in ICT and Learning (MIL) was established in 2000 as a shared educational enterprise on equal terms between five Danish Universities, as an attempt to enhance collaboration between universities and working life within further and continued education.The Master programme is research based; teachers come from the five different research environments at the collaborating universities, and all participants (teachers, students and administration) are comfortable with participation in both small and large scale research projects. Hence, characteristic for MIL is that the education continuously tries to reflect and change its own activity by combining research and practice.

The Master programme is blended by a combination of virtual periods and 4 face-to-face seminars pr. study year. Between seminars the teaching and learning processes are conducted in the conventional 2D virtual learning environment, FirstClass combined with various web 2.0 technologies. Despite the fact that the five universities traditionally have represented different pedagogical cultures, MIL was from the beginning build fundamentally on the pedagogical philosophy of Problem Oriented Project Pedagogy, which is a Danish version of Problem Based Learning.

MIL consists of four course modules, a module on ICT tools and two long project periods. Each course module covers a theoretical and practical approach to its field of study combining ICT with

1) Learning

2) Interaction Design

3) Organizational Learning

4) Educational Design

The progression of the programme evolves in interplay between theory, practice and experiences of the participants.

Student profile
The goal of MIL is to upgrade people working with ICT and/or learning, both in the public and in the private sector. An internal investigation conducted in 2004 gave the following profile; a typical MIL student has an average age of 45, and is married with two children in the teens. The majority of the students work fulltime. Their educational background usually stems from the humanities, and all our students have bachelor degrees or equivalent, and about 75% have higher level educations. For most of our students their primary education is more than ten years old, which often means that is has been a while since they last were students and many of them have no or little experience with blended learning. All of them are quite competent regarding general ICT-skills, and nearly 20% are highly competent technicians. About 5% of the latter have never been professionally engaged in teaching and learning. When it comes to working experience almost all of our students (95%) are experienced teachers at different levels in the educational system and in the private sector, and it is not unusual to meet students with more than ten years of teaching experience. Nearly all the participants come with a background from leadership in organization or project groups.

Main motivation for entering the MIL programme is to increase competencies regarding ICT and learning and create intersections between the two. Another strong motivation for entering the MIL programme is the wish to connect with new networks in the field.

Course setting – ICT and Educational Design
The 4th module of the MIL programme “ICT and Educational Design” consists of 2 courses, and it is in the first course that we use SL:

  1. Educational design, ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments; theory and analysis
  2. Educational design, ICT based learning products and virtual learning environments; concept and implementation

Though separate, the two courses should be regarded as connected, in the sense that the learning outcome of the first course should be more or less applied in the second course. In the first course the students usually are provided with 2-3 optional virtual learning environments between which they are asked to choose one as analytical object. Throughout the MIL programme the students are introduced to different virtual learning environments covering a wide range of mainly conventional 2D asynchronous and synchronous examples. Therefore the learning environments chosen for this course always represent the more unconventional trends, since it is our experience that these often provide more rich and radical settings, which can stimulate reflections. This study year the students can choose either the 3D virtual game Global Conflicts Palestine or SL as their analytical object. Regardless of choice, the students are expected to discuss and analyze the learning environment on the basis of the 5 following mandatory topics:

Pedagogical design and target groups
Orientation and navigation
Interaction
Learning processes
Audio-visuals

SL setting and activities
MIL does not own land in-world, but we rent 2 locations on the island, Wonderful Denmark, but these locations are mainly used as meeting places. As mentioned above the students are expected to explore and analyze SL form a pedagogical point of view. In order to show the students the rich potential, I arrange tours to different locations where we meet with the owner/designer, have a tour and discuss pedagogical topics. Afterwards the students are expected to reflect on the locations, and document their findings in the asynchronous platform, FirstClass. Naturally the students can tour on their own, locate interesting design and share these experiences.

Besides touring, I’ve planned the following activities:

  • Get off to a good start – meetings where we focus on basic in-world skills
  • A building class running for 3 days with guest teachers Doctor Asp & Heidi Ballinger
  • Didactic Design Discussions – 4 sessions where we’ll focus on course litterature related to the students findings
  • Friday Bar – social meetings just for fun
  • Students Tour – students plan a tour based on their discoveries
  • Christmas celebrations and course finalization

And based on my experiences from last year we’ll have a lot ad hoc meetings, whenever the students need a helping hand :-)

“Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods”
By quoting Aristotle from Nichomachean Ethics I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my in-world colleagues and friends both from Denmark and the rest of the world for helping me out in showing the potentials of SL – I couldn’t do it without you guys!

As the course progresses I’ll return with posts on our experiences ..

/Mariis

Designing for Learning in SL – RL seminar

Mariis2 Comments

Monday October 13th I attended a RL seminar at Roskilde University arranged by the Danish research project Sense-making strategies and user-driven innovations in virtual worlds: A critical analysis of virtual market dynamics, cultural and social innovation and knowledge construction. Focus was on design for learning in virtual worlds – especially in SL. Here are some of my personal highlights …

Hunsinger, Jensen, Holmberg, Lester, Doyle & Beaubois

(C) Lis Faurholt

Sisse Siggaard Jensen gave a short presentation of the research project, and what I find most interesting is that the project will be empirically driven and based on collaboration between universities, institutions and private companies, hereby providing an opportunity for researches and practitioners to benefit from each other. Read more about the project here. I’m not part of the research project, but do collaborate with several of the people involved, and since the research on virtual worlds still is rather limited in Denmark, I think it’s pertinent that we join forces – so many thanks to the team for making this event public :-)

John Lester opened with a keynote on SL. Before joining Linden Lab in 2005, Lester worked with creating online communities for both patients and medical staff at the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and at Harvard Medical School. Lester’s background within Neurology gives him a really interesting take on learning, which in his term is bound by biology. As far as I understand Lester, this means that we as humans used to navigate real life actually may find many strengths and advantages in 3D virtual worlds as a sort of default predisposition. Some of the characteristics of humans such as recognizing patterns, navigating in 3D, communicating with other people, creating communities and using tools do seem very applicable or transferable (not without problems though ;-) From a learning theoretical point of view this really is interesting, and I would love to hear Lester talk more specifically on this!

A keyword for Lester when talking about SL was sharing – SL is all about shared experience, and shared places. Elaborating on this, Lester identified several examples of shared places based on different modes of reality:

  • Shared places based on reality – e.g. replicas of RL places
  • Shared places based on intangible reality – e.g. molecular structures
  • Shared places based on soon-to-be reality – e.g. prospects
  • Shared places based on imaginative reality – e.g. art performances

Returning to biology Lester pointed out that our brains appriciate or even demand places and faces, that we crave emotional bandwidth, and that education in SL therefore should be seen at the intersection between people and places reminding us that there are humans behind most avatars.

Lester also provided some updated stats on SL:

30.000 CPU’s (regions)
2.000 square kilometers
540.000 residents spending an average of 56 h/m
Average age of SL resident: 35 yrs.
Gender neutral
65% of residents outside North America

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lester twice now, and I have to say that he really incorporates the SL community feel – no wonder he is such a popular Linden :-)

Next up was Denise Doyle from University of Wolverhampton. Doyle has been involved in The Immersed in Learning Project since the beginning in 2007. Creating the Kriti Island has been part of this project in order to have a place for collaboration both nationally and internationally. Kriti Island has also hosted a very successful artist lead project on Reality Jam – an interactive exhibition contemplating creative practices. Doyle has a special research interest in interactive narratives and is using SL as a place for experimenting with different theoretical concepts and as a teaching and learning tool in undergraduate programmes in Digital Media.

Jeremy Hunsinger, from the Centre for Digital Discurses and Culture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, whom you may know from the weekly SLEd Lessons in Second Life, did a talk on Interaction and Interactivity in SL pinpointing the many boring, non interactive builds in-world and addressing some of the technical problems students may encounter when entering SL. Hunsinger reminded us what a dreadful experience SL can be if it is cluttered by technical problems and if you only explore the world on your own. I agree that SL is best experienced together with others. SL is about collaboration and community first and foremost. So many places in SL are still just pointless replica of RL with no interactivity other that clicking on notecards or being redirected to out-of-world websites. I do feel that realistic rebuild can be appropriate, but respectful remediation just shouldn’t be the prevailing principle for in-world learning design – where is the innovation in that?

With his avatar rezzed back in 2005 Terry Beaubois certainly is one of the more experienced and persistent residents, and it was really illuminating to learn more about Beaubois’ work and research. As Director of Creative Research Lab (CRLab), Montana State University Beaubois has a vision of bringing together academic staff and students from different disciplines both RL and in-world. Being a RL professor of Architecture Beaubois intuitively started out by creating a spectacular place for his students in-world, when it suddenly dawned on him that he actually was depriving them of perhaps some of the most valuable lessons in doing so, and so he tore down the build and let the students do the work. Sharing control and responsibility with his students seemed to be an important part of Beaubois’ pedagogical philosophy and I really enjoyed meeting a teacher who focused so much on the students and their needs. In some projects Beaubois and colleague Larry Johnson have brought together students from disciplines such as art, architecture, and film, and he proudly showed us this little film created as a result of this collaboration:

Final speaker of the day was Kim Holmberg from the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi in Finland. Holmberg is an expert in social media and Library 2.0 and was the first university lecturer to use SL in education. Holmberg reported from a study he did together with colleague Isto Huvila, where they used SL as an alternative learning platform in distance education. Holmberg and Huvila found that SL cannot replace face-to-face, but as an alternative platform SL proved to be more “fun”, and they wish to study this particular aspect further. Holmberg was very interested in the avatar phenomena and how this kind of representation influences the learning processes. Holmberg also focused on the fact that we persist (especially as newbies) on bringing RL behavior into SL even though it doesn’t make much sense – e.g. when we sit down or face the one speaking. In this aspect, I think Holmberg’s talk supplemented Lester’s initial ideas of biological and cultural predispositions very well.

Summarizing the many interesting talks and discussions isn’t easy, but I was personally confirmed in some of my own findings and I was reminded of the complexity of design for learning (in general!).
SL – as a 3D learning platform – has a huge potential, but there still are many critical aspects to consider. The entrance and beginning phase as a newbie in SL can be filled with technical problems that need to be addressed both in- and out-world. Offering a possibility for humans, represented as avatars, to meet synchronously across time zones and geographical place, SL gives us a unique chance to explore communication, interaction, embodiment and many other natural and cultural phenomena. So far, in my personal opinion, much educational design in SL does not take advantage of the new possibilities to design learning environments NpIRL, but I do think this is only natural. When entering a new environment we bring our cultural and biological predispositions/experiences primarily in order to survive, to find “common ground” both literally and figuratively speaking. Only when the new environment has become habitual, I think we’ll be able to cross the intersections between the many modes and possibilities of reality. Since research in learning in virtual worlds like SL is still in its infancy, I’m quite confident that the future will bring exciting, mind-blowing examples of design for learning in 3D – and the great speakers clearly showed us how to continue this endeavor …

/Mariis