Education in Second life
Anna Peachey, The Open University (UK)
a.peachey@open.ac.ukAka Elsa Dickins
Introduction
The multidimensional qualities of Second Life hold significant potential for rich, immersive teaching and learning activities, providing semi-authentic contexts for simulation, role play and experiential learning. However whilst there is much information to be drawn from a wider context of teaching and learning online and/or with virtual reality, our knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning in this specific environment is in its infancy. This article outlines some of the education projects currently underway in Second life, and looks ahead to the long term future of education in virtual worlds.
Background
Universities and other training, teaching and learning-focused groups from across the globe have established a substantial educational community in Second life, paying Linden Labs a special ‘Educators’ reduced rate for virtual islands on which they create a variety of campus spaces, ranging from traditional real-world metaphors of buildings and lecture halls to strange and fantastical forests, gardens and extraterrestrial landscapes. The educational community is lively, with many educational links and resources available through the Second Life website as well as countless individual and organisational webpages, blogs and wikis. Educators have access to several very active mailing lists for the vigorous exchange of ideas and information, the most popular of which is commonly known as the SLED-List (Second Life Educators)1. There are frequent educational events ranging in scale from small seminars and in-world meetings to fully immersive virtual conferences, often including live link ups with real-world conferences and settings.
Education projects are represented in a much smaller but equally thriving community working with young people in the Second Life Teen Grid, where adults are only allowed as named and verified members of a specific project, and must demonstrate a clear criminal record check before being allowed to join the grid.
Education in Second Life
By far the largest educational presence currently in Second Life is the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international not-for-profit group of close to 250 learning-focused organisations with a shared interest in the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.2 The NMC as an organisation promotes, supports and encourages innovation in collaboration, a goal that lends itself particularly well to what many educators believe to be one of the big enablers of teaching and learning in Second Life: learner collaboration. The NMC has held numerous in-world classes, conferences, demonstrations and exhibitions as well as hosting visiting speakers such as the social and cultural commentator and academic Howard Rheingold.3
Figure 1: Presentation space on NMC Virtual Campus
In a January 2008 press release NMC CEO Dr. Larry Johnson commented that, "2007 was a year in which campuses made their entries into Second Life in great numbers, and as a result there is a considerable critical mass of educational institutions now existent in Second Life — more than 1200 educational islands were created in 2007, and the number of educational projects launched last year in Second Life is many times that. [...] 2008 also promises to see strong educational use of Second Life, but with a new focus. Projects in 2008 are much more likely to be about creating learning experiences than virtual campuses. This is, in my view, a very positive trend, and reflects the increasing skill and understanding of virtual spaces among educators across the board."4
Sometimes the environment is everything – as in the case of The Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness program (IBAPP), created to provide training in bioterrorism and emergency response for Idaho's healthcare workforce.5 IBAPP uses two islands (Asterix and Obelix) to a design influenced by dioramas more often associated with tabletop exercises, one providing a virtual town and the other a virtual hospital, and facilitators can trigger any natural disaster or bioterrorist emergency with the click of a mouse. This teaching activity, delivered both via in-world role play and dissemination of and reflection on machinima output, is as immersive as it gets, and has significant real-world consequences if it fails to deliver its learning outcomes. It is important to put such activity in context, and note that the team are using a wide ranging variety of methodologies such as webcasts, seminars and on-site training to work with and around the virtual tabletop ‘[...] to touch [the] hard-to-reach, rural, and busy health-care professionals.’6, employing Second Life as a tool rather than a driver for their training.
Another immersive project is run by Professor Mary Anne Clark, a lecturer in genetics at Texas Wesleyan University.7 Clark has created in-world laboratories for her students to run virtual experiments, where for example they are asked to observe and predict the results of cross breeding between cats, programmed with a degree of randomness so that the experiment does not produce the same outcome if repeated. Clark has used some buildings on her island but this may simply be in order to increase her available floor space. Otherwise the experiments, exhibits and working models - including a DNA sequencer, a human chromosome and a giant model of a Eukaryotic Cell with the notice ‘To enter the cell right click on the plasma membrane’ – are open to the Second Life elements. The relatively minimal landscaping means that the focus is on the exhibits and activities rather than the environment.
Figure 2: Cross-breeding for virtual cats and the Chromosome Cafe
Not all the immersive environments in Second Life that can be used for teaching and learning were designed with this in mind. Laukosargas Svarog (her Second Life name) is a software engineer in the UK games industry, who created her island over the course of a year whilst on a maternity break from work. The island of Svarga is a fully-functional artificial ecology system. All the flowers, plants, birds and insects on the island are unique to Second Life, and they grow and replicate by themselves within a simulated weather system. “If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours, […] Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated. And it's the transfer of pollen that signals the plants to drop seeds. The seeds blow in the wind, and if they land on good ground according to different rules for each species, they grow when they receive rain water from the clouds. It's all interdependent.”8 The island is open to anyone,
and visitors can take an automated tour cart from the island arrival point to learn about the flora and fauna of the ecosystem.
Figure 3: A unique tree on Svarga Island
Some education projects are more actively exploring the best way to exploit the pedagogical value of Second Life. For example Annabeth Robinson, better known in-world as Angrybeth Shortbread, of Leeds College of Art and Design in the UK, heads up a group of students on the Design for Digital Media Degree who are known as the Collective.9 Students and staff in the Collective lead active explorations and exploitations of Second Life alongside (and often overlaid with or by) other technologies. Angrybeth keeps a very active web presence with a blog and wiki, and is a well known figure in the UK Second Life educator’s community. The island created by Angrybeth’s Collective has various spaces that teachers and students can meet and work in, along with a cinema for showcasing moving image work produced by the group.
One of the best known education projects in the Second Life teengrid is Schome – ‘Not school, not home: Education for an information age’.10 The Schome project is hosted at the Open University in the UK, who also have two active islands on the main grid (SchomeBase and Open Life)11. The Schome community has
developed over the last four years utilising a range of media, including a wiki, a forum, Flashmeeting, Skype, and face to face meetings alongside the Schome Park archipelago in the Second Life teen grid. Within the Schome community the most active participants are those who are members of Schome Park, where one of the key aims of the project is to empower young people to take responsibility for the development of the island (and the activities on it). Schome staff are providing a variety of learning opportunities in formal and informal scheduled events but, significantly, see the greater part of their role as creating the basic
infrastructure and support to provide a context for the young people to come up with their own ideas and governance for Schome Park. This means that activities are often led or driven by the younger members of the community, and an abundance of interesting research material is being generated by the project. Another unusual aspect to the Schome group is that, since Phase 2 of the project, the Sparkers (the teen group as opposed to staff) need only to be within the right age range and have their identity verified through their school or college in order to be eligible to join the community.12 This has led to the germination of a global and multicultural participant-base – Schome is currently working on adding members from Nepal and China amongst others.
Figure 4: A meeting in Schome Park – the standing figure is a student, 2 of those seated are staff
Future Trends
It is significant that three of the five case studies above are actively using other tools for communication within their learning communities (and of the other two one has no formal learning community and the other is used to supplement real-world classes). Whilst Second Life has significant potential for teaching and learning in many different ways, most educators are mindful that it also has drawbacks and limits and is best used in a greater context of networked support. One of the fastest growing movements to have come out of this need is known as Sloodle, ‘[...] an Open Source project which aims to develop and share useful, usable, desirable tools for supporting education in virtual worlds, making teaching easier. Through engagement with an active community of developers and users, the Sloodle project hopes to develop sound pedagogies for teaching across web-based and 3D virtual learning environments. Sloodle integrates the Second Life multi-user virtual environment and the Moodle learning-management system.’13 Sloodle supports teaching and learning in Second Life by linking it with Moodle14, an open source virtual learning environment employed globally in thousands of formal and informal learning contexts. One vital aspect to this mashup is the accessibility it affords, so that people unable to access Second Life can participate in the same class as others in-world, and that class can be extended asynchronously through the Moodle forums. The Sloodle community is expanding rapidly, and there is little doubt that this is one of the most significant future trends for educators working in Second Life.
Figure 5: A Sloodle tutorial box in-world
Conclusion
Johnson’s prediction about the focus of education in Second life shifting from the creation of virtual campuses towards the creation of learning experiences may be premature. Many educational institutions are still finding their way in this virtual world, and there are countless iterations of learning cycles still to be enjoyed and endured before we can really say with any certainty what works and what doesn’t. Education and training islands range from carbon copy reproductions of the real-world, where avatars must enter lecture theatres and sit in rows to view slides delivered on virtual display boards, to fantastical spaces that stretch the metaphors beyond the familiar and challenge students to step free of any real-world context. There are arguments to be made for both, from keeping learners within their comfort zone to creating a truly unique learning experience, and many providers are championing a slow and steady approach that blends the learning activity with the environmental setting in the best possible combination for the student experience. Sitting in rows inside a virtual building, for example, can play havoc with an avatar’s camera angle as well as being perhaps a bit un-exciting, and attending class in an alien castle in the sky could be more than a little
teaching students, and if the alien castle is loaded with mathematical conundrums and challenges for a school geometry lesson, then there is a significant sense of purpose to these settings. The more we learn about ourselves and our students within Second Life, the better placed we are to create environments and activities that work together and complement each other to create a truly rounded student experience.
References
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4. http://sl.nmc.org/2008/01/16/nmc-virtual-worlds-2008/ [last accessed 08/02/09] 5. http://irhbt.typepad.com/play2train/ [last accessed 08/02/09]
6. http://www.isu.edu/departments/irh/IBAPP/more.shtml [last accessed 08/02/09] 7. http://slnn.com/article/genepool/ [last accessed 08/02/09]
8. http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/05/god_game.html [last accessed 08/02/09] 9. http://ddmcollective.blogspot.com/ [last accessed 08/02/09]
10. http://www.schome.ac.uk [last accessed 08/02/09]
11. http://www.open.ac.uk/colmsct/projects/openlife[last accessed 08/02/09]
12. http://schome.open.ac.uk/wikiworks/index.php/Main_Page[last accessed 08/02/09] 13. http://www.sloodle.org[last accessed 08/02/09]
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