Virtually Transforming Classrooms
Posted on November 10, 2008 by Hamish
Filed Under Teaching, Web 2.0 tools
The following is the first of three installments ETAs Geoff and I will be covering about ‘virtual worlds’ over the course of the next week or so. As the question of whether ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life may have a constructive application within the classroom, we thought the concept deserved another look.
In recent years we have witnessed the Web itself alter in character from being a mechanism of communication and distribution to one of contribution and collaboration. We now live and interact in a drastically different way of things than we did for the majority of the nineteen-nineties. What the Internet has grown into to facilitate this is a new quality of online experience called Web 2.0.
‘So, what, the Internet got an upgrade?’ you might ask. Well, sort of. One of our previous blog entries outlines Web 2.0: Essentially, it’s a whole new way of experiencing what you do online. Imagine your Facebook profile page without a ‘wall’ to post on, and you can imagine an Internet without Web 2.0. Instead of simply reading and digesting what is on a webpage, you can contribute to the material, share it, and collaborate with others at the same time. This could be through blogs (yay!), YouTube videos, or even such interactive and collaborative Web environments as Carleton’s WebCT (think Discussions and Whiteboard sections). In short, Web 2.0 is one of the main contributing factors that has elevated Web experience to the needed level in order to necessarily accommodate what virtual worlds have to offer. This is the beginning of the digital integration of your virtual profile and identity
Enter the world of the post-secondary Learning Management System. Sure, it’s multi-faceted and has a wide range of tools, but in the whole it remains difficult for students to openly collaborate in person, be creative from a distance and proactively learn class material, and all within the same environment, all at the same time. Virtual worlds like Second Life and Lively beta by Google, on the other hand, are three-dimensional (3D) environments accessible over the internet through a high-speed connection. At first, they feel like games, but after some time exploring you begin to realize that it’s not all stimulation: It’s intuitive, interactive, collaborative, and social. These virtual worlds have not only begun to attract attention from companies seeking better conferencing tools, considerable attention has been delivered by educators who believe that virtual worlds have a place in the educational discourse through ‘immersive learning’ – worlds that can offer course content in a virtual setting in different ways that students can immerse themselves in, rather than requiring the student to be adaptive to the material.
Instead of a classroom, students may appear on an island, surrounded by water and nothing for hundreds of kilometers. Each user is presented as a 3D avatar that can be custom-dressed and altered in appearance. Students can fly around, interacting with other objects and collaborating between themselves. What better way to even spend an office hour than to explore a chapter of the text with a student in three dimensions? Instructors are immediately transformed from being a uni-directional, dictatorial speaker at the front of the classroom, to a support and orientation mechanism who helps guide students through learning. No doubt in the future it may expand to encompass a wider range of students – potentially as wide as kindergarten to grade 12.
A professor of Computer Sciences at Colorado Technical University, Cynthia M. Calongne has called on Second Life to expand the horizons of what nine of her classes’ curricula have to offer. According to Calongne, “Virtual world classrooms use a mix of media-rich course materials”, and “since a student’s understanding of complex content may be hazy, offering information in a variety of ways allows students to use the information and virtual environment around them to solve problems and create solutions for their projects.” Suddenly, students are a part of the learning and not just mindlessly assimilating concepts before storing this information in the back of their minds for the long term. Now, they can experience it.
Another difficulty for students is trying to squeeze into their preferred university programs because of limited classroom space available. Typically, a lower supply of classroom space will inevitably lead to a higher demand, and increased cost. The only logical step is to build more buildings, but this is a stubborn approach to a much larger problem. In virtual worlds, an entire island can be created for your class, and depending on the application, it can be an economical. For eighty percent of Penn State’s 80,000 students who live off campus, professors and instructors taking after Cynthia Calongne could save their students a lot of money in travel expenses, not to mention cut down on required classroom space and resources, commonly the under distributed commodities of learning. Suddenly, ‘distance learning’ within virtual worlds is raising more eyebrows than ever. Besides, why not throw a little fun in it, too?
This third-person perspective appearing in software has traditionally been mostly prominent in video games, that immediately and seamlessly transforms you from one reality to another. As software has been the greatest single contributor to the human experience with computers’ Graphical User Interface, we have now accelerated into a league virtually separate from the PC, and from the operating system. Computer technology has reached a level in which the ellusion of an alternate existence for ourselves has quickly become a reality. Such domains as Second Life have the capacity to make it happen for educators with the use of 3D, constructive applications: New ways of teaching course material. What is real, and what is not? Or, more precisely, does it still matter? While some of this technology has been around for quite some time, enter a level of immersive learning that has not: virtual worlds.
Stay tuned for our upcoming post on Google’s Virtual World: Lively
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