Slashdot Mirror
Online Higher Education in Second Life?
XxtraLarGe asks: "As both a technician for my college's Distance Learning program and as an avid gamer, I have been tasked with investigating Second Life as a possible way for us to extend and enhance our online classes. I've done a lot of research, reading about what other schools have done. While I personally think it is a really cool idea, I am somewhat skeptical of the actual practicality and value of what seems to be a glorified chat room. I'd like to hear from others about their education experience in Second Life, particularly if you've been involved in setting up any online classes or taken any online classes. What sort of training would be required for the faculty, and is it really worth it?"
if so, consider the fact that you guys will look like total boners if you offer classes in a video game. I don't care if that sounds ok to you, accept that you're weird and think how it's going to sound to anyone who is in a position to hire anyone for a real job.
Ok, so Second Life is cool. It's waaaay trendy. It has the sexy.
But it is chat. Only chat. Chat that you can't archive, that is done with word bubbles, and without a moderation system. What on earth would make you think that this would be a good platform for instruction?
Additionally:
- It's a beast on the requirements side, you need a ton of 3D horsepower and a fat network pipe to use it effectively
- Large groups of avatars clustered together hammer the client, turning things into a 4fps slideshow
- Server uptime has historically not been stellar, though that may have changed since I was involved
- It's distracting as all hell - your students will spend all their time customizing/scoping out each others' avatars
Please, for the love of pete, get over the hype on Second Life.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
Well, if nothing else, at least once a day your virtual classroom could be invaded by giant, flying lessons in human anatomy.
seriously how much is second life paying slashdot to post all of this crap?
And what if it is a school for videogaming? (Programming and Animation in particular, such schools exist).
Anyway, in my experience. employers for technical jobs care about competence more than education. And if they are competent, they can tell if you have the stuff or not by the end of the interviewing process. They won't care if you did your classes standing on you head if you are good.
So I wouldn't be turned off just because a student learned through a game (a top freshman or sophomore Naval pilot trained on a Microsoft's Flight Simulator a few years back to win Naval contest that only juniors and seniors won before... can't seem to find the story right now). I remember also a Discovery Channel special where they showed surgeons being trained on a video game.
OTOH, the worst classes I have ever taken were online classes. Impersonal, the teacher (in English anyways) seems to grade papers harsher without a face to put to it, lacking in clarification or time the teacher can devote to your question, and all around sucky for areas you aren't naturally good in. No social interaction, etc.
So I would ask: does this make sense and how exactly will it help students? Is this just eye candy? Will it put up barriers for education? (I know nothing about 2nd life - Windows Only? Does it require too high end of a computer to run comfortabley?) Make that a consideration. Is the professor going to struggle with this? Could this money be spent in a better way or would it be better not to spend it at all? Is it easy? When your semesters are only 14-15 weeks, you don't want to dick around for a week or two getting things running on either side. Does it or doesn't it make sense? It should be really that simple.
Forget trying to teach people, you could probably even make a profit off it by charging people admission. I'm sure even if the concept of learning was useless, you'd make money just based on novelty.
And I wouldn't worry about lag too much, its not like people go to class in real life much, how much less will they do it in a virtual world? But as long as you keep hammering them with reminders and some sort of "diploma" for their completion of stuff they will probably show up for exams.
Best of all, since it'd be the definition of contributing to the world of second life you'd be able to trade the money you make off lucrative virtual colleges into real world cash. Its not like you have to worry about paying off any accreditation board (yet) for all the PhD's you hand out to the highest bidders.
SL is so extremely overhyped right now it seems like the new Internet of the late 1990s. People even have conference chats in there, and now we need to have schools in there as well? Get a grip guys, and focus on the quality and results of your work. Doing your work in a new and cool way isn't always better you know. The only ones who will profit from the hype is the Linden 'family'.
-- Cheers!
Having taken part in the initial beta of the Second Life voice client starting two weeks ago, I can say that when voice capabilities come to SL they will certainly make it more useful to educational purposes. The system they are testing already works well and allows for 3D stereo sound. I realize that this alone does not make it perfect for education, but it does mean that it will not simply be a "glorified chat room" much longer.
I think attempting to bring learning systems to SL does have merit. The tools actually are shaping up and aside from the universities that are already in SL, I know of a few other educational offerings that are being developed now that could demonstrate value for educators and students.
I think that this type of immersive long-distance multiuser education is here to stay. Whether it will gain public acceptance during the platform life cycle of Second Life really depends on whether innovative educators keep coming into the virtual world prepared to push it forward. So if you are looking for a polished educational software platform to set up and get rolling quickly, then SL is not for you yet. On the other hand, if you want to be a pioneer and expand your thinking on how virtual worlds can fascilitate education then you should invest a little funding in SL and see what you can make of it.
Part of the advantage of online classes is the idea that students can read the materal at their own convience and communicate though email and postings. Having a live chat can be useful but is unnecessary to have every week.
Look beyond the hype and anti-hype. Second Life is a great platform for cooperation, and it is not just about chat.
People can build things together without having to know 3-D instructions of 3-D software. People can program in a C-like syntax, event-driven. It has produced a great result in beginning programming classes, since students have been able to produce enticing results from their first 'for','while', or if... And they find an immediate use for maths (3-D movement) and for lots of algorithms.
For instance, my undergraduate students are producing in Second Life "products" that behave as if they had RFID tags and are now developing a traditional Windows application for managing e-mails sent by those "products" - without actually having to acquire RFID tags. And they are just beginning their programming.
On the other hand, one of my PhD students is trying to integrate Second Life with teaching management software like Moodle or like our in-house system. There is an open source platform for accessing Moodle content from Second Life (Sloodle), but not the opposite.
I think you two could exchange interesting view. Get in touch.
""Distance Learning" is already kind of stupid, as a big part of the college experience is learning how to interact with other people in a meaningful and productive way that simply cannot be done via chat rooms and message boards, but god damn. I'm actually going to elevate this to the dumbest thing I have ever heard come from any college anywhere. "
Well by that logic telecommuting is "kind of stupid" too since a big part of that is "learning how to interact with other people in a meaningful and productive way". Maybe the problem is that distance learning will cut into people's "let's get wasted and trash the place" face time, all on their parents dime.
Second Life in its current form is not suitable for any serious business (or education) for the following reasons:
/every single day/ and this fact alone will make any form of serious education completely impossible.
1. Unplanned outages. These have been there from the start, but for the past 3 months or so it has been horrible. Expect at least 2 to 3 days a week where no work can be done due to the fact that people can't log in, can't get to the assigned location, can't chat properly because their chat lines are coming out in jumbled order or not at all.
2. Griefers. SL is so full of these it's going to kill it off soon. The flying penisses are not a joke from some journalist and they are not the only griefer tool by far. The prime target to aim these puppies at is anything that takes (second) life too seriously. I'd say that makes serious education the #1 target.
3. Huge performance trouble on the backend, with asset servers that looked meager a year ago when there were on average 10000 concurrent users online. At this point the number of concurrent users goes over 30K every single day, and as soon as they hit 20-25K, any use of inventory items will become impossible. This includes opening scripts and notecards (the SL equivalent of books), building stuff, accessories for your avatar, etc. To make it clear, this happens
4. Total impossibility to get any form of compensation for lost items, work and/or time. Linden Labs, the company behind SL, is not interested in what you lost. The best you'll get is a quote from the EULA, if you are one of the lucky few that get a reply at all.
SL is barely suvivable as a form of entertainment at the moment. Using it as a platform for business or education is complete idiocy. Have a look at the Linden Labs SL blog and read the comments to the post relating to technical problems and outages. You'll see what I mean.
PS: I've been playing SL for about a year.
Having held two seminars in SL - at the request of other players - as well as doing the same in a real university I think I can fairly comment on how lacking SL is as a teaching medium.
The seminars were a "101" style introduction to a scientific subject. I prepared for it much as I would have any presentation. I made my standard dull yet structuring powerpoint slides, exported them as jpegs and scripted a slide viewer in LSL. The seminar was well attended, drawing 20+ attentive students to each two hour seminar. I had built a classroom facility that allowed all to sit close enough to me to be "heard" and able to see the slides. The seminar consisted of about one hour of me "chatting" through the slides and an hour's worth of Q & A. The slides and the chat transcript were made available and requested after the seminars.
Here were the advantages: it allowed people from any internet equipped, English understanding country to attend. It did communicate the information fairly well although it was a little taxing to IM chat continually and substantively for that long. The attendees were quite interested in the subject and were extremely polite; as far as I could tell, most were probably more focused on the chat and slides than on other avatars. Given the format, if I had to do it again, I'd have streamed audio from me to all of them and used the IM-style chat for receiving questions.
I needed two thing that I wouldn't have needed outside SL. The first was a sergeant-at-arms to watch for and ward off the disruptive "griefers" that uniformly invade any significant gathering of players in SL. The second was an assistant to ensure that questions were vectored into me as it is difficult to raise a virtual hand or grant the floor to a questioner.
I also was using something that in no way enhanced the quality of the seminar: SL. The slides could have just as easily been on a web page, and the dialog would have been equally well served by any generic multicast chat service. There is no inflection or gesturing that I'd have done in a real world seminar; I doubt anyone even looked at my avatar as it was sitting and IM-ing. Chat is about as narrowband a communication medium humans have ever used, and the incredible amount of bandwidth required for the 40-person-hour seminars would have been just as well served by IRC.
With the possible exclusion of 3D models for demonstration, SL affords absolutely nothing to the teaching or learning; indeed, the seminar was significantly slowed by the medium. Furthermore, these seminars were at least a year ago. These days, I'd have had to use a private simulator to ensure that 20 people could attend and the extremely overburdened "content" servers may have difficulty in getting the next slide image to the 20 attendees in the time it takes me to chat through one. The only way I have seen SL used as an effective teaching medium is to teach others to use SL itself.
If you're planning to acquire a whole sim, then you can get a nice discount on it.
I'm not sure if a whole sim would be needed though, but they have advantages over normal land as you get a lot more control over them.
"Get your degree without leaving your parents basement!"
[Insert pithy quote here]
...no.
In itself having online classes in a 3D virtual setting like Second Life is a good idea. It is surprising just how much more of a connection seeing and interacting with others in such a manner brings compared to text only. Integrated voice should serve to deepen the immersion and effectiveness of using SL as an online education platform. The real problem though, is that Second Life is not quite up to the task yet and the kind of hardware that students would need to run it well is not that widespread yet.
The hardware issue makes me think that while Second Life is not, strictly speaking, a game, it would be a good idea to create an optimized client for game consoles like the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. These two consoles have the raw computational power and graphics capabilities that should make for a smoother in world experience. Plus, game consoles are standardized platforms that are widespread and easier to support than PCs at lower cost to the user. Sony's virtual world project Home (beta soon), may point the way for Second Life on a console.
In a lot of ways, Second Life is glorified chat. But don't forget, in the early days, AOL made a lot of money off of mere chat. And now chat and online forums, etc. are being used effectively for online instruction. So it's just a matter of time and technology before many of us will be taking our seats in a 3D virtual classroom, hopefully free of flying male anatomy!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
There are a couple of points here. First, using Second Life (SL) as an environment for learning brings it under the general heading of online learning about which there is a rich literature already and which deserves some attention on your part. A readable introduction to this topic is Palloff and Pratt's "Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom", or Harasim et al. "Learning Networks : A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning On-Line " for a more scholarly treatment.
Second, there are two basic kinds of online learning: asynchronous environments and synchronous environments. SL would fall into the latter category, so that is where you should focus your attention.
Third, there is a literature on using MOOs and MUDs (the predecessors of SL and other virtual worlds) for educational purposes. This is also a good place to look for what works and what doesn't. Lynn Davie and Jason Nolan are two researchers who have written about this. As well, Edward Castronova's book, "Synthetic Worlds" also deserves a look for a general introduction to a variety of aspects of the current crop of virtual worlds.
Fourth, whoever is using SL or any other online learning environment should be made aware that online learning of any type proceeds differently than face-to-face classes. One of the biggest mistakes that an instructor can make to to try to port their f2f class directly and without change into an online environment. There is a learning curve, and there is information on what works and what doesn't (see above.) They need to look at it.
I got a law degree via distance learning and am now a patent attorney. Any type of distance learning will turn off some employers, but so what. It worked out well for me.
You WILL need voice. In my lectures, the prof talked while the class messaged. SL has the goods for doing that.
It is easy to establish a group and restrict parcel entry to that group. You can also restrict object rezing and such to the parcel owner. There are lots of trespass bots available in SL that will eject intruders and intruding objects. If any flying pricks do manage to appear, they will likely be from folks in the class - and it's easy to figure out who.
However, SL will work for lecture and demo only. There is also lots of out of class reading and test taking. SL doesn't (yet) have a capability for that type of stuff. No big deal, it sounds like you've already got that covered outside SL.
I suggest setting up a ventrillo server until SL voice is released.
Otherwise, go for it. No need for an in game class room, just stand around in a parcel. The rest is eye candy.
What? Me? Sig?
Due to a medical error that happened 20 years ago during vaccination, I can say that this is my second life. And, during my study at the university, I often used free online educational materials. So, no news.
I strongly agree with all the comments explaing why Second Life wouldn't be a good tool for online learning, but I was hoping to read some well informed detail about viable alternatives. I was thinking that something like Groove or Placeware would be a good platform for building a real online school, but I don't know enough to talk about it with authority. Anyone?
Yeah, but on how many college campuses are you in danger of being attacked by giant flying penes?
:-)
Well, outside of NJ. And they don't fly, even if they are dicks...
SL seems it should be useful though the best I've seen has been billboards to teach SL prim building, and an outdoor class on fountain making which was chaotic but neat somewhat. The teacher can pull out models from his or her inventory to show. I do have a serious problem with all the skankiness in SL (I avoid it all but it fills up the search dialog). There are beautiful places however, so a private island seems the answer there.
There are other systems perhaps. I have not used it but Squeak (language) has an online moo type graphic system with hyperportals, avatars, animation, joint editing of a document, simulations, etc. and it is aimed at education from young children and on up. I do not know how easy it is to build things. It would seem that a custom SL client might also be a very attractive way to use SL, but I don't know if I could trust a course to it if you can't run your own server. But yes I can say that I have learned useful things in those two examples in SL above, the online book and the live class.
If anybody knows other real alternatives post here.. I have had an off and on idea of building something for this kind of situation myself (custom software) but perhaps there is something out there. Of course for test taking there is, so it would seem the OP wants an interactive class. So long as everyone is sitting, no craziness is going on and people aren't chatting in class it might be useful. I also believe you can stream from a website now.. I'd be interested in seeing a tool that lets you do this from your own computer, not just prepackaged streams. I was wondering if a SHOUTcast stream could get through to SL and then I found this link, the answer is yes. It would definitely be cool if you could get each participant a similar voice stream and mix them on the server.. anybody?
Anyone know of other richer virtual worlds for education? I know mainly of experimental things, like a gardening simultion for children in a CAVE environment.
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
As a student having experienced both traditional lectures, distant learning, and e-learning, I would be very interested in learning through Second Life, and I believe that it could help me to better retain the material in my long-term memory. Remember, though, that users are the creators of the SL universe, and therefore the designers of an SL educational programme must have a good understanding of SL in order to fully use its capabilities.
Hi, I have been using virtual worlds in college classrooms for the past four years. To date, I have used Everquest, Everquest II, World of Warcraft, and Second Life, with varying degrees of success. In all of these instances, the benefits outweighed the disadvantages. A paper on my preliminary findings was published in the JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, and is available online at: http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_3/14.pdf. You might also want to check out the first-rate work of Constance Steinkuehler, Lisa Galarneau, and James Gee, as well as the discussion group for Second Life Educators.
s .html. Previous examples with SL and other virtual worlds are posted at http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/games/students.htm l, http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html and http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/worlds/students.ht ml
This semester, my students are using Second Life effectively in a course teaching concepts associated with new media, interactive marketing, and public relations. Check out the student's work at: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/metaverse/student
There is clearly a significant amount of hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life. Challenging such hype is both useful and important. However, in reading through this thread, it seems that most of the critics have not really used Google to search for information about the wide range of thoughtful experiments with virtual worlds as a teaching tool.
It would be ridiculous to suggest that Second Life is a panacea for all educational woes, and I'm not aware of a single educator who makes this claim. It seems equally unreasonable -- not to mention close-minded and unimaginative -- to suggest that Second Life is completely useless as an adjunt to time-test methods of instruction.
I encourage anyone who is monitoring this thread to take a closer look at the thoughtful and self-reflective work that is being conducted on this topic by educators around the world, and am happy to field questions -- either via e-mail or in this forum -- about my own experiences with virtual worlds in the classroom.
Professor Aaron Delwiche
Department of Communication
Trinity University
adelwich@trinity.edu