One of the things that drew me to SL to begin with was the increased educational presence in-world. A year ago, SL was very much in evidence in blogs and other media as a kind of new frontier. Colleges and universities were investing in their own islands, SL created a teen grid for the 13-to-18 year olds, and professional organizations established programs to encourage and mentor new residents. As a long time participant in virtual worlds, I was interested in how this presence was playing out — in seeing how the educational establishment was adapting to the environment.

First, while I am not a lawyer, I believe that any college or university which accepts US federal dollars and requires students to use second life as a classroom space is in violation of regulation 508 because SL is not accessible to individuals who are blind. The viewer does not appear to be accessible and the value of the environment solely as a chat room is so small as to be asinine. The argument that “we have no blind students so it’s ok” is merely a blank check for the first blind students who wants to retire without finishing his/her degree. The creation of an inaccessible school is a de facto violation of US laws governing accessibility including IDEA, and regulations 504 and 508. The much bruited installation of “voice chat” as accessibility option is merely an indication of how very little the educational establishment actually understands the issue of accessibility.

Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space. Touring campuses and educational spaces reveals instance after instance of lecture hall and virtual classroom dedicated to displaying 2D data in 3D space. Powerpoints, audio (voice and mp3 streaming), and video screens appear to be the main mechanism for education in the space.

Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game. This is particularly ludicrous when dealing with subject matter such as marketing, economics, mathematics, history, and literature. It underscores a reality that educators are still in the “doing the same old thing with new technology” stage of adoption. I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.

Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment. Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.

Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment. Ask the average educator what they’re interested in and you’ll get a variation on the response, “I want to find the best way to teach here.” Contrary to popular belief that is not the obverse of, “I want to find the best way to learn here.” It’s not surprising. They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.

Sixth, research in SL is actually NOT exclusively “media comparison” which was a surprise. There are actually people looking at some interesting things like how embodiment choices in SL effect one’s RL thinking. Much of the social research on gender is flawed because it’s based on self-report. Almost all the “personal space” research is based on the flawed assumption that people stand where they intend to stand (and not the last place a movement left them). I’m still trying to figure out what a valid “educational research question” might look like in SL.

Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.

The Educator’s Coop group is filled with people who obsess over trying to find ways to “teach” in SL. What they mean by that is “deliver instruction.” In most cases that’s “display a PowerPoint”, “show a video”, or even just, “display some text.”

My problem is that SL is the wrong environment for all those.

In the first place, PowerPoints are almost universally the wrong choice of medium to “deliver instruction” despite their endemic application.

In the second place, the power of SL is, at least in part, in the shared experience of a 3d environment — whether synchronously (together) or asynchronously (one at a time). Reading or watching a video is a two-dimensional activity and there are much better environments for delivering text, audio, and video than SL.

The fundamental issue, for me, is what I’ve dubbed the Tyranny of Synchrony. It comes from the classroom mndset that says, “We can instruct people better in a group setting where I can bring them altogether, tell them all at the same time, answer all their questions as we go.” The fundamental flaw here is that, while that might be an efficient application of instructional resource, it’s not necessarily the application that yields the best learning outcomes.

Myself, I’m getting more than a little tired of the focus on Education in SL, and I think maybe it’s time we shifted to a focus on Learning.

meanwhile

Radhika’s blog has some posts of interest

One of the questions they ask is “what you are interested in and imagine doing in SL as an educator/researcher?”

In part I’m doing it by participating in this little activity with rad and in part the answer has to be, I don’t know yet.

One of the difficulties in dealing with educators and researchers in general is that they seem to want to know what you’re going to study before you even have an idea of what might be interesting. THE big question about SL for me is “What’s a valid question?” The embodiment topic is sort of interesting. Research on “Do people treat me differently in this body or that body?” is probably interesting, but I’m not sure what to do with it. “Yes,” as an answer leaves a lot to be desired.

So, I told the interviewer (yes, you have to have a phone interview! — I hate phones), I’m not really interested in *teaching* in SL per se. I’m not sure that the idea of *teaching* in SL has a lot of merit frankly. For that matter, I’m beginning to question the merit of *teaching* in RL. I *am* interested in the power of creativity as motivator and in the issues surrounding perception of distance. I still run into people — like this group who insist on having a phone interview — who feel like the communication isn’t valid unless they can hear your voice. Or see your “body language”

Which brings me back to embodiment in SL where the POV is not thru the avatar’s eyes, but something else — most often over the shoulder but frequently at some tangent zoom angle. Just because the avatar moves its head, doesn’t mean the person at the keyboard is looking in a different place. Placement of avatars in relationship to each other is — at least for me — a haphazard exercise at best. I find I DO like to sit. I dont know what that means. It has something to do with anchoring the av so I’m free to use the cam. I will move so that the group is in the 20m chat circle from me, even if it means that people on opposite sides only hear me and not each other. Most people don’t seem to even be aware that there IS a chat range, let alone how big it is. I wear a small device, in fact, that tells me who’s in chat range. It updates every 20 seconds and I find it invaluable, but I don’t think that most people find that information is particularly useful. Why IS that?

And one last idea before I pack to go to a physical conference that could be just as easily handled by text chat, my largest reservations about the Coop have to do with the tendency for people to get into SL and not move around. Educators in particular treat the rest of SL like some kind of dangerous third world country where the water is suspect and the food is bacterially contaminated. If all they/we as members of the coop do is sit on the Mesa and chat, then the whole experience is lost.

We’ll see.

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/07/la-times-joins-.html

Similarly, when we teach in SL and try to reproduce the four walls and powerpoint in-world and then state that that does not work – what are we expecting?