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Konrad Glogowski's List: Second Life Research

Field Research in Virtual Environments | peoriamagazines.com

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sleducation SL Second Life research virtual environments on 2009-05-04 and saved by 6 people
First Seasonal Report on Ethics and Virtual Worlds | NPSL: Nonprofits in Second Life

The MacArthur Foundation recently put out this press release regarding RezEd.org and their first report on ethics and virtual worlds.

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secondlife nonprofit SL rezed.org report on 2008-12-09
International Bureau of Education. Bureau International d'Education. Oficina Internacional de Educacion. IBE. BIE. OIE. | UNESCO.org :: 48th session (2008)

The International Conference on Education is a major international forum for education policy dialogue among Ministers of Education and other stakeholders (researchers, practitioners, representatives of intergovernmental organizations and civil society).

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education UNESCO UN teaching conference international Geneva on 2008-11-04 and saved by 3 people
Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

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Second Life sleducation virtual worlds on 2008-09-19 and saved by 12 people
- I continue the orientation with highlights of accomplishments from teenage students at Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s campus in Second Life, hosted by Peggy Sheehy (http://ramapoislands.edublogs.org/about/). Their learning experiences are inspiring and help my students visualize projects modeled in a virtual world. During one session, a student reflected: “If teens can do it, I can do it.” Student ownership grows as students visualize the class workspace as a place where they meet, attend class sessions, work on projects, play, and relax with friends.
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- Class can be held on the beach, in another country, in outer space, or in any simulated setting. Students do not need to be confined to a traditional class setting, with chairs facing forward, but can instead move within the learning environment, communicate via text or voice, offer information or ask questions whenever they like (without being impolite), and correspond with classmates and friends via private messaging.
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- - Virtual world learning experiences are fun
    
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  - A few may feel disengaged and go into “cruise control,” expecting the instructor to entertain them. Shifting students from the passive roles of survivors and castaways to the active roles of researchers and explorers requires a change in their perception of themselves and their willingness to participate.
    
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  - learning stations can be designed that offer content to students who miss class or who need more time to study and reflect. Students can touch these 3D objects to get notecards, listen to podcasts, or see streaming video that covers this course content. Although this capability is also available in online course management systems and websites, the shared nature of an avatar interacting with an object, being part of the content that is being studied, and seeing 3D simulations of the content come to life is powerful. Since a student’s understanding of complex content may be hazy, offering information in a variety of ways allows students to use the information to solve problems and create solutions for their projects.
    
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  - Class participants are often not anonymous, despite the use of virtual world aliases for avatar names. One reason is that students want information, education, feedback, and grades from their instructor, and they want to know who is responding to them. In addition, students share a sense of community in these environments, and they mentor one another as they discover how to use the tool to complete their individual and team course activities. This sense of identity differs from the social use of virtual worlds for entertainment purposes, where anonymity is often favored.
  - Students shift from being passive listeners to engaging in group interaction and activities and demonstrating that they understand the course content via the completion of projects, papers, labs, and case studies. Many classes that include case studies use role-play, putting learners in roles and contexts in which they explore the content and make decisions based on the forces and constraints placed on them.
    
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  - In addition to learning user-interface design and testing principles, the class goal was to reflect on new ways to design and evaluate user interfaces. With this goal in mind, the students elected to study problems related to accessibility, perception, and interaction. Instead of focusing solely on the software interfaces, they created 3D linked objects with behaviors that simulated real-world systems.
    
    In their “lessons learned” papers, the students noted that the virtual world classes enhanced their learning experience and their perceptions of self and gave them new skills to demonstrate their mastery of the course content. The sense of presence and the customization of their avatars were high on their list of priorities for learning and participating in virtual world classes. In contrast, they noted that it took time for them to customize their avatars and to learn to communicate, gesture, and emote. They also learned to create 3D objects and to texture, link, and program the objects into testable, scripted projects that responded when touched.
    
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  - In virtual worlds, we can leverage a mix of content and activity to support all learners: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
    
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Virtual Worlds? “Outlook Good” (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

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virtual worlds sleducation Second Life on 2008-09-19 and saved by 12 people
- bring the words “3D virtual environment” a bit closer to the mainstream. In June 2007, Second Life had nearly eight million residents. One year later, it had more than fourteen million.²
  
  But Second Life is not the only virtual world—and not the only one involved in education. The Active Worlds program Active Worlds Educational Universe (AWEDU) includes over eighty educational worlds (http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/). Educators are also working (individually) in There. Other virtual worlds efforts include Central Grid, Kaneva, Twinity, CyberNet Worlds, The Palace, Furcadia, and Project DarkStar. Others spring up daily, it seems. Over time, we may see a shift toward open source opportunities like Croquet and toward work-oriented virtual collaboration spaces like Sun Technology’s Project Wonderland.
  
  In addition, many virtual worlds are tied to product lines: Webkinz, Home (Sony), BarbieGirls (Mattel), and Club Penguin (Disney). Add the many additional efforts that Disney is putting forward in this field, along with other younger-market companies like MTV, and it is crystal-clear that virtual worlds are here to stay. If the number of virtual worlds is not an indication, certainly the amount of money being invested should be. According to Virtual Worlds Management, over $1 billion (U.S.) was invested in virtual companies in 2007 (http://www.virtualworldsmanagement.com/2007/index.html), and over $184 million was invested in the first quarter of 2008 (http://www.virtualworldsmanagement.com/2008/q1.html).
- the New Media Consortium estimates that more than 1,200 educational islands were created in 2007.⁴
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- - Other efforts are starting to move to the forefront and should certainly be watched in the coming months. Many, especially those working on an open source platform, would like to see standards that tie other platforms together. Efforts such as the Immersive Education Initiative (http://immersiveeducation.org/), by the Media Grid (http://mediagrid.org/), are looking to bring standards to, and develop best practices for, the mildly wild frontier that is currently virtual worlds.
  - In July 2008, IBM and Linden Lab announced an interoperability agreement following successful tests in which avatars were teleported “from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another.”⁸
  - Another perceptual challenge for virtual worlds is the idea that they are all games.
  - In addition, users of Second Life, Active Worlds, and There have something that players of the highly polished, graphics-heavy, multi-user role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings do not have: the ability to create, change, and control the environment.
  - Most of those educators using virtual worlds today realize that it is a means to an end, a tool available for teaching and learning. However, this particular tool has shown the same growth pattern and potential as the Internet. Just as once many in higher education loudly proclaimed that the Internet was of no practical use and was filled with questionable material and marketing, so too do critics today have their doubts about virtual worlds. But the web grew into a vital part of our lives, and a growing number of people believe that virtual worlds will do so the same.
edna workshop in Second Life

Participants in the Second Life session of edna's online workshops get the opportunity to collaborate on an original work of music. This international event included participants from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Many thanks to Jo Kay, Konrad Glogowski, Jude O'Connell, Dean Groom and the residents of the islands of jokaydia. Produced by KerryJ.

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ednaworkshops08 edna education.au sl secondlife jokaydia workshop on 2008-06-25
Virtual classroom project coming to a close « Learn Online

Leigh Blackall reflects on his virtual residency in the Virtual Classroom Project

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self-directed teacher development teacher education virtual classroom project pd on 2008-05-03 and saved by 2 people
- learning about architecture, sustainability, and SL rendering.
- The simplicity in learning the drawing tools, coupled with the ability to meet numbers of other people in the actual model who would then discuss and help me build the model was a very potent learning experience.
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- - people who would be there for me, who would look at and discuss my drawings as I did them, and who would share with me links and other information relating to what I was doing for the simple enjoyment of sharing and helping.
  - It doesn’t matter if the ideas I had - or the way I was trying to express them were any good or not.. what I’m talking about is the need we all have for encouragement and motivation to improve on and further our own learning. I could have enrolled in a course and paid a teacher to give me that … attention, but even then it would have felt disingenuous and limited by what that one teacher could muster after 20 years of putting up with it.
  - This amazing project that Konrad has taken me on boils down to is this:
    
    I have drawn a concept for a building I want to one day build, using Second Life and its communities to draw and develop the model.
    
    I have used numerous online networks to research and inform the model, and this drawing is only one step in many for this long term plan I have. That network has given me the motivation to take it all further.
    
    In the process I have learned a lot about sustainable building, drawing in SL, communicating with online networks beyond my normal peers, and in that I have gained new confidence.
    
    Now I am coming to an end with the VirtualClassroomProject, having reached the limitations of the model in SL Jokaydia, and want to take it further.
    
    I have made numerous attempts to connect with a local group who are developing sustainable building designs, but what was that I said about powering down?
    
    I think it will turn out that I will install the model somewhere more permanently in SL and continue to tweak the model, make variations and details, do a costing analysis for a real build, develop a website for it, and continue to try and find useful contacts who I can work with and possibly take something like this further - no doubt I will find them online… I already have one lead in Melbourne!
  - this project has helped me to render my private and two dimensional ideas into a public and socially supportive domain.
Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills

Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills
Environments such as Second Life can both stimulate and educate, experts say

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Second Life 21st century skills eschoolnews games gaming on 2008-04-28 and saved by 2 people
- Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, agreed educators who spoke during an April 16 webinar on gaming in education.
- gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making
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- - repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.
  - "I call Second Life an engine for creativity," she said.
  - L'Amoreaux cited a team of students in an internship program studying museum creatorship, who partnered with others for a Second Life activity that involved a recreation of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938 Nazi Germany. As participants, the students assumed the roles of reporters, exploring the events for themselves.
  - Still, Trevena cautioned that teachers, administrators, and technology staff must work together and be prepared to support a Second Life program. Identifying sustainable funding sources, upgrading computers and investing in hardware, and having a backup plan if the Second Life platform is down are all necessary.
  - A 2006 NCES and University of Michigan study found that by age 21, the average youth has watched 20,000 hours of television and played 10,000 hours of video games, said Ntiedo Etuk, the CEO Tabula Digita, which offers games centered on pre-algebra and algebra.
  - "The reason that [gaming] is successful is obviously that it's relevant to students--it allows for the notion of competition, which gets students going, there's an opportunity for socialization, and there is instant feedback on what they're doing right or wrong," Etuk said.
    
    Video games also foster collaboration, because instead of a teacher standing in front of a classroom, students begin to help one another and become teachers themselves, he added.
  - Teachers can set difficulty levels and receive reports on student data, including the last time a student played their game, what their score was, right and wrong answers, and the topics they covered.
  - "We found that students in our project have improved their self-efficacy in science,"
  - Video games engage students and help foster some of the 21st-century skills, such as problem-solving, which may be more difficult to acquire in a traditional classroom with a textbook.
  - "When you think about the skills that students need when they leave school, like creativity and curiosity...identifying problems and solving them--these are skills that [can be] hard to teach in the traditional face-to-face classroom," Clarke said. "And a lot of these technologies are being used in the corporate world--IBM is now using games to train its employees, so you see simulations and games emerging outside of K-12 education."

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Konrad Glogowski

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List of resources on the uses and effectiveness of Second Life as a platform for teaching and learning.

Updated on 2009-05-04
Created on 2008-04-28

Category: Schools & Education

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Konrad Glogowski's List: Second Life Research

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