One of the challenges with new technology is to avoid simply using it to do things the way we did them with the old technology. Selby Evans, a retired psychology professor and consultant who founded thinkerer.org, calls this the “horseless carriage notion.” When automobiles first appeared, people could only think of them in terms of what they were used to: buggies pulled by horses.
- Give Your E-Learning Some (Second) Life: Simulation Made Easy
- Virtual World-Building: Designing Environments for Learners
In e-Learning, we face the same challenge when we think about how to use virtual worlds to support learning. For some designers, the answer was to build virtual lecture halls, supply lecturing avatars and listening student avatars, and provide virtual screens on which to project PowerPoint slides. However, other designers, like Dr. Evans, have started to think ahead to what can be.
Last week, I presented a quick overview of Second Life and the features it offers to the learning designer. However, much of what Second Life learning designers are doing is so different from the “conventional” way of supporting learning online and in the classroom, that it seemed to me it would be better to illustrate with some examples.
For this week's article, I interviewed some of these forward-thinking designers in order to show you what they are doing, and to pass along their tips. What I found in these interviews was all about e-Learning in the largest sense. It is more about creating environments for learning than it is about technology. In fact, the technology itself becomes transparent to the learner.
So, here are some of the details I picked up in talking to these folks who are already finding new paths to learning in Second Life, and indeed in virtual worlds in general. Not all of them identify themselves as e-Learning designers, developers, or managers, but all of them are in the business of fostering learning, the exchange of knowledge, and the building of skills.
Blending the real world and the virtual at eLumenata University
Virginia Dickenson
(Xenon Darrow in Second Life) is the founder of
Figure 1
Xenon Darrow (Virginia
Dickenson) and Data
Austin, an administrative
avatar, on the deck of the
offshore drilling rig sim
ANWR in Second Life
A quick
tour of eLumenata
University
Dickenson currently operates
Figure 2
The Instructional Design
Center at eLumenata
University
Figure 3 The Child Development and Learning Research Centre
One of the areas at eLumenata is
Silicon Campus, which simulates an actual college campus and provides a link to
real world colleges. It is designed as an entry area to Second Life for
educators.
Another of the campuses is Socrates,
which is where the
Some lessons learned
Another way in which Dickenson uses
the capabilities of the virtual worlds is to create simulations for technical
training. Last week's article contained a link to a YouTube video of a gas
separator simulation in Second Life. That simulation was created by
Dickenson and Gatens recommend
Second Life as an opportunity to do good analytical research on learning for
very little money. With the powerful learning models available in-world, they
have found it simple to evaluate results of varied approaches, such as conducting
training with or without voice chat, using different combinations of
activities, and so on.
A final lesson that Virginia and John have learned has to do with the ways in which avatars can increase learner comfort and trust. Some avatars look pretty much like regular human beings, although most of the time the avatars do not accurately represent the resident behind them (avatars tend toward the “young and beautiful” look unless the resident makes a deliberate effort at self-portraiture). However, they discovered that the male avatars in particular can be a bit intimidating to female residents, even if their appearance is not bizarre in any way. So John, in his administrative work in Second Life, appears as an avatar of the “furry” variety. Furries are avatars that look more like stuffed animals in most cases, complete with animal tails and pointy ears. (See Figure 4.)
His experience is that residents of both genders respond significantly better to Lostpup Seattle as a furry than they would to a standard male avatar. Other Second Life residents have chosen to make their avatars gray headed and obviously past middle age for the same reason (see the author's in-world photo at the end of this article).
Figure 4 “Furry” avatars
Thinkerer Studios: Exploring possibilities
I've already mentioned Selby Evans, who goes by the name of Thinkerer Melville in Second Life. As a psychologist, Selby is interested in using the online world to explore what a person can do, and in reporting on it and demonstrating it. He believes that virtual worlds like Second Life are the next “killer app” in social learning, and much of his effort in Second Life is intended to advance that development. It is worth noting that everything he sponsors is free of charge.
In addition, Selby is a great proponent of the power of online networking, particularly as this can help educators and e-Learning practitioners alike. His point is that online you do not have to have all of the skills – graphics, coding/scripting, building, and so on – yourself. You can find others who have those skills and persuade them to help you, in return for your assistance and support for their projects. “People working together get more done than working individually,” says Selby.
Walking the walk is very
important to Selby. He has created or been instrumental in facilitating the
organization of a number of groups in Second Life that provide cooperative
support for their members and for any and all residents of the virtual world. I
mentioned the Second Life Hobos in last week's article. This is a group of 800
to 900 residents with Second Life skills of various kinds, who help with
projects in-world. Selby, as Thinkerer Melville, is the sponsor for the group
and for
He has also put up a separate Web site, Thinkerer. org (http://www.thinkerer.org), to serve as a portal to a great deal of information about networked learning. In Second Life itself, he has set up Cookie, which is primarily a facility for artists and writers working together but also supports English as a Second Language (ESL) education. He operates Thinkerer Studios and Thinkerer Quests, which are workshop areas; the latter features lower “lag” (delays in action created by packet loss in crowded built-up areas of Second Life). Thinkerer Studios is a good place to connect with his LOD (Learn On Demand) service, asynchronous e-Learning that develops scripting and script modification skills. Finally, Selby is very interested in supporting the creation of videos in Second Life, and has set up other studio facilities where these can be produced, and from which live broadcasts of interviews can be provided to Second Life Cable Network.
Why do I include Selby in this article on e-Learning in the virtual world? Because everything he does is about learning, and mainly about what has come to be called “informal learning.” However, he provides information about more formal undertakings as well. For example, he has posted a number of videos on YouTube that demonstrate how to use the networking potential of virtual platforms. For example, see this one on “Experience Design”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3pw70-Oi6M.
Tips from Thinkerer
Selby, as Thinkerer, provided some tips about getting around some of the limitations in Second Life related to the number of avatars in a space at one time. These limits are computation limits, not broadband. Every avatar is itself a simulation. Part of the simulation runs on the resident's computer, but most of it does not. When an avatar moves, the Linden Labs computers must recalculate its position. When a simulation responds to actions by avatars, the Linden Labs computers handle the transactions and state changes. You can imagine the amount of computation required when there are tens of thousands of avatars online.
Each area sim is a separate program, and it can handle about 50 avatars simultaneously (60 if they are all seated). When the number of avatars approaches this limit, things begin to slow down. When the number exceeds what the sim program (and the computer it runs on) can handle, the program will prevent any new avatars from entering the area, and in fact the program may crash, bringing down the entire sim. Thinkerer offers two ways to deal with this.
One way is known as the “four corner
build.” This involves owning four regions (each one a sim capable of handling
up to 50 or so avatars) that meet at a single point. (If you live in the
If the “four corner build” is not
practical, you can broadcast your event within Second Life. (Actually, you can
broadcast it to the world as well.) For example, Jilly Kidd (the avatar of a
writer who lives in the
Another thing that Selby has learned
is the importance of ambiance, if I can call it that. In other words, even in a
virtual meeting there are certain environmental factors that can increase the
comfort of participants. For example,
Figure 5
The carefully-thought-out
design of Cookie Town
Center, including ambient
sights and sounds, makes
it a very pleasant place
for a discussion.
The big Corporate picture
IBM famously adopted the use of Second Life for employee and customer education some time ago, and many articles on this have been published in training magazines. In fact, last week there were a number of press releases around the announcements by IBM and Linden Labs concerning efforts to make the various virtual worlds interoperable – allowing avatars to move from one virtual world to another.
For this article, I wanted to look at some of the details of IBM's use of Second Life. I contacted Matt Ganis (Astro Sabre in Second Life). Matt is part of the group at IBM that maintains IBM.com, the company's external Website.
This group's focus is on the Virtual Branch Office (VBO), the starting point for information on IBM hardware and all other content in IBM. The entry point is the telehub. Matt explains, “This is where visitors arrive when they come to our island.” (See Figure 6) From the telehub, visitors can teleport to any of the locations on the Welcome sign.
Figure 6 The IBM telehub is the entry point for visitors to the Virtual Business Office.
Matt explained that the
Matt's group uses Second Life for knowledge transfer and for in-service training of IBM.com team members in Second Life skills. “The conference center (see Figure 8) has four conference rooms (Figure 9) that can hold sit-down meetings or education sessions or we remove the table and chairs for a larger space.” He points out that this is an easy vehicle to use for teaching scripting, building, and prim-shaping to internal staff. Other groups in IBM use Second Life for various staff and employee training purposes.
Figure 7 This is dedicated space in the IBM support library for the “meet the experts”
events.
Figure 9 Each conference room can be configured for sit-down meetings or for gatherings
without the table and chairs.
Matt believes that his group has taken the first step to actually delivering information, not just promoting Second Life or Second Life commerce. They now have the Business Center staffed “24/5” – twenty-four hours a day, five days a week, visitors will find an IBM employee trained to act as a concierge and ready to help them find what they need. It's a baby step, he says, next is developing lead generation and figuring out how to go to the Amazon model for providing information.
Conclusion
My interviews with these Second Life leaders yielded a number of key points that will be useful to any designer considering how to incorporate the use of virtual worlds into an organization's learning strategy.
First, virtual worlds are best as collaborative environments for work and learning. Even though they are sometimes used as simple lecture delivery mechanisms, this is really a waste of their potential. Take advantage of the power of the social networks that you can foster and support in these virtual worlds, and don't assume that you, the designer, must do everything yourself.
Second, the question of how many people you can assemble in one virtual facility is not that important any more. With the opportunity to broadcast live video within and external to the virtual world, learners can be anywhere in the virtual or the physical world.
Think about what can be, and then go create it in the virtual world. Just because learning in your experience meant training or education and indoor classrooms does not mean that the virtual world is similarly constrained. Think in terms of the ways you can create a virtual space that emulates a very pleasant environment where people will be happy to sit and discuss questions, with the added bonus of only being a mouse click away from all the information at hand on the Web.
Don't feel that you must confine your virtual world building to Second Life, or that you must do everything in the virtual world. Explore the other virtual worlds that are available. Look for ones with lower barriers to entry and shorter learning curves. Use only the highest level of fidelity needed for the learning task. It's OK to have learners switch from virtual world conversation to static Web site to asynchronous simulation and back.
Use the inherent power of the virtual world to do your own research into what helps people learn and what blocks them from learning.
Make things easy for the participants. Put up good signage in your virtual world. Make the signs function as teleport terminals – why force an avatar to walk when she can fly, why force her to fly when she can teleport? Encourage your learners to set up Yahoo e-mail accounts and Blogger Weblogs for their avatars. This makes it easier for the participants to communicate with each other when they are not in-world.
Remember that there are groups in the virtual world whose members are there to help. If you need something – an object, a script, a process – chances are very good that someone has already solved the problem and has the solution in his or her inventory. All you have to do is ask. Even in a virtual world, nobody is a mind reader, and if you don't ask, they won't know what you need.
I hope that you will use these ideas and the other tips in this article to use the full potential of the virtual world as part of your organization's learning strategy.
Bill Brandon (AKA XPecto Tomorrow)
is the Editor, Learning Solutions
e-Magazine, and a long-time member
of The eLearning Guild. Contact him
by e-mail to bbrandon@elearningguild.com.
