20 May 2008 Notes on Going Teaching

I was thinking about rolling out part or all of the ecommerce module I teach using Second Life. So I was asked to assess the feasibility of it. I made notes. This is what this post is about.

I decided against the approach based on a number of issues.

First and foremost, though the idea would have given me an incredible amount of structure, I was hesitant. There were about three reasons for this: to hang a phd on something never done before seems an unnecessarily risky business. It seems to me that virtual worlds are wonderful tools for collaboration and team work, which the phd would not have permitted. Also, I doubted that I could deliver the innovative tools that would be needed to truly distinguish the study given my own inexperience. We have to get beyond in world slide shows if we really are to deliver the potential of virtual worlds for education, I think.

Then there were some technical issues.
- a lengthy treatise from technical staff about the security and ethical issues to consider (e.g. having students sign up for SL terms of service for instance, copyright issues etc)
- network configuration may have hampered my efforts
- not one lab in this department meets the minimum spec (in terms of graphics card which is a bit of a deal-breaker)

There were commentaries from others about the difficulties of doing this (even for very senior staff members). It also occured to me that for every activity in SL I would also need a backup plan in case the grid was down or in case there were other problems. There would be issues around assessing students in world. Preventing

The notes I took were as follows:


Technical issues
- Lag? Dependent on number of avs in one location or not?
- Running SL in labs? Can it be done at all?
- Need to test in labs but don't have download priviledge (or update)
- Bandwidth?

Response:
"I have heard of no 'bandwidth issues' there will be limited lag on a
10mb connection of most older ethernet. the real issue is that you
can only have, unless this has changed, a limited number of
connections from one ip address. most labs are arranged with 1 real
ip address and the rest of the computers use nat through that
address. many concurrent connections will be rejected by sl. so lab
architecture is more important than bandwidth."
- Audio, video, machinima? I'll have to learn to design all of these.
- Recording text and sound and image? I'll need to trace everything. What about SL terms of service? The copying of chat trascripts for instance, is a violation.
- Having backups or alternative platforms for when SL isn't good
- Griefers - serious issue. Need an island.
- Student age - will not have to use teen grid...

Legal Issues
- SL Terms of Service
"I believe that MIT had very similar concerns, and chose to work with
the New Media Consortium to "lease" the land from NMC rather than
"purchase" the land from Linden Lab directly. By doing so, NMC took
on the legal liability rather than MIT, if I remember correctly from
one of Philip Long's presentations about their Student Design contest
in SL (page is at https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/sldc/Home
but hm, it looks like they put some of the information behind a
private log in)." 1 may 2008 Educators Digest mailing


Commercial issues
- How do students buy land?
- Costs:
Island is http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/04/09/details-on-the-q2-2008-island-price-change/ 700 dollars set up
Not sure about maintenance fees


Teaching issues
- What tools exist (e.g whiteboards)
- Sloodle - what's that like?
- Guidelines (samples)

Social Issues
- "College students barely make it into the demographic that is really comfortable here."
- Idea that SL is an adult world

IDT Issues
- Selling it to COmmerce
- Work with marketing people?


Design issues
"Is there a clearly identify community of SL users on your campus, such
as a SL Users Group or a group of faculty and students of substantive
number that are using SL to demonstrable and continuing success?

the design principle is; Design to the real needs of the
real community. If there is no community, there is no design.
Develop and sponsor a users group first to develop that community.

if there is, then it really does not matter too much what you build,
as they might use it. if there is not such a group, then what are you
doing in sl organizationally that would require a campus build? "


"Designing a sim for a university is a lot like designing a course in that you need to first identify your goals and objectives. What is your purpose for being in Second Life? What do you hope to accomplish? You also want some sort of assessment to determine whether or not you have achieved those goals. This might be a notecard drop or sensors to pull statistics.

When designing the islands for my university, I traveled far and wide around SL looking at what other colleges and universities had done. I got lots of ideas on ways we could contribute to the SL learning community. Again, as with a RL course, we storyboarded out the area and brainstormed ideas of what we could do. Developing was a snap after that."

Ideas
- Modular continuous assessment
- production of machinima
- collaboration
- treasure hunts
- using term 1 tutorials to teach
- using term 2 tutorials to implement modular continuous assessment
- how structured to be?
- implement strategies?
- Need evaluation instruments, objectives
- Using BOTS??
- Sloodle, Moodle, noodling?
- Something about natives (millennials) learning faster and being more comfortable.
- It seems crazy to me to work solo on this, like doing a solo open source project and writing it up