While corporations both struggle to find their place in virtual worlds and strengthen their control and reach, especially amongst children (see Disney’s announcement of an investment up to $100 million in virtual worlds for kids) another trend is shaping up to be the one to watch for 2008, and that’s the growing use of platforms like Croquet, Second Life and even the standby ActiveWorlds as forums for research and education.
The Argument for Virtual Worlds in Words and Pictures
Sarah Robbins put together a presentation that summarizes the benefits of virtual world platforms:
Her primary argument is for the use of virtual worlds to supply safe spaces in which a sense of community and engagement can increase retention, deepen the sense of fun, allow for “difference experimentation”, and places an emphasis on groups of learners rather than didactic transmission.
Meanwhile, what better argument than the power of virtual worlds and games as tools for education than a peek at ‘serious games’ which encompass both the virtual and single-user platforms, appliances, and augmented education:
[slideshow 72057594049259879]
Meanwhile, empirical research backing up the use of virtual worlds for education will deepen in 2008 although already there is a growing body of evidence attempting to quantify the value of serious games and virtual worlds as tools for education.
An extensive bibliography has been posted at East Carolina University and includes links to articles on a wide smattering of subjects.
Aggregating Expertise
The growth of stakeholder and research groups examining the use of worlds in education is on the rise. Of particular note, the Media Grid has formed the Immersive Education Technology Group based on significant grant money, in an attempt to form standards for education:
The Immersive Education Technology Group (IETG) is responsible for defining open standards and best practices for a new form of computer-based learning that combines collaborative online course environments and classrooms with interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality (VR), voice chat (Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media.
Giving as an example how standards would help to power education models on immersive platforms, IETG defined several use scenarios. The concept of reusable content libraries, for example, shows how tagging of 3D objects would help to underpin the sharing and portability of learning objects:
1) Reusable content libraries — A teacher who is not skilled in creating or editing digital media content wants to conduct one of his classes using Immersive Education technology but doesn’t have the time or experience necessary to create or assemble the course materials himself. Rather than create his Immersive Education course from scratch the faculty uses a simple Web page interface to browse through libraries of pre-constructed Immersive Education courses that have been built by faculty at other universities and colleges. Because the faculty who created these courses have designated them as “shared” they’re available for others to use (similar to the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative). After the teacher finds a pre-made course environment that suits his needs he then uses his Web browser to make it available to his own students through his own server instance, meaning he and his students are able to meet online in the course environment within their own private learning space (with no mixing of students or faculty from different organizations). Over time the faculty decides that he’d like for his course environment to contain more learning objects (e.g., videos, interactive 3D objects, audio lectures, etc.) which he finds by browsing the pre-made libraries. After identifying the custom objects for his course environment the faculty member has one of his student teaching assistants add the custom learning objects into his course.
Much like SCORM has been a key model for Web-based education, IETG is madated with seeking similar standards, or porting those standards into immersive technologies.
Meanwhile, resources from the Edutech Wiki to Linden Lab’s own Wiki for education start to aggregate community expertise. The Second Life Education mailing list is a highly active group of users posting research questions, sharing papers, and seeking advice.
The New Media Consortium has long taken a lead on education issues in virtual worlds and has facilitated an extensive presence by educators on a series of sims in Second Life. A unit of the NMC provides a full suite of virtual world development services to educators looking to explore use of virtual world platforms.
Platforms and Technologies
None of this is meant to be exhaustive or inclusive and it’s really a very brief survey of what’s out there, but a few initiatives have caught my attention, mainly perhaps because of my own areas of interest and work we’ve been doing on establishing “wizard-based” techniques for distributing education and creating forums for interaction and engagement.
SLOODLE in particular has shown wonderful progress. It is an open source project whose purpose is to create a bridge between the course management software Moodle and Second Life:
Sloodle is an Open Source project which aims to develop and share useful, usable, desireable tools for supporting education in virtual worlds, making teaching easier. Through engagement with an active community of developers and users, the Sloodle project hopes to develop sound pedagogies for teaching across web-based and 3D virtual learning environments. Sloodle integrates the Second Life multi-user virtual environment and the Moodle learning-management system.
InfoIsland meanwhile continues to provide excellent resources and holds courses on the use of virtual worlds in education.
Meanwhile, open source platform Croquet holds a lot of appeal to educators (and others) because of its ability to easily embed Web objects within virtual spaces, and also because it allows full privacy and security. Many educators concerns with Second Life (especially those outside of the US) are related to security and privacy concerns. Croquet helps to address these concerns and being open source is similarly attracting attention. SOME of the benefits of Croquet might be mitigated by Second Life’s open architecture plans, but privacy issues may not be fully resolved so long as avatar information is held in US servers.
Meanwhile, Project Wonderland also offers a platform for developing 3D virtual worlds and extends a previous targeted to children and is based primarily on open source Java.
As mentioned above, this is by no means meant as a review of resources on education in virtual worlds, just a few pointers to paint a picture of a vibrant and emerging community of passionate individuals examining, building, prototyping (and already using) virtual worlds.
Additions to this Survey
I feel horrible for what I’ve left out in particular jumping off points to other resources. Please don’t hesitate to add resources or links to your own entries, WIKIS or pages in the comments below or e-mail me at dusan.writer@nospam.hotmail.com (remove no spam from the address, of course) and I’ll keep this list up-to-date if it seems like there’s interest in that.
(We’re also crafting a series of white papers on this and other topics and I’ll post them as we wrap them up.)
