Learning in Virtual Worlds

I’m just back from the Educause 2008 conference, and as always I find myself overwhelmed with the sheer bulk of information I encountered.   I’d like to share a few highlights, however:

Just a quick post about a new book, The Tower and the Cloud – Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing,  edited by Richard Katz.  This is a relatively small download (2.1mb) and is also available in print from the educause site.  Click the book cover.

Sarah Robbins presented a quite challenging picture of the future of higher education in an era of rapidly expanding, free, and leveraged technologies. I highly recommend that you view her entertaining presentation…click on the picture below.

I would also recommend the presentation by the taskforce sponsored by the National Science Foundation.  This presentation raises several remarkable views of the future of Networked Worlds, and particularly of the seamless integration of home-based technologies (and learning tools) into our school-based technologies (and learning strategies).  This is one of those ‘must reads’ for anyone in higher education.  You can find the full report from the National Science Foundation website.

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The time is now to build and to experiment and to learn what it may mean to perform campus master planning when the master plan includes virtual spaces. We need to learn what it means to regulate access to institutional resources when those resources reside in virtual spaces. We need to understand the nature and limits of institutional authority inside the virtual classrooms and the virtual social spaces that bear the institution’s name.  Richard Katz.  Educause Review.  Accessed 20 Sept 2008.

The latest edition of Educause Review is dedicated to virtual worlds and related developments - remarkable.  Two years ago this would have been relegated to the bottom of most reading piles, but today it is arguably on top of most.  From CIOs, who are increasingly concerned to understand the support issues, to administrators, who already express concerns over control, to teaching staff, who rightly fear that such massive changes in teaching could overstress their already stressed lives, this is an exponential change.

Two years ago I offered an opinion in a University meeting that we might soon be providing classrooms in virtual worlds in order to save money, travel and “carbon” costs.  As you might suspect, there were smiles around, and a bit of contained laughter, but not much else.  These ideas seem to challenge the very roots of higher education across the globe, and bring with them associated complexities - such as campus planning and space allocation - that are not easily entertained by those who still see bricks-n-mortar as the pinnacle of accomplishment. 

But as Richard Katz points out in the reference noted above, now is the time to act, to explore and to experiment.  Current decision-making models around IT are simply not keeping pace with the changes in IT, and the situation could get worse.  If the pundits are correct in predicting that this Virtual World phenomenon will encompass billions of users within just a few years, then universities must begin now to understand the impact.  This virtual world phenomenon is a new World Wide Web in the making, it is not a simply passing fancy.  And these changes are coming at an ever-faster pace as well.  We must keep up.

Even with those who have been working in e-learning domains for years, this new world is proving to be a conceptual challenge.  I am noticing colleagues from across the sector suddenly scrambling to understand and become a part of this work, while at the same time expressing concern over the supposed ‘unhuman’ contact it would provide.  But this dilemma is good.  Over the past two years I’ve been quite isolated in the University as regards my work in Second Life, yet now I am seeing colleagues take ownership of the domain, with interest and energy.  This too is good.  It will take considerable people resources to shake entrenched ideas both internal to universities, and externally in the marketplace.  But make no mistake, companies around the globe have now been clued-in about the potential of Internet business, and they are moving at astonishing speed to take up this latest technology.  We must keep up.

It is Monday morning here in New Zealand, Sunday in the U.S., and I just tried to log in to Second Life.  But Second Life had 67,333 current logins and could handle no more load.  They were at their user limit!  C’mon, how un-scalable is this platform?

I recently asked Linden Labs how I could get a full refund for the University sim that we purchased, and I cited the highly unreliable performance of the system as the reason for my request.  Over the course of several weeks, I noted dozens of instances where the system failed, almost daily.  Now, Linden Labs may cite that they were up and running, but if teleporting doesn’t work, or clothes don’t download, or object libraries are unavailable, or certain regions are undergoing un-announced ‘maintenance’ and can’t be reached, then for a class meeting the service is a complete system failure. If we (educators) are to utilise environments like Second Life for teaching, we must have assurances that service will be available on a reliable basis.  Reliable doesn’t mean 80% available, it means 99.99%.  Industry standard.  This is crucial for Linden to understand.  It is nearly impossible to reschedule a cancelled class meeting during busy semesters, so if a class is cancelled we simply lose that time.  It is unrecoverable teaching time.   

In my request to Linden Labs I asked that we first have a discussion about a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to see if there might be a way forward.  To my shock I receive a reply from one of the do-not-reply-to ‘Lindens’ (can’t they do business in the real world?) asking me to clarify what I meant by ‘Service Level’.  Have these folks never heard of ITIL?  Again, remarkable.  Well, for those Lindens who are still sitting there with a “huh?” on their face, here is a link that will explain ITIL “…delivery and control activities to achieve operational excellence on a day-to-day basis” - Service Operation.  Read it.

I hate being so seemingly impatient, but most educators are passionate about the precious time allocated to interact with students - we cannot tolerate shoddy support systems.  These frequent SL failures cause me great concern for the future use of such systems for real education.  The great promise of high-fidelity graphics, voice and animation means nothing if reliability isn’t present.  Importantly, reliability is a prerequisite.  It must be present in the first instance, not developed after Linden experiment to see if there is community interest in the product .  Do what is necessary to provide up-front Service Level reliability, or fail.  Full stop.  Given the fact that there are dozens of such environments either in production or in development, I fear that Linden’s offering is failure waiting to happen…it may be just a matter of time.

I’m just back from the Distance Education Association of New Zealand (DEANZ) conference in Wellington, whose theme was My Place, My Space, My Learning.  We had two very thought-provoking keynotes, one by Nancy White and the other by Michael Barbour, and although my notes are unclear on this, one of these two wonderful thinkers used the term Free Range Learner in passing.  I’ll email them to clarify, but it was the kind of margin note that one makes when listening intently…and the kind that I normally breeze over.  Reading through the pages this time, however, the margin note jumped out at me.  Free Range Learners…what a wonderful visual image that term evokes.  And what a scary alternative “battery learners” is.  A quick search of the Internet for this term led me to Jay Cross, and to many references around corporate training and rural education movements.  However, I’d like to hijack the term and use it in the slightly different and more focused context of higher education. 

Free-Range Classrooms

Our classrooms haven’t changed a lot…let’s be honest.  In fact, technology has actually interrupted some of the powerful interactive dynamics that have historically been a part of good teaching - wandering around the classroom, looking directly into eyeballs  and, (God forbid) touching students! Powerpoint Education has tied teachers to a menu-driven podium, and ever-increasing class sizes have cast students into even larger ’seating batteries’ where they can be fed.  Peck, peck.

But we can do better.  In her book, Designing Learning Spaces, Diana Oblinger provides a wonderfully clear view of what we could accomplish:

The key, therefore, is to provide a physical space that supports multidisciplinary, team-taught, highly interactive learning unbound by traditional time constraints within a social setting that engages students and faculty and enables rich learning experiences. <http://www.educause.edu/elements/cdn.asp?id=learningspaces_e-book> Accessed 21.08.08.

If you have doubts that such a vision can be accomplished, please have a look at the JISC learning space design site (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/learning-space-design).  However, I’m not wanting to leave it at that…what if we use virtual space rather than physical space?  Can we apply the same concepts?  These are early days, but I am becoming convinced that we can.  Utilising the power of virtual environments, particularly those like Second Life, we can construct learning spaces that are unbound by physical and geographical constraints as well.  Imaginations run wild!

Free-Range Funding

Universities have long suffered from the need to provide scales of economy in the delivery of content, and although most educators understand the financial realities of this paradigm, they understand many of the consequences as well.  Importantly, current EFTS funding schemes tightly bind students to their ‘parent’ institution, and severely limit educational exploration.  To compound the matter, the narcissistic “not invented here” syndrome that plagues most Faculties further blocks the potential of wider institutional exploration.  So what could we do?

There have long been exemplar programs that foster wider educational opportunities for students (eg Erasmus or Western Governors University), however I see another emerging dynamic that might prove to be a ‘disruptive technology’.  What if we combined the potential of OpenCourseware (as led by MIT), Wikieducator (Commonwealth of Learning) and other open education initiatives, with the competency-based degrees awarded by WGU?  Further, what if our government funding schemes were granted to students, rather than to institutions, so students would have free-range on where to apportion their education dollars?  Accreditation (which should be about the assessment of competency outcomes) could remain with institutions (as it does successfully at WGU), all the while giving students wide discretion.  There are significant issues to consider, of course, but the idea seems worth considering.  I can see my thoughts are going to need to be informed by much more research.  Suggestions welcome!

Kia ora.  After several weeks of development the new Medical Centre is starting to take shape.  Most of the ‘build’ to date has been around the design and physical structure.  For those interested in SL building, this very large structure (50×50x50 metres) was made with mega-prims and required less than 50 prims.  This did not include the interior walls, etc…but is a substantial savings in precious prims.  Although many site report that the use of such mega-prims causes serious lag (slowdown) in the site, we have not found this to be the case.

This site will house several simulations related to medicine, surgery, nursing, psychology, and disaster preparedness. 

Presently the ground floor houses the Medical Clinic and related facilities (doctor offices).   Level 3 houses a similar clinic, but may be cleared for other projects in the future.

Level 4 houses an experimental nursing simulation in conjunction with Boise State University in the United States.  This simulation will attempt to mimic the real-life nursing simulation environment at Boise, and a study is currently being designed to compare the effectiveness of this environment against the Boise RL simulation.

The next stages of this overall simulation will be to script the various medical components and instruments, and to carefully develop PBL (problem-based learning) scenarios that might lend themselves to a Virtual environment.  I might add emphatically, international participation in these simulations is invited!

Reading Dr. Fedoroff’s address to the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0806/S00092.htm), I am reminded of the travels my wife, son and I had in the late ’90s in our sailboat.  We travelled from San Diego through the South Pacific, stopping at over 50 islands along the way.  In case after case I was struck by the lack of infrastructure available for higher education, and it was apparent that there would likely never be such.   If these people were to receive advanced education, they would have to leave.

But it isn’t that simple.  Leave to where?  The current (physical) global education system is simply not capable of sustaining the population that needs/wants higher education, and our societies are simply not capable of building enough universities to keep up.  Think about this:  according to the U.S. Census Bureau(http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html), the population of the world increased by 77,191,241 human beings this past year, and if we were to build modest sized universities to educate them all (say, 30,000 student capacity each), we would need to build TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED SEVENTY THREE campuses.  This year.  And next, and next, and next….  

In recent weeks I have been giving some thought to how virtual worlds (like Second Life) might be utilized to address such inequities in our global distribution of educational resources.  Could we develop virtual universities that rival our bricks-n-mortar universities?   Perhaps.  Distance Learning programs are certainly not a new idea, and many organizations are offering these in a variety of delivery modalities.  But many of these programs are nothing more than static content delivery, with a modicum of asychronous discussion thrown in.  In the case of the universities with which I have been affilitated, these programs have almost always migrated to become ‘blended’ learning approaches, where students and teachers occasionally meet face-to-face  in an attempt to recreate the more human interaction so necessary to deeper learning.  That means travel.

More importantly, higher education…any education really…has become well beyond the financial reach for the majority of these new global citizens.  Campuses are expensive, programs are expensive, and the content is expensive.  And it is repetetive.  That is, universities around the world offer custom-designed (read, expensive) courses that are virtually identical in content.  Statistics, humanities, art, sciences, etc…we all teach very similar things, but we don’t share content much.  We could.

So putting the two ideas together, what if we developed virtual worlds into virtual universities, where students come (real time) to meet, discuss, listen, research and create?  What if the content of those universities is shared, open source content?  I once attended a lecture by Leo Buscalia, in which he stated (paraphrased) “I can share with you everything I know, and I will still know everything I know“.  I will not be diminished in the slightest by having shared it, and neither would universities.  Again, this is not a novel idea - many groups are marshalling resources today to develop and distribute free content…free knowledge.

Over the course of the next few months I will explore these ideas, but for now, I hope the reader will look at these developments around global learning:

• OpenCourseWare Consortium - http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php
• UNESCO’s Open Educational Resources community - http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_development_and_publishing_initiatives
• OECD (2007). Giving knowledge for free: the emergence of Open Educational Resources. OECD.
• Commonwealth of Learning - http://wikieducator.org/Main_Page

Well, we have liftoff!  This is the new University of Auckland site, on the sim Long White Cloud.  Interestingly, the names New Zealand and Aotearoa were already taken…one by a commercial land company.   I’m pushing this project like a large boulder uphill, as there is relatively little interest from the rank-n-file teaching staff, and more than a bit of skepticism from administration.  I am getting support from the University, however, so I have to count my blessings.

At present we are working on prototypes for two real projects;  first, a writing ’skytower’ that is being developed by our campus Student Learning Centre, and second a virtual hospital ward that we envision using to develop stronger medical ‘team’ studies (eg. simulate ward emergencies).  These are early days, but I am confident that the folks involved in these projects will be instrumental in helping us understand the utility - or lack thereof - of virtual worlds for higher education.