Blogging the SLCC: Three Classes in Second Life

Three Classes in Second Life was the first education track program we were able to go to, but it gave a good overview of in-world education projects. Mecthild Schmidt teaches “Visionary Concepts in Motion Art” at NYU, Isaac Greenbaum was one of her students, and Chuck Kinzer is the Director of Communication in Computing and Technology in Education at the Teacher’s College.

Mechtild Schmidt, NYU: I started teaching a class in SL last fall, Visionary Concepts in Motion Art. I figured in speaking about visionary concepts, I should have a platform the work with visionary concepts. It was in a formative stage, and I didn’t expect a smooth ride. I believed this would develop a new kind of media literacy. Our students are mostly between 19 and in their 30s. The idea is for me to teach the students to use the creative skills they already have in the real-time environment and to teach the software skills that I believe will be essential for their creative career.

I configured tiered difficulty lessons to transition students in. We started with a historical introduction, because I wanted them to als osee what it means to have such a visionary platform. Then we had a warm-up exercise. Then we conducted some interviews along the lines of media behavior. Our final project was distilling the information we had collected into major milestones: collect images, upload imagery+writing, build exhibition space, drop-box+note cards with scripts+SLURL.

We were very aware that we were carrying over some of our traditional visuals into the second life, but we were trying to be open to not just transferring everying 1-to-1 into SL. All these milestones say that if you transfer media into SL, you increase immediacy in image making and the democratic tools of creation.

[Shows short movie]
The  class all had different backgrounds. The people with 3D backgrounds expected better tools. The people with a gaming background expected more levels. Isaac was one of my students in the class who took the project to a different level.

We had some challenges, as was to be expected. Audio will now be included for my next class in the fall. The topic will be Shakespeare’s Macbeth for a mixed media project. You cannot really go and see our class right now. Right now we’re on Eduisland and the IT department of NYU is also on outreach. It’s pretty much empty because we want to shoot them.

Isaac Greenbaum: I’m here as the token student. I started off as an undergrad. I’m a grad now. And I came from being a student skeptic to being an avatar advocate. When I initially heard about Mechtild’s class, I was a little put off. I thought you did something online, and it was interesting, but okay. You’re also not going to get a lot of pushbacks from students who think they’re going to be playing a game. It’s also a deterrent for when you’re trying to get departments to give you money, but students think about what they’re going to get out of it.

I had an epiphany at the Tower of Ivory Prims. I accidentally walked into a wall and I was somewhere else. I had this realization that while I walked through a wall, I wasn’t any different. The wall was there for my protection. Having that structure in a classroom setting is very important. I was stepping through the lessons, but I didn’t have the opportunity to see beyond what I was doing.

That structure was very important to me. Having everyone onboard for the same plan is key for a classroom or business plan. I think it’s best done through adopting the standards of the real world. When you’re cooperating, you have to deal with the understanding that you might not see the other people in front of you.

In my internship, we’re studying attention. The island will be a place to study how we go from reality to virtual reality. That’s what is very interesting to hold on to. It’s very hard when you lose track of the fact there is a person on the other side of the pixels.

Chuck Kinzer, Director of Communication in Computing and Technology in Education at the Teacher’s College: Part of what I was trying to do in my classes for a couple of years now, and in the last two years I’ve taught “Possibilities of Virtual Worlds,” and these are graduate students who are very sophisticated users, what I was trying to look at was what makes users come and go.

I draw heavily on the new literacies and new literacy studies, what it means to be literate in an environment. The first time I taught this we taught it on five Fridays, three weeks apart. The next year we had our own island. We taught it in-world and out-of-world to decide and determine if the in-world sessions functioned differently from face-to-face sessions. And we tried different thing, collecting data on lectures and scavenger hunts, etc.

We collected data on these different activities, group work, indidivual work, in-world discussions, chat with voice or without, assigned work, group and individual visist with follow-up conversations, etc. The data sources were notes from class conversations, online journals, interviews, response to questions, papers, etc.

We took a look at all these data sets and analyzed them with good qualitative procedures. We found four categories of users:
•    Excited: “I can be whoever I want to be!”
•    Tentative: “I felt lost initially.”
•    Professional: “The physics engine was not very sensitive nor did the graphics render very quickly.”
•    Utilitarian: “I first found it difficult to do this, then I solved the problem to do this”

When you have these four groups, the excited and utilitarian people tended to stick with it. The tentative and professional users did not. We came up with other categories in addition to the global categories. There were two that were critical to continuing. Social communities in SL and social communities in the “real” world, made it easier to stick with it. If you viewed it as a social environment instead of a game, you tended to stick with it.

Presentations and lectures work, but they work better in class. Contextual learning, provided you can build the context, works wonders. Social learning is heads and shoulders above what you can do in real life. But we don’t need to make the assumption that because we’re here and we like it, we need to convert everyone to liking it. We need to research these specific variables and pair these up with the people they make sense for. We can’t continue what we’ve done in education for decades and decades, grabbing something we like and forcing it on other people. WE need some really good research that answers the questions compellingly.

Q: Intlibber Brautigan: We’re just completing our own orientation island and we’re using a hud and reward system to add a gameplay system to convince people to stay involved. What are your opinions on a proper orientation system.

A: Schmidt We tried a few things together in my first class, but I mostly just included the steps I wanted the students to take in the syllabus. I think it’s important to have a good start. If you encounter a high frustration level at the beginning.

Kinzer: There’s kind of a low-cost and high-cost solution. I found that my students oriented themselves best when they could work with users that were already there. I’ve been trying to pair students with previous classes to show new users. I think a gaming environment like that is an ideal environment.