A Word in Your Ear 2009 - Audio Feedback is a one day conference on the use of audio for providing assessment feedback to university students being held at Sheffield Hallam University on Friday 18 December. There has been some interesting work in this area in recently such as the JISC-funded Sounds Good project (Bob Rotheram who led that project is the keynote speaker at this event) and this event looks like an excellent opportunity to learn more about initiatives in this area.
Assessment, accessibility, innovation
JISC have released several new publications recently looking at ways in which multi-user virtual environments and alternative reality games can be used in education.
Alternate reality games for orientation, socialisation and induction by Nicola Whitton of Manchester Metropolitan University reports on the experiences of the ARGOSI project, with which our own Scott Wilson was involved. The project aimed to support student induction in university and acquisition of required library and information skills using a range of resources such as character blogs and supporting websites. Student participation in the activity was disappointing, although consistent with participation in such games in general, and the report is possibly most useful for its analysis of where things did not go right - for example, the this is not a game aesthetic that is fundamental to ARG design may actually be rather inappropriate in a resource designed for students who are already in an unfamiliar and potentially challenging environment. The lessons learned from this project, and the extensive resources produced by it, make this a very useful study.
Second Life is the undisputed MUVE leader in terms of uptake both within and beyond HE, and three JISC publications look at how newcomers and the more experienced can develop their practice within the system. Getting started with Second Life offers exactly what you’d expect, a guide to everything new users need to know from how to register and log in for the first time to some guidance on teaching and course design, some advice on how to address institutional concerns, and a few useful pointers to further reading. One significant omission is the lack of a list of relevant educational sims (impermanent though they may be) and support systems such as the SLED and Virtual Worlds mailing lists - as the guide itself observes, loneliness and the inability to find interesting locations are two of the biggest factors underlying SL’s massive new user attrition rate.
Modelling of Second Life environments reports on the MOOSE project based at the University of Leicester, which looks more deeply at design and delivery issues around learning in MUVEs and identity and socialisation issues arising from the use of avatars in virtual worlds.
Finally, Open habitat: multi-user virtual environments for teaching and learning points to the Open Habitat magazine, an attractive report on how MUVEs were used with students of art and design and philosophy to understand the nature of virtual group interaction and community building.
All these reports provide valuable information and insights into using MUVEs and aspects of gaming in education, and help to demonstrate the increasing significance of both in current educational practice.
elearning, innovation, serious games, virtual worlds
A post this morning on the WebPA discussion list raised an issue that I’ve long felt has a negative impact on the uptake of JISC project outputs: how to support the use of tools produced by JISC projects in an institutional environment that is not interested in supporting them.
WebPA is a great project success story, being adopted by a number of institutions and winning a Bronze Award at the 2008 IMS Learning Impact awards. It provides an innovative approach to peer assessment evaluation, allowing individual marks for each participant in a piece of group work. The system generated a lot of interest when they presented at a CETIS event last year.
The poster has identified WebPA as a possible tool to support his teaching, but says:
Unfortunately there is little if any chance of the application ever being hosted on my University servers, I won’t even waste my time trying to get this on their radar [...] I should say that while I am not completely IT illiterate I am not going to install the application myself since this is well beyond my personal skill level.
This highlights what I feel is a gap in the project lifecycle: bridging the support gap between the production of useable tools and enabling those outputs to be used in real educational contexts. Although some lecturers have a high level of technical confidence and competence, this absolutely cannot be expected for the vast majority, and there seems to be a lack of support for those who are keen to use these innovative tools but lack the confidence or expertise to do so. How do we encourage institutions to be willing to broaden their horizons and support those lecturers who wish to use what they feel are the best tools for their teaching practice? The poster references commercial companies which host open source systems such as Moodle, but what about newer systems that lack the wide uptake that make providing support and hosting services commercially attractive?
So who should be responsible for supporting projects after the end of their formal funding period, and supporting lecturers and institutions in using these tools? We’ve addressed this issue before in relation to supporting emerging developer communities in an open source model, but what about tools that are ready for use in actual teaching practice?
Assessment, cetis-support, innovation
Yesterday I attended the first VIrtual Education Worlds Scotland (VIEWS) Forum meeting, hosted by the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland South and East and facilitated by the irrepressible Kenji Lamb from the JISC RSC Scotland N&E. There were about fifteen of us in total, from a wide range of institutions and organisations, with developers, educators, support services and the simply curious all represented.
I really enjoyed this event, and particularly welcomed the conscious decision of the organisers to focus on virtual worlds other than just Second Life, with demonstrations of Open Sim and Metaplace featuring on the agenda. The discussion sessions covered a range of issues facing educators and developers trying to work with virtual worlds, with a few topics in particular seeming to stand out:
- Lack of support from institutional IT departments for VW-related activities, even to the point of refusing to unblock the ports necessary to actually run them. Here at Strathclyde, for example, we’re in the fortunate position that Second Life runs fine on the wired network, but (as we found at January’s joint event with Eduserv) the ports necessary for voice to run are still blocked. Some institutions apparently blame JISC/Janet policies for this, but the inconsistent application of these supposed policies suggests that there might be other reasons for this…
- Monitoring and evaluation of in-world activities particuarly for the purpose of summative assessment, and tie-in to other systems such as BlackBoard and Moodle to support this and other educational and administrative functions.
- The relatively steep learning curve of SL in particular, especially when contrasted with the high level of useability of alternatives such as Metaplace and commerical games.
- Age-related issues. SL is currently restricted to over-18s only, as is Metaplace, at least during its beta phase. This is a problem nationally for FE, and a significant issue for Scottish HE given the number of students entering university after their Highers at age 17 rather than at 18 after Sixth Year as is more common elsewhere. Open Sim is an obvious solution for this, but the relative obscurity of it and other VWs compared with SL mean that it’s often not an obvious answer for people who are just begining their exploration of how VWs can be used in education. There’s a lot of talk at the moment about Linden Labs merging the adult and teen SL grids which may eventually overcome this, but in the short term it can place apparently insurmountable barriers to adoption.
- Even the basic processes of registering and selecting an avatar can be problematic. Registration for multiple SL accounts from a single location requires advance ‘whitelisting’ of the IP range with Linden Labs, updated every six months, to prevent blocking after just a handful of accounts have been created. Students can be asked to create their account from home in advance of the session, but this has its own problems: students may not have access to a computer capable of running SL, may not get around to doing so, and may require the support of an experienced user that can be provided in a lab session but not at home (no matter how good the documentation prepared for the class may be). Third-party registration sites can allow mass registrations, but pre-made accounts don’t allow students to select their own avatars which may reduce engagement and identification and therefore the effectiveness of using VWs in the first place.
All present agreed that the RSCs should lead support of the VIEWS Forum, at least in these early stages. Plans for the future of the Forum include events showcasing other alternatives to SL, a shared space for discussion and knowledge exchange, and the development of a training package for staff and students including items such as a getting started guide, etc.
So what can CETIS do to support this work? Should it, even? To me there’s no doubt that this is an area with which we need to engage, but I’m not sure what exactly we can do to meet the needs of our communities while allowing this new and exciting field to develop and mature. So please, let us know! Either here, on Twitter, or by getting in touch offline, I’m really keen to know what we can do to help 
innovation, virtual worlds
Due to the level of interest in our forthcoming joint event with Eduserv, Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning, we’ve managed to make a few more places available. If you’d like to attend, please make sure you register as soon as possible to secure your place!
Update: This is event is now fully booked. We’ll be maintaining a reserve list in case any places become available; if you’d like to be added to this list please contact Sheila via the event link above. If you’ve registered and now find that you’re unable to attend, please let us know so that we can make your place available to someone else. Thanks!
innovation, virtual worlds
That’s the title of a joint JISC CETIS and Eduserv event we’re running on Friday 16 January here at the University of Strathclyde, and it’s an event I’m looking forward to enormously. If you fancy coming along I’d advise you to register as soon as possible, as places are already filling up rapidly and if you’re not on the list you ain’t getting in.
Although there is an understandable emphasis on Second Life, the event will look beyond that particular environment to consider some of the issues and barriers to the use of virtual worlds in general in education. It should be a hugely interesting and valuable event.
General, innovation, virtual worlds
BlackBoard have awarded a $25,000 Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds to Ball State University to ‘to foster and promote the integration of virtual worlds into everyday teaching and learning’. The work will explore a range of pedagogic and administrative issues (you’ll need to scroll down a bit to the right section) around linking BlackBoard with Second Life, some of which could have quite far-reaching outcomes for the use of virtual worlds in education.
Security issues are explicitly addressed, as is the validated association of avatar names with student names for the use of assessment management and enterprise systems. The development of a best practice model for instructional design within virtual environments could help produce structured and carefully directed learning activities with tight control over locations and sequencing of activities that may help overcome the aimlessness that students who don’t engage with SL complain about. Although the award will directly fund development for BSU’s cinema arts course, outcomes will be made available to the BlackBoard community as a whole.
There’s likely to be some way to go before this work can compete with Sloodle’s achievements in linking Moodle with SL, but it does open up the possibility of secure and suitably controlled use of SL for institutions tied in to BlackBoard.
Thanks to Daniel Livingstone on the Virtualworlds JISCMail list for pointing out this award.
innovation, virtual worlds
I don’t know if it’s just that I’m becoming more aware of these things, or if new Web 2.0 sites and services really are emerging at an exponential rate at the moment, but I regularly find myself following the rush to the latest toy application to try it out, spending a little while playing with testing it, then never going back again. One exciting exception to this, however, is Social|Median, a Digg-like social news network that launched its open beta last Thursday to an impressively positive reception.
I really like Social|Median. I spent far too much of Thursday finding my way around the site, identifying the newsmakers and networks I wanted to engage with and wandering off across the internet in pursuit of fascinating new content. By Friday morning, the site had become part of my daily routine: log into email, check Twitter, open SM. Yes, that quickly.
There are a few reasons why I’m quite so taken with the site. Partly it’s the interface, which is nicely intuitive to use and which, more than other such aggregator services I’ve used, provides you with enough of an advance snippet from the stories clipped by users to know whether you want to follow them further. The really crucial element, however, is the quality of the content that people are clipping (the SM equivalent of digging or stumbling upon), aided by the fact that some of the key names in social media, the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, have engaged with the service, bringing their stamp of approval and quality content to the service as well as becoming the news themselves.
One thing I’ve noticed since I started using SM is that I’m less interested in Twitter. I don’t know if it’s just coincidental, some random application ennui that might just be a passing phase, or if there’s a connection with the rise of SM; I rather suspect the latter. Recently I’ve been using Twitter less as a social tool and more as a source of content, following twitterers who post interesting links and opinions rather than announcing the local weather or that they’ve broken a nail. The awkwardness of retrieving older tweets and the 140 character limit, which made it such a fun and exciting service in the past, simply doesn’t lend itself to such use, particularly when combined with my haphazard approach to delicious tagging interesting material I find. Social|Median fulfills this need so effectively that at the moment I’m barely logging in to Twitter. Criticising a service for being poor at a function it was never really designed for may be more than a little unfair, but I guess the point of a lot of these services is precisely that they are what their users want to make of them, and if we’re bored with them, we can either find new uses or move on.
Web 2.0, innovation
Now this is just cool. CamSoft is a software product that allows you to control your computer with, well, anything. It uses a basic webcam to identify and lock onto your chosen object - examples from the video include empty soft drink bottles, maracas, even fingertips - and relate them to controls and actions within your programme. The precision and sensitivity of control suggested by the video even in its current pre-release state is seriously impressive, particularly in the first person shooter, and frankly, it’s impossible to stop imagining the potential of this. This could have some really exciting applications in educational simulations, could offer some creative accessibility options, and just looks like being thoroughly good fun, and best of all, they’ve promised it will always be free. You can sign up for the beta here.
accessibility, innovation
I was more than a bit bemused to stumble upon this post discussing Andrew Baron’s attempt to sell his Twitter account ‘and followers’ on eBay. Although Baron is still the proud owner of his account after ending the auction early (now that wouldn’t have been a publicity stunt, would it?), bidding had reached a tidy $465 as Boyd was writing. He also inspired one innovative entrepreneur to apparently net himself a similarly neat $375 by selling his phone number on the auction site. If only it had been 867-5309, perhaps Baron would have bought it and the circle of Web 2.0 life would have been complete…
This does raise some interesting questions though. As Boyd says, it seems more like a playful thought experiment than something that ’shed[s] any light on the issues of identity and reputation in any real world fashion’, but some commenters on his post seem genuinely offended by the notion that ‘followers’ can be sold, likening it to selling your friends’ email addresses to the highest bidding spam advertiser. Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Baron’s comment that Twitter ‘is not the place to get personal… networks are different’, and to be honest I feel pretty guilt-free about unfollowing people whose tweets I decide (link may offend) I don’t want to read.
This experiment also highlights the implications of relationships underlying the debated issue of Twitter reciprocation etiquette (or twitiquette - I guess someone had to do it). Baron appears to follow almost all of his over 2,300 followers, while Boyd has a thousand more followers but follows less than 700. Baron is a performer perhaps relating to his followers as to an audience, whereas the majority of Boyd’s updates are @comments that are part of a series of dialogues with individuals. Just as the thoughtful and extremely persuasive comments to my post on Twittering at conferences illustrate, there are as many different ways of using and relating to such technologies as there are people to use and relate to them.
Web 2.0, innovation, word of the day
