Rowin’s blog

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

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

New year, same old stories, as Tuesday’s Guardian recycled last year’s claims by Deborah Taylor Tate of the US’s Federal Communications Commission that games like World of Warcraft are so addictive that college students are dropping out of their courses to devote themselves to them.  There’s a rather more balanced response today from Aleks Krotoski pointing to the likelihood that an innate predisposition towards excessive behaviour coupled with poor parenting or poor self-control result in behaviour which appears addictive.

Students have always dropped out, so perhaps we should have learned by now to look for the underlying causes rather than how they manifest.  When I was teaching, the most common causes of students dropping out were financial, such as being obliged to take on increasing amounts of part-time work in order to be able to afford to attend university - a nightmarish, catch-22 situation that government policy actively encourages.  Illness, either their own or a family member’s, or simply being completely unsuited to their course and having very little interest in the subject matter or faith in the mythical graduate employment market were also recurring factors.  Too many students are pushed into higher education straight from school by parents and other social factors, rather than waiting until they as individuals are in the best place to benefit most from higher education, while others are pushed (or push themselves) into academic rather than vocational courses because academic snobbery is allowed to take precedence over common sense.

This same snobbery appears to dictate what forms of excessive behaviour are and are not considered problematic: avid reading and extensive involvement in athletics, for example, are approved and indulged, while avid television viewing and extensive involvement in gaming are frowned on.  Ultimately, however, the book worm and the couch potato are the same creature, displaying the same basic behaviour in different forms.  Surely it’s time to stop blaming the way in which an individual’s unhappiness, discontent or psychological makeup manifest, and to try to address the actual causes of those truly undesirable feelings and problems.

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

I blogged about Lively, Google’s browser plugin-based take on virtual worlds, when it went live back in July, thinking that it offered an interesting ‘entry level’ approach to customising 3D spaces and online interaction. Google have now announced that they’ll be closing Lively at the end of December, pretty unambiguously stating that it was simply a bet that didn’t pay off.

There’s no real information yet about why exactly it didn’t work out, although not being available on Mac or Linux, or even Google’s own browser Chrome, couldn’t have helped. Techcrunch reproduce a Google Analytics graph showing just how transient interest in Lively really was, and I know that my own use of it exactly mirrored the inital spike of interest followed by never returning to it.

Like the FaceBook groups and protest sites that sprang up when FaceBook’s News Feed feature was announced, there are some rooms on Lively aimed at protesting the closure, but unlike the more than 500,000 people who signed an online petition protesting against News Feed, the two rooms I’ve linked there have had less than 200 visitors between them. It’s always sad when something doesn’t work out, but is there really any point in a virtual world where the only person there is to talk to is yourself?

Update: Jason Calacanis asks why Google didn’t sell off Lively and wonders if its closure is a prelude to layoffs. Google’s announcement does state that Lively staff will be redeployed on other projects, for what that’s worth but Valleywag, who aren’t slow to point out where signs of the recession are evident within the Silicon Valley giant, have a pretty unambiguous view of why Lively, and by extension Second Life, just aren’t that appealing to that many people. Massively also offer their own interpretation of the closure.

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

Well, I could hardly let today go by unmarked after all: at 00:01 this morning the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, officially launched.  Currently played by over 11 million people worldwide, and by far the most successful MMO ever, the launch provided an ideal opportunity for the BBC to film girls dressed up as elves and turn concerns that a few people may deal with real life difficulties by becoming addicted to the game into a hand-wringing breakfast time piece featuring a ubiquitous, apparently publicity-addicted psychologist.

Despite the discredited claims of flawed studies, eccentric opinion pieces and extremist activists that computer games cause real life violence and social problems, there is significant evidence that they can actually improve skills and academic performance.  JISC have funded a significant amount of work in this area, and it’s been a popular theme at our own conference.  Multiplayer gaming, with the social and mental engagement it involves, seems to me to be a far more worthwhile activity than passive television watching, and as Mark Barrowcliffe says in his wonderful memoir, The Elfish Gene, ‘much less dangerous than horse riding or wind surfing, and no one seems to bother too much about those’.

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

Google’s tentacles have now penetrated the 3D space with this week’s launch of Lively, a 3D social environment which allows users to furnish and style their own rooms and invite their friends round to admire them.  Is that really all it is?

Well, apart from anything else, it’s Google: as Google’s Head of 3D Operations Mel Guymon says, ‘Google making a play validates the space like no one else.’  It’s straightforward to install, runs via a plugin in Internet Explorer and FireFox (but, significantly, not yet on the Mac OS or Linux), and like Vivaty, it provides a 3D context in which to view 2D user generated content like YouTube videos.  Every room comes with HTML code to allow users to embed them into a web page or, in Guymon’s ’standard use case’, their Facebook page. 

The obvious comparison is with Second Life, but they’re really very different creatures.  Reuben Steiger, CEO of one of Lively’s two preferred content developers, says:

I think you’re going to see a lot of blowback at first from people that don’t matter.  The Second Life cognoscenti.  They’ll be pissed because they can’t build stuff and blah, blah, blah.  The real test is whether other people like it.  If they do, that’s when it gets interesting. 

To be honest, I think it’s a pretty superficial comparison.  SL offers a fantastic space for those with the skills and inclination to build content - but at a price.  If you don’t own or rent land, you can’t really build anything.  If you can’t afford land, you can’t afford to be creative, and your in-world experience is reduced to passively consuming other people’s creations. 

Lively, by contrast, is currently completely free for the end user, but provides them with no content creation tools whatsoever at the moment.  Users create rooms by selecting a room name, and can then choose from around seventy shells or bare environments (both indoor environments such as two, three and five room apartments, a coffee shop and a dungeon and outdoor environments such as treetop windmills, a graveyard and a winter scene).  These can then be furnished from an extensive catalogue of furniture, toys and other goodies.  Avatar choice and customisation are pretty limited but movement and camera use are very easy to get to grips with (and infinitely easier than Second Life at its worst).  There’s text chat but no voice, and you can stream music or embed videos from YouTube; further integration with Google Gadgets is planned for the future which is where things could get really interesting for educators.  On the downside, it’s pretty laggy: popular rooms such as World of Warcraft (how could I resist?) and presumably also the inevitable sex rooms that keep springing up despite regular weeding-out took a while to fully rez, although you can start to move around and interact with content fairly quickly.  There’s a limit of 20 avatars per room at the moment, with additional users becoming passive observers.

I don’t really think there’s any need for the SL community to feel threatened by Lively - in fact, just the opposite.  Lively really isn’t trying to compete with SL in terms of direct content creation, although its potential as a 3D environment for mashups is very exciting.  Where SL could really benefit from Lively is in familiarising reluctant users with 3D environments: it’s so user friendly and so easy to quickly create your own little space without learning sophisticated and intimidating building techniques and without financial investment that it could create a whole new audience for virtual worlds, with SL providing a natural next stage for those who become frustrated with the limitations of Lively.

cetis-content, virtual worlds

Andy Powell delivered a fascinating and thought-provoking presentation yesterday at the UCISA User Support Conference at the University of Reading.  Not that I was there to see it…

As Andy took the stage in Reading in front of around 120 delegates, his Second Life avatar Art Fossett waited in front of an audience a tenth of that size in the Eduserv Island Virtual Congress Centre, ready to deliver his presentation simultaneously in both venues.  Andy’s slides were projected on the large screens in the virtual centre, and (as far as I could understand anyway) it was this that was broadcast to the real life attendees.  Andy used SL’s talk facility, fairly recently implemented, to speak to both actual and virtual attendees together.  For me, the voice channel and 3D sound worked extremely well: it’s very well implemented and I had no problems with it at all, although a couple of my virtual colleagues were unable to hear his talk.  Virtual delegates benefited during the curtailed Q&A session that followed (as Andy warned, it seems that presentations in SL always overrun) by having one of our number also present in Reading and able and willing to relay questions and comments from the RL audience to us.

Although those of us attending virtually definitely benefited from the event being made available in SL, I’m curious as to how much the RL attendees benefited from it.  Despite my previous peenging about highly visible backchannels at conferences and events, Andy was keen to encourage ‘chat heckling’ from SL delegates in order to demonstrate the value of the mixture of text and voice channels running simultaneously.  Being bound by the conventional format of a RL event of a static speaker, slides and an attentive audience, the real potential of SL was rather hidden: as Andy’s own presentation says, while ‘SL can be used to deliver lectures… [it is] most suited to “active” learning styles’ such as building, coding, discussion, role play, machinima and performance.

Andy did offer some caveats for the use of MUVEs in education.  Just as virtual attendees numbered about a tenth of the number of RL participants, so only around 10% of the RL audience had a SL avatar.  Andy cited Linden Lab’s own research that a massive 90% of accounts don’t make it past the orientation stage, and 90 day user retention remains at 10% despite significant changes and improvements within the environment and associated support.  He also argued that as many as 90% of people feel ‘alienated’ by virtual worlds and it is therefore inappropriate to focus pedagogic activities around MUVEs.  Unsurprisingly, there is evidence that they are much more effective for distance learning than for face to face classes.

Issues of identity in MUVEs are deeply fascinating.  At a recent Engineering Subject Centre event exploring the use of SL as a teaching aid, we were asked to identify ourselves and our institutions at the start of the session and almost all of us happily did so.  The suggestion by one participant that we should add this information to our avatars’ profiles, however, caused consternation:  people seemed very resistant to the idea, and one individual pointed out that people who use the same avatar for non-work activities would not be happy to share such personal information with random people they may meet inworld.  Despite the fact that I only use SL for work-related activities, I felt exactly the same sense of discomfort about explicitly associating my avatar with my real world identity.  Similarly, despite signing up for the Twinity beta, I’ve never actually logged in as by the time I got around to it they’d decided to embrace the use of real names - something I’m just not comfortable with. 

However, Andy raised the suggestion that the nebulous nature of identity in MUVEs might be part of what is turning off so many people: as well as students having to remember different RL and SL names for their teachers and peers, and lecturers (and possibly enterprise systems) needing to associate SL names with RL students for assessment and accreditation, appearance and even gender can be completely transformed in moments.  As we all know, we never really know who we’re talking to online no matter how much we want to fool ourselves, and perhaps the way an environment like SL celebrates and revels in that rather than trying to disguise it contributes to the alienation so many people seem to feel.

virtual worlds