Jumping from one work to the next can be tricky if you are an Avatar. This great video by BotGirl explores Evolver, which allows you to move your avatar between worlds. There are plenty of ways to use this to dream up classroom literacy activities using it — even if your bubble is stuck in >text >based >learning >.*.* and can’t get in world.
Integrating virtual worlds and games into Stage 4 English isn’t technically hard — although they syllabus only mentions CD-Roms and Websites due to it’s age.
So lets start simply and work through an idea. I’ll add some examples and leave you to explore them later. The point of the post is to clearly illustrate that todays reading list should include things that students find more compelling that websites and CD-Roms. In doing so I’m using just three technologies. It would allow an entire unit of work over a term for US$100.00 and provide an opportunity for team-teaching.
Let’s take FICTION – The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins being a great story, brilliantly plotted with tremendous pace. In order to be used “students must study examples of spoken, print and visual texts”. Okay so we can cover the print; but lets look at how games and virtual worlds fit in this. Spoken — well virtual worlds afford role-play in which students play characters, audio readings of the books and streaming of both video and audio into scripted objects and land parcels. Yes Katniss can be visualised as an avatar — allowing students to visualise the texts. All of which meet the need for students to present students with “a range of social, gender and cultural perspectives”. Tick, tick, tick.
The texts on the ‘list’ (why and English teacher can’t align a text without a list seems weird) have to “challenge the reader, texts that have layered and multiple meanings, and that provoke thought”. Hunger Games does that on many levels, adding a virtual world allows them to rise beyond that – to create and make. Another tick.
Now lets look at what is on the list for a moment in this rough area – Animal Farm, Lord of the flies, The cry of the wolf — all great books — but I’m still sticking with Hunger Games. As one reviewer in Goodreads.com said
“I am a young adult media specialist. I read a lot of young adult literature. I read all summer long, looking for the next IT book. I didn’t find one. Though I enjoyed “The Glass Castle,” “The Host,” and others there was nothing that I thought could match the “Twilight” fever. Suddenly this fall, I have read two books that I think are absolutely outstanding. One of them is “The Hunger Games.“
Ah I slipped in Goodreads.com – This is where I’d be putting the class to journal the book as they read it. The syllabus asks us to provision “composing extended imaginative, interpretive and critical texts based on their own investigations and their wider reading”. Hunger Games has wider reading in Fan Fiction for a beginning, so already I am thinking about getting them to reflect using one tool, read the authorised text and compare other texts to it online. We’re already cooking and no-one’s set foot in a virtual world yet.
I’m thinking about how we can not only look at the story, but also at the way we construct stories … with an eye on working towards creating a story narrative in a virtual world. There are numerous examples on Fan Fiction – but I’d choose something like this — so we can pull apart the construction of the writing itself, and compare it to the author’s work. The quarter quell is the topic of the second book. I would not make direct reference to Catching Fire, but allow students to look beyond the ‘task’. There are also stories mashing vampires with Hunger Games, so really what I would like to encourage is that students would find something of personal interest to read from Fan Fiction, as well as the book itself. So now I’m using Fan Fiction and Good Reads as my learning management tools. Nice and simple.
Now lets look more specifically at an outcome
2.1 use a range of listening, reading and viewing strategies, including skimming, scanning, predicting and speculating, reading and viewing in depth and rereading and re-viewing, according to the purpose and complexity of the texts
I am going to meet that by using comments and discussion in Good Reads and by looking at other reviews.
2.15 processes of representation including the use of symbols, images, icons, clichés, stereotypes, connotations, inference and particular visual and aural techniques including those of camera, design and sound.
Here’s the kicker – the easy way to meet this outcome is to create a Power Point, grab a few images off Google, watch a DVD and then get them to respond to some directed questions. But let’s use a virtual world instead — Reaction Grid. This is the place to be in Virtual World Education right now, and I’ll leave you to explore what it is all about except to say, get your IT people to unlock a couple of ports and install Meercat browser, and grab a sim for a term for about US$100.00. Now you are ready to LET THE STUDENTS go nuts in a private, safe, virtual space.
Rule#1 – the sim is only open when a teacher is present. Rule#2, get Reaction Grid people to give you a chat-logger for the island. Rule#3, explain the rules of virtual space – they are the same as any other space — an opportunity to side track for a while to look at digital citizenship and cyber-behaviour that is syllabus-missing anyway. So now you’re adding value and the kids are pumped with ideas around your project. You might go and look at other school-sim rules too, but in the initial phase — you have to keep it simple. Being in-world of course is not a right. I would set in-world time as a reward for completing task milestones. That is significant – it creates group responsibility and encourages the teacher to design learning well enough from the outset to manage computer time. A good habit of mind.
Ah, I didn’t mention the project did I? - Well that’s for you to design – suffice to say, you are NOT going to build anything in-world — don’t panic!
In fact the world itself is just one outcome of 4 or more that you are aiming to hit. It is the activity, not necessarily the assessment. It is the motivation, the chat-room and the social space you need to get them reading and writing in other spaces. The project itself should allow students to visualise and make. Reaction Grid does not require any Linden $ in payment to do this – so you’re going to hit some targets with ICT immediately as you add graphics etc.,
Now go and see a computing teacher or maybe an art teacher, there are multiple lines you can draw – the point it DON’T WORK ALONE.
Computer teachers are probably building boring websites (the syllabus tells them to). If so, add a couple of ICT outcomes to your project — this will also buy you some more computer time if you are not 1:1 access – and it will allow them to look at 3D software, different graphic formats, resolution as well as sound and video. So now you can get year 9 to work with year 7.
By now your students are exploring and making and you’re blending learning and subjects — beginning to team-teach in an enquiry driven approach. You have a book, paper tasks, an online community in 2 and 3D accessible quickly and easily. A class of 30 is now in 6 or 7 groups — and you are beginning to act as the pathfinder and guide — not the font of all knowledge.
I have glossed over the project purposely - as learning about instructional design, project based learning or scenario based learning to me is a given in our hyper-connected world — and is indeed a something new to learn in itself.
However, this approach meets the needs of the syllabus and more importantly will create far greater realism and resonance – as right at the centre of it are motivating technologies – that connect students to their friends and their learning.
You could do this with Sims2, which is pretty cheap – the illustration opposite is fan art using it. Personally I think that would cost more and not provide an open-enough environment as Reaction Grid. Also note that I am not suggesting that as a teacher you would learn to ‘build’ either, that would be part of the skills kids need to develop in their PBL project. But as I started out saying games or virtual worlds — it is a viable option if your network admin believes that the a private virtual world is more dangerous than their filtered web. If that’s the case you have some myth-minded matters to attend to – as there is plenty of academic evidence to counter prejudice and fear — if they bothered to look.
In the new year Judy and I are going to provide a workable model of this though Second Classroom – and teachers will be able to come and learn about the design of projects in more detail. Contact me if you or your school are interested.
Tools needed: Private Reaction Grid sim, Goodreads.com, Fanfiction.com. Nice to have: Picnik browser plug in, Diigo class library browser plug-in
Pedagogy: Enquiry, Group based learning 8/10 students per group
Duration: Over a term
Swapping Out: Quiet Reading time – for active learning time
POPTROPICA – the virtual world that is the new black for pre-schoolers and primary age explorers. This isn’t a game review, this is a heads up that Poptropica is the ‘must play’ social game – for now. So quit Farm Town and Cafe World for a moment and lets take an educators look at Poptropica.
Who’s behind it? – Pearson — the mega-publishers who’ve been keeping classrooms knee deep in manuals and text books for a long time.
It is interesting then to see them with largely un-branded game site and trying out micro-payments , social gaming and chat rooms. It claims they are safe, but doesn’t explain how they determine this.
Poptropica is 2D platformer, browser based game using levels, tokens and makes you work harder to unlock and collect stuff. The levels have themes and back-story. Best of all – choose chat or battle with your friends. Its cute, slick and very hip. There is a blog to feed new information to players and of course merchandise, mailing lists and ‘buy credit on your phone‘ – which seems a bit worrying.
The avatar studio is a great place for kids to try out customising their toons. But what irked me was the fact that kids either spend forever playing to earn micro credits (camping in Second Life seems familiar) or pay to look good and play better.
This sends wrong signals. Pay to win, pay to be better and pay to look great. The casual, social nature of this game sees kids getting into peer pressure situations about status and reputation – rather than any real skill development. Mr8 breezes trough it without really thinking.
The images and animation are great. The controls are simple enough for a 4 year old to have fun and achieve things and on a ‘I’m not giving Pearson a cent’ level — Poptropica represents an effective way of combining fun with social-gaming — but its hardly a virtual world. It’s a series of interconnected platform games. Winning is easy, just watch the walk-thoughs on YouTube.
Have a look at the viewed figures on the various videos — kids have made — 500,000 views plus! perhaps that’s the educational value here. The rest of Pearson’s YouTube reputation is somewhat ‘tiny’ in comparison. They seem to have missed out on their largest marketing channel (it’s okay, send me the cheque – that bit of advice was a mere $20,000).
I have mixed feelings about Poptropica to say the least. Interestingly, Mr8 only played it because his friends did. He just likes to level, the game “is not that interesting” he says. “I just want to keep up”. Games online, are part of the school-reputation cycle it seems. The biggest reason Poptropica is popular in public school – DET have not yet banned it - its accessible. Kids are playing it.
If you have kids in 4-11, then chances are they are playing Poptropica. You might not have noticed – it looks just like another cute platformer, but it is a social-network. Kids connect and communicate here as they do in MSN. I am still trying to see why Pearson, the ‘brand’ heavy publisher offers almost no clue that they are behind it – the only link being to their T&Cs which firmly pass responsibility to the user.
Safe world? probably not — but very interesting that such a good social game – is almost running vanilla branding — Educational? Not really, but has Educational impacts. Obviously Pearson are looking at new markets. As long as you keep away from the micro-payments – it’s not too bad. BUT from a K6 education perspective – the Avatar Studio and looking at micro-payments for ‘looking better’ might (just) make for an interesting discussion about image and society.
But as a classroom-game? –NO. It stands apart from their other online games at the Funbrain portal of flash games and I don’t see how it stacks up as being educational, and it’s not well enough explained anywhere on their umpteen portals to cover their ‘family friendly generic happy-making’ parent branding either.
Which is what makes me wonder why Pearson would head down this route, unless it represents a new market. And if that is the case, I’d have expected far more visibility and explanation of it’s social side . Sneeky one Pearson. Go and buy Puzzle Quest is great, multi-player and under $5.00.
This post kind of follows the last few and looks at why TOYS will create digital-emigrants from 2D learning, before you can say podcast. The trends in creating online virtual worlds around product and game is stepping up, and will see kids stepping out of using laptops and desktops …
The traveling STAR WARS exhibition had an interactive table, where with a few crude black and white shaped cards, you could build a moisture farm using augmented reality.
These are toys you will be buying. Free software online and a web-cam. Given that all consoles can deal with this and so can most laptops – even phones – you will be using this technology sooner than later.
This short demo from James Cameron’s movie Avatar – shows this at a new level. Although the movie is going to be just that – a passive movie, it is interesting to see how toys and peripheral materials are increasingly focused on mashing physical objects with virtual ones. There are a number of examples of people messing with cameras and applications (check this Transformers home made one) or an academic project to see what people are doing. but this is the first one I’ve seen which has obviously been developed around what will be a big-commercial-movie. This interaction, blending real with virtual is already happening with things like PS2 Eye-Toy. But objects are now beginning to appear in the middle. Not just camera sees person and visa versa, but camera recognises object and persons interaction with it. – That makes it an assessment tool as well as a learning tool.
With digital camera’s already fitted with projectors — 3M mini-projectors on Amazon — and POV cameras — it’s significant that a major movie/game enterprise starts to fund the mashing of these together in commercial ways. Think it’s hard teaching with an iPod – imagine what the science lab will look like in a decades time – when this kind of thing is old-hat and been in the lounge room since they were pre-schoolers.
The point is that much of the driving forces that power the web itself are more interested in escaping the small screen. While we live in a time where hyper-connected-social-twittering is the new cheese … it is likely that the generation now playing GT5 on PS3 will see much of Web2.0 as ‘historical’ much like dial-up.
While adults might discuss the decline of traditional media trending down and to the right – it is facile to think that one is simply replacing the other. Statistically, youth-online is not flocking to 2D spaces – and FB has discovered games are it’s killer app, not comment walls.
Yet, virtual worlds and games – are still regarded as less important than the new-standards – and god knows, they are hard enough to access in public schools.
If you have 10 minutes – watch this amazing video story ‘world builder‘. Especially if you are not yet seeing what ‘virtual worlds are for’.
I read Betch’s post about being AMAZING – or rather what is AMAZING technology. He observed …
The teacher was all effusive, gushed about the Ning’s “amazing” features and wanting to show the students all the “amazing” things it could do… “Look! You can use it to leave messages for each other!”, she said excitedly.
So what is AMAZING? I have to say STORYTELLING and writing. But it means getting out the comfy chair again.
Increasingly virtual worlds and games offer tools that are more engaging than those Chris mentions — and even pre-schoolers are using them. Transmedia is now the norm in publishing. You can’t seriously leave the reader – just a reader. They want to participate. Check out http://fairygodmotheracademy.com/ for a nice example of this in action.
STORYTELLING and more specifically — digital narrative — plays out in the lives of young people though their use of consoles and games. The development of the story, the realisation through images, sounds and immersion in ‘open’ worlds will be more familiar to kids than anything else.
Call of Duty – $3billion dollar game — a significant reason for games/entertainment to find increasing synergies between telling stories and being immersed in stories. They are skipping past he blogs and portals — and putting their audience in world, not on the web. Developers have learned that we don’t just want to play — we want to connect, share and customise ourselves and the environment.
Sony PS3 Little Big Planet is about to offer online creation and other games such as Spore have already discovered that creating a character is more engaging that just choosing one and even separated the character tools from the game itself. Pre-schoolers love to create Mii’s as much as play the Wii – and no MMO would dare show itself unless you could dress up your avatar.
What has this got to do with school? — Literacy. We like to create and visualise outside of the reading. We want to combine characterisation with avatars and we want to experience the worlds and situations that we create. This is what made Peggy Sheehy’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird” sim on the Teen Grid so brilliant – way ahead of its time – kids could be part of the book, not just observers.
Schools right now have multiple options to use virtual worlds. The AU RRP of PS3 is under $500 — and of course will play DVDs — so why not replace the DVD player with a console? OSGrid, HyperGrid, ReactionGrid all offer affordable, reliable and safe places for students to create content.
Second Life has well established places to gain teacher inspiration — and the fundamentals of writing are no secret online. So why not use them? Here are two photos from Second Life – what story could you build around these? – Of course! – BUT you have to be in world to take the shot — and that seems outside of what even the most Webby teachers like to do.
I had the good fortune to spend an evening with Dr Larry Johnson, CEO of NMC this week following his trip to VITTA. We talked about the Teen Grid and a lot about Open Grids. At VITTA he was keynoting about the Horizon report. He made several points about Second Life — not least that the ideas founded in virtual worlds are more important that the world itself, saying that if Second Life closed tomorrow, they it would not matter to NMC — Second Life is the now technology which is why they use it to create ideas and generate new directions for learning.
It seems a fundamental issue that Australian attitude among administrators and IT managers is to block the use of virtual worlds, even on a small scale. From a story creation, literacy viewpoint they offer far more than adding Google’d images on a powerpoint blah. But teachers don’t spend time in them, don’t explore them and don’t understand sufficiently that the decline of passive media online is being amplified by games and virtual worlds – it is not blogs and wikis that drive out portals exclusively — it is the multi-billion dollars in games and the millions of people immersed in their story.
Yet, Second Life and Game remain something missing from the PLN – get connected slide-decks that we see presented at conferences. Twitter, FB, Ning et al – but not Blue Mars or MetaPlace, not even Second Life.
Kids don’t need Twitter — they have MSN and Mobile Phones. They need immersive, motivating environments. We need to recognise that teaching story telling and literacy need to happen ‘in world’ – and not just on Ning — that consoles are every bit as valid in class as a DVD. Chris has hit on a big issue. We should be AMAZING when it comes to using technology with students for engagement, assessment, inclusion and most of all – learning to be creative, critical thinkers.
I’ll be running some classes in-world next year via Jokaydia on using Second Life in English … via Second Classroom. If you are interested let me know.
STORY QUEST. Not only is this a brilliant idea, it represents yet another signal to the wider educational technology teaching community that virtual worlds are fast crossing over as the place to take your read/write/make classrooms. The impossible is possible, and with a clearer understanding of writing – students can experience a much more open and immersible learning environment – exploring on their own terms and raising questions that it generates. While the current fuss over Google Wave rages on Twitter, I can’t help keep asking what is it for – in the classroom. What does it do that can’t be done. I suspect Google Wave will have implications for people, but not sure how it would align with the current syllabus’ demands for information communication technology.
The great thing here is that you can not only watch that video; but step into it yourself. You prompt the action and interaction and your presence in the space triggers the events. It is designed for architects, to understand how to look at Second Life or Reaction Grid as an instructional design space that is created to meet outcomes intended, though activities and assessment. For more information, check out Jo Kay’s blog post on Story Quest, grab a walking stick and explore a new way to tell stories – and in Story Quest, there are no stupid questions.
As I begin a 6 month project in Virtual Worlds … this sim to me, shouts – this is where story’s and learning are heading …
The recent debacle over Jo Kay’s SLEducation wiki has provided a wave of new discussions around Virtual Worlds in Education. It has raises discussions around the idea that Second Life is not THE virtual world for education, just one execution of it – and what if we used something else?
Many of those who have been writing, developing and researching are clearly past the critical flack of the initial beach landing, have overcome the initial ‘yeah but’ barrage from the sand dunes and are confidently aligning virtual worlds and games with learning and assessment.
Unlike a great deal of Web2.0-ness, virtual worlds are long supported by a wealth of academic research to suggest they are extreamly good at motivating students and offer high quality instructional design environments for learning.
Obviously not everyone is going to explore them. The biggest barrier is that in muves the experience has to be instructively designed to create opportunities that extend beyond it and facilitate experiences that cannot be created without it – Who has the time to do that?
Well lots of people actually, not least the students we are teaching and certainly the multi-billion dollar technology industry.
A flood of educators followed Kerry Johnson’s footsteps into Reaction Grid, a community of inter-connected Open Simulators.
The discussions have not been about whether Second Life is better, but how it changes pedagogical opportunities. I am yet to hear from teen-educators that Linden is easy to deal with, or overly keen to help – quite the opposite. But Lindens notice to Jo felt like a wake up call to lots of Second Life Educators.
Maybe it was time to get past what we can’t do and look at what we can. As blog posts appeared online last week over Jo and Sean’s well established (and Linden referenced) wiki there was a flurry of new activity – not about the wiki issue, but in going right around the problem – which was all about ownership and trademarks, not community. We get the idea of trademarks by the way.
The Jokaydia Second Life community flocked into Reaction Grid and Jo Kay has established a new outpost to allow Second Life educators to explore Reaction Grid with the same level of support, resources and expert development you’d expect.
There’s also an ISTE2010 conference proposal via Judy and Vicki Davis that was put together via iPhones and Google Docs in a few hours this week to meet the call for proposal deadline.
In the next few months, there will be open resources and open spaces in Reaction Grid created for teachers to explore with students – and this will lead to further instances of students read, writing and making things outside of them. Some will be online – and perhaps some will be downloadable – able to run on local machines as stand alone or LAN learning objects. Imagine being able to download a unit of work around Huxley’s Brave New World and run it on your nice new DER laptops using open source resources – offline. Giving students a zip file to unpack and run for homework, where they have to model mathematical problems. Virtual school in a virtual world.
Change comes from places you least expect and creates opportunities you never imagined. You get into Reaction Grid for FREE. Join us at 9pm AEST on Sunday night – because that is where the new curriculum in being crafted. You can google it.
This is a presentation given to Macquarie University staff about considering the opportunities that are presented by virtual worlds in education. I tried to keep it simple and included some of the uses of Second Life Campus. The aim was to get them to look past the visual and to consider how shared reality is a familiar way to experience technology in informal situations such as Facebook. During the presentation In a time where Web2.0 is abundantly available for read/write, virtual worlds offer instructional designers a controlled and measured ability to deliver eLearning in experience/evaluate. It was followed by a tour of several educational spaces to support the presentation.
ORIENTATION for the super-secret spy class (I still have no idea what they do) was held in Evergreen tonight for distance students preparing for a role-play assessment task. This is actually the space for Scott Merrick and Co’s MUVERS activities in simulations and assessment. It’s got this great feel to it and has very simple, but effective instructional design. It took only a few minutes to get off the landing area and to a point where the students had configured their audio, learned how to move in the space and interact with the environment. The session then moved to Jokaydia to the role-play area and students were able to walk though the actions that they will soon be doing under assessment.
Like the rest of the internet, Linden has made massive leaps forward in terms of functionality and reliability this year. Macquarie University has access to all the usual video conference tools – so there has to be a pedagogical reason to choose Second Life!. That becomes obvious when students are engaging with the environment that has been designed specifically for a purpose, not repurposed. There is a purity in Educational Second Life away from the duplication, and noize of the 2D web.
The ability to conceptualise yourself in spaces and situations that are impossible otherwise provides a clear focus, and readily allows the alignment of outcome, activity and assessment. For distance learners; this is affords an opportunity to experience a ’shared reality’ – and has been warmly welcomed. Of the few comments the spooks made “this is so much fun”, and yet they were learning. The level of stress and effort to get them here and prepared for their assessment has been absolutely minimal. Perhaps the game-like space brings an assumed understanding that not everything will be explained or prescribed. Seriously if all you are using in distance education is a forum – you are at the telegram level of engagement with learning online.
Designing assessment is Second Life is possibly the most rewarding and creative parts of instructional design for me. Watching avatars interact and explore puzzles and problems, talk and work together to solve them in real time is amazing. Even if they won’t tell you anything about their course or what they do. Spys are not the most sharing people to teach. I’m looking forward to the role-play sessions.
DISTANCE students in an International Security course at Macquarie University are about to play games. The are playing the roles of people who might potentially be making some of very important ones for real. It seems that the chances are, many conversations will happen over great distance as well as in the conference room. While on campus students can role-play their assessment in the comfort of the super-secret high tech lair, those distance students might have previously been given some alternative task. No fun in that, so now there is a weekly task held in world with their teacher.
Second Life is incredibly flexible in assessment of this kind. The course designer can create a ’shared reality’ by role-playing and facilitating an engaging environment for the students. Progressively over a two weeks; students have waded into virtual worlds – using online resources. The space is designed to be a ‘three click deal’. As they enter the space; they are automatically given note cards.
The instructional design for this was developed using simple storyboards in Apple Pages; and gradually we explored and expanded on the functionality and environment needed to bring absolute newcomers into a virtual world and undertake a very real assessment task. Each week, the students will get watch a video briefing from SL (we film them all in 15 mins in one session). So far, this has been met with real enthusiasm by the distance students and will be interesting to evaluate. In getting the solution for the students, the teacher has had to do some work too – and already has forgotten about trying to using …. I can’t say too much more …. I hear footsteps heading my way.
Feeding Interest
|
