If you were a teacher how would you use SL?

[Bree Giffen]

It's the game industry that drives computing advancements. What are the highest end computers? Gaming computers. Games have continuously been the driver for VR as well. Oculus, Vive and Sony's VR products are chiefly game driven. 

[Selene Gregoire]

3 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

It's the game industry that drives computing advancements. What are the highest end computers? Gaming computers. Games have continuously been the driver for VR as well. Oculus, Vive and Sony's VR products are chiefly game driven. 

Gaming falls under entertainment so I'd have to say it's the entertainment industry that drives much of it. Look at how far CGI has come in just the last 20 years. Compare the movie Avatar to... well.. pretty much any movie or tv series prior to Avatar's release.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Selene Gregoire

[Bree Giffen]

You could fold everything into entertainment but gaming is the largest majority of it. The game industry made 30 billion in 2016 compared to 11 billion by the film industry. By all measures, games pull in more money than film and music combined. In terms of consumer computer technology though, it's just games. There's not way other way to interpret it. 

[Selene Gregoire]

2 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

You could fold everything into entertainment but gaming is the largest majority of it. The game industry made 30 billion in 2016 compared to 11 billion by the film industry. By all measures, games pull in more money than film and music combined. In terms of consumer computer technology though, it's just games. There's not way other way to interpret it. 

Doesn't change the fact that gaming is entertainment. 

[Prokofy Neva]

I would go to some of the great historical builds in SL, like Machu Picchu. (Go here to get a free copy of the International Bazaar terminal which has regularly-updated lists of landmarks of real-life country sims.

Or to some of the sites like the Human Genome.

[Zeta Vandyke]

On 2/16/2019 at 11:24 PM, Selene Gregoire said:

Doesn't change the fact that gaming is entertainment. 

So is the circus, or a boardgame, a coloring book and uncountable other things. Entertainment is to broad a meaning to name it a single industry really.

[RachelWales]

On 2/13/2019 at 4:59 PM, Pamela Galli said:

Roblox is like SL for kids. Many opportunities for creation. 

Kids are not allowed in SL.

Yes, I realize that kids aren't allowed in SL but on my own little parcel, I could do a little skit for whoever I want. Anyone can on their own Sim. Kids may not be allowed to be members but there's nothing stopping me or anyone else from doing a play or a puppet show for friends and family.

As an aside, it's too bad that SL isn't more inclusive.

Use a blackboard (another person weighing in on the topic)?

Sure, another tool but I would have been fired in my engineering career if I hadn't progressed from the manual drawing board to Autocad and other software.

Not sure about SL's capabilities and if it actually could be used in some teaching applications but I don't think I'm going to see an open discussion about it if we're still on the blackboard and touting that as the greatest teaching tool ever. It's one, there are others and I'm not convinced that SL wouldn't be useful as well for some things.

 

[Pamela Galli]

 

You can do whatever you want from home. The question was about school teachers or professors using with a class. 

We have had several teachers weigh in on the suitability of SL as a classroom teaching tool, but as we all know, teaching experience is of no particular value and the opinions and skills of  anyone who walks in off the street will do about as well.

Right? 

[Selene Gregoire]

6 hours ago, Zeta Vandyke said:

So is the circus, or a boardgame, a coloring book and uncountable other things. Entertainment is to broad a meaning to name it a single industry really.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/e/entertainment-industry/

[Zeta Vandyke]

7 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

https://definitions.uslegal.com/e/entertainment-industry/

I stand corrected!

Never thought about it in legal terms to be honest.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

 

You can do whatever you want from home. The question was about school teachers or professors using with a class. 

We have had several teachers weigh in on the suitability of SL as a classroom teaching tool, but as we all know, teaching experience is of no particular value and the opinions and skills of  anyone who walks in off the street will do about as well.

Right? 

One-size-fits-all generalizations about the effectiveness of pedagogical tools are pretty pointless. An engineer might well want to use autocad. I use PowerPoint slides, and those sparingly. But then, I'm teaching literature and gender studies, not engineering.

I think the question being posed here is far too vague and broad. Teaching elementary school kids is very different from teaching high schoolers, and that in turn is long way from teaching undergrads (who, in turn, are different from graduate students). SL is going to be more or less useful to these different kinds of student depending upon how you want to use it. It's potentially a good tool for "engagement," for instance, for older students, but younger students are more likely to find it "fun" and interesting (and are less likely to be unimpressed by the graphics and clunky interface).

On top of that, the subject matter is going to matter a great deal. The university courses I knew about that employed SL were mostly media studies courses: Second Life wasn't a tool, but rather the actual subject of the course. I suspect it's probably less likely to be useful for STEM subjects than for humanities ones generally, for reasons some have given here and elsewhere, but it does have some potential for teaching things like history, archaeology (I remember a fantastic sim, now long gone, that was a real-time simulation of a bronze age dig in Turkey). I knew someone who used it to teach Spanish.

The biggest problem -- in fact, for me, a deal-breaker, or I might consider using it myself -- is the learning curve.

[Pamela Galli]

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

think the question being posed here is far too vague and broad. Teaching elementary school kids is very different from teaching high schoolers, and that in turn is long way from teaching undergra

The question was about high school and college. 

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

.

The biggest problem -- in fact, for me, a deal-breaker, or I might consider using it myself -- is the learning curve.

That is true of all high school (and other ) students in states with high stakes testing (college teachers may be able to tak a more leisurely approach). Like it or not, every moment has to be accounted for and justified in accordance with objectives. It is very intense.* SL learning curve is steep enough if all you want to do is wander around; learning to actually use or make tools and artifacts would take way too much time. I can just imagine some hapless teacher trying to justify poor test results by pointing to some SL achievement — she would find herself out on the street. 

Everyone can tell what they would do “if I was a teacher”.  Real, full time school teachers have an entirely different perspective. 

* Which is why I jumped ship after 20 years.

[Rolig Loon]

15 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

One-size-fits-all generalizations about the effectiveness of pedagogical tools are pretty pointless. An engineer might well want to use autocad. I use PowerPoint slides, and those sparingly. But then, I'm teaching literature and gender studies, not engineering.

I think the question being posed here is far too vague and broad. Teaching elementary school kids is very different from teaching high schoolers, and that in turn is long way from teaching undergrads (who, in turn, are different from graduate students). SL is going to be more or less useful to these different kinds of student depending upon how you want to use it. It's potentially a good tool for "engagement," for instance, for older students, but younger students are more likely to find it "fun" and interesting (and are less likely to be unimpressed by the graphics and clunky interface).

On top of that, the subject matter is going to matter a great deal. The university courses I knew about that employed SL were mostly media studies courses: Second Life wasn't a tool, but rather the actual subject of the course. I suspect it's probably less likely to be useful for STEM subjects than for humanities ones generally, for reasons some have given here and elsewhere, but it does have some potential for teaching things like history, archaeology (I remember a fantastic sim, now long gone, that was a real-time simulation of a bronze age dig in Turkey). I knew someone who used it to teach Spanish.

The biggest problem -- in fact, for me, a deal-breaker, or I might consider using it myself -- is the learning curve.

That's essentially the conclusion that I came to in my own study a decade ago.  SL is much better suited for individual instruction -- tutorials or adult education -- than it is for traditional classroom learning, and more for higher education than for secondary.  The learning curve is indeed the deal breaker.  It's easier to overcome when a student is dealing one-on-one with a mentor who knows the ropes, but even then it's a distraction from learning (unless the point is to learn how SL works). 

Coming from the sciences, I am skeptical -- as you are -- about how effectively we can teach STEM principles in SL. I once created a fairly detailed interactive exhibit to introduce the three laws of thermodynamics, which @Madelaine McMasters may remember, but was rather disappointed by how few people came to see it.  I created another one at about the same time to illustrate basic workflow in a small glass studio, complete with a working furnace and glassblowing tools -- again, to underwhelming response.  To be fair, I had similarly poor attendance at an interactive exhibit on British/American literature of the 1920s, so it's not simply the sciences that generate a ho-hum response.  Still, my experience in RL tells me that fewer people go out of their way to learn about STEM topics than are drawn to topics in the arts and literature.  Anyone trying to teach about the sciences in SL has to leap a higher hurdle.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

45 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

That is true of all high school (and other ) students in states with high stakes testing (college teachers may be able to tak a more leisurely approach). Like it or not, every moment has to be accounted for and justified in accordance with objectives. It is very intense.* SL learning curve is steep enough if all you want to do is wander around; learning to actually use or make tools and artifacts would take way too much time. I can just imagine some hapless teacher trying to justify poor test results by pointing to some SL achievement — she would find herself out on the street. 

I suspect that one of the ways some people envisioned using SL was for distance education and, more broadly, as a way of "scaling up" and cutting costs on classroom teaching, much as the idiotic "MOOC" (massively open online courses, for the uninitiated) were supposed to do a half dozen years ago.

But that kind of use of virtual worlds wouldn't actually be about engagement or pedagogy at all. It would be about economics. And as SL isn't scaleable in that way, it was a non-starter to begin with.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

43 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's essentially the conclusion that I came to in my own study a decade ago.  SL is much better suited for individual instruction -- tutorials or adult education -- than it is for traditional classroom learning, and more for higher education than for secondary.  The learning curve is indeed the deal breaker.  It's easier to overcome when a student is dealing one-on-one with a mentor who knows the ropes, but even then it's a distraction from learning (unless the point is to learn how SL works). 

Were i Queen of the World, or of SL anyway, and in the position to design from the bottom up a virtual world that would be really serviceable for the sorts of things I mostly teach, it would, feature for students (only) an extremely simplified, intuitive, and limited interface: one that allowed students to move around, shift their cams within reason, communicate with each other, and interact at a simple level with in-world objects. It would be browser based, rather than employing a dedicated viewer platform. And it would permit the teacher to restrict the ability of students to travel outside of the sim (as well as the ability of others from outside to enter, but we have that already).

In other words, it wouldn't be SL.

The other necessity, of course, is worthwhile content. There used to be a lot in SL that was worth visiting from a humanities-teaching perspective. There's a lot less now than there used to be, as educational institutions have retreated from the platform. I could build something, or commission something to be built, of course, but how worthwhile would that kind of effort be  for a presumably singular experience that likely represents a week or two of actual course content?

The ship has sailed on this one, I think, and the kind of VR that SL, Opensim, Sansar, and similar projects represent is pretty certainly no longer "the future." What might be is a mixture of VR and AR technologies. Why take students in-world to see an imperfect simulation of an archaeological dig if I can use headsets and a beefed-up version of Google Earth to take them virtually to the actual site?

 

[ChinRey]

28 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Were i Queen of the World, or of SL anyway, and in the position to design from the bottom up a virtual world that would be really serviceable for the sorts of things I mostly teach, it would, feature for students (only) an extremely simplified, intuitive, and limited interface: one that allowed students to move around, shift their cams within reason, communicate with each other, and interact at a simple level with in-world objects.

The awkward user interface is definitely a huge obstacle not only for education but for all "casual" use of Second Life. But although it's far from ideal, it's not critical and it can be overcome to some degree.

For those who has SoaS or similar, I recommend ot take a look at Linda Kellie's Conference Center OAR. As the name says, it's a sim specially made for conferences, not for education, but the entry tutorial overcomes most of the problems of the UI simply by ignoring all the mess and focusing on the essnetials and only the essentials.

You rez on a platform right in front of a big sign with a picture on the arrow keys and simple one or two word explanations how to use them to move around. Then you follow boardwalks with arrows on them to a changing room (different ones for males and females) where you get to choose an avatar from a line of vendors. (This is where the major weakness of the system is: after selecting the avatar, you then have to find the folder in your inventory and wear the content. That's the best Linda Kellie could do back then but with experiences or rlv or something like that, the avatar switch can easily be automated). Next, you walk to the conference hall and click on a chair to sit down.

During this very short session that should only take a minute or two, the new users have learned two of the four vital skills. They have learned how to move around and they have learned how to itneract with obects by clicking on them. The other two vital skills are how to see the surroundings and how to communicate with others. Seeing comes automatically, communication may require some minor tweaks to the interface.

The major flaw in all other welcome systems that triy to be newcomer friendly, both in Second Life and on other grids: they try too hard. They try to teach the poor newcomer far too much in one go, violating one of the most fundamental principles in all good teaching: In a learning curve there is no such thing as too small a step.

 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

That's essentially the conclusion that I came to in my own study a decade ago.  SL is much better suited for individual instruction -- tutorials or adult education -- than it is for traditional classroom learning, and more for higher education than for secondary.  The learning curve is indeed the deal breaker.  It's easier to overcome when a student is dealing one-on-one with a mentor who knows the ropes, but even then it's a distraction from learning (unless the point is to learn how SL works). 

Coming from the sciences, I am skeptical -- as you are -- about how effectively we can teach STEM principles in SL. I once created a fairly detailed interactive exhibit to introduce the three laws of thermodynamics, which @Madelaine McMasters may remember, but was rather disappointed by how few people came to see it.  I created another one at about the same time to illustrate basic workflow in a small glass studio, complete with a working furnace and glassblowing tools -- again, to underwhelming response.  To be fair, I had similarly poor attendance at an interactive exhibit on British/American literature of the 1920s, so it's not simply the sciences that generate a ho-hum response.  Still, my experience in RL tells me that fewer people go out of their way to learn about STEM topics than are drawn to topics in the arts and literature.  Anyone trying to teach about the sciences in SL has to leap a higher hurdle.

Rolig, I recall witnessing several of your simulations, both STEM and recreational. You'd have to remind me of a particular from your thermo demo, but I do recall a golf/croquet game with visible club/mallet aiming vectors, which I very much enjoyed. I don't think you've ever shown me something that didn't put a smile on my face, either because you'd solved the vexing problem of making anything work well in SL, or because there was an element of playfulness in what you'd done.

I certainly enjoyed working up fanciful creations here, some of them demonstrating mathematical or physical ideas and some of them adding interaction to art in service of storytelling. Compelling as SL is for people like us, I still think it's a dreadful way to teach others anything other than SL.

There are already purpose built computer based educational tools that exceed what SL can do for simulation and collaboration, with little to no learning curve for student and teacher alike. Those tools are making little progress in the classroom, so I really don't see how SL stands a chance.

 

[Becca Rebane]

I discovered SL via my grad school. I was in a library program, specializing in archives, getting a MLIS online (San Jose State U). Since everyone was a distance learner, SL was a great place for us to meet and interact w/ each other. I got a part-time job with the university as a guide on the uni campus - it was awesome! We had ALA conferences, took field trips to historical sites (WWI battlefield, WWII airstrip) as a way to discuss having digital archives in virtual worlds, had lectures from librarians and archivists from around the world, etc. I *adored* it. I was gone from SL for a long time and am just now back and trying to catch up on everything that has changed in 8 years. I love exploring places like Macchu Picchu which I'll most likely never visit in person. 

[Sasy Scarborough]

This just came up in my feeds, and it is pretty awesome showing us exactly how teachers/students are using SL 

 

[Maryanne Solo]

If students are obsessed with their mobile phones in classes by the most inane content, (what I see are posts such as "oooh get a load of him/her" "wow I got soo smashed at lectro boom-tish festival" I fail to see how SL could grab their attention unfortunately. They simply cannot see they are being used by the Zuckerberg parasites of this world. It's pretty sad

OoooooK.... I just watched the above video. One tutor I observe regularly uses "Kahoot" the online test/game app for mobile/cell phones to construct revision challenges prior to formal exams. It really is the funniest thing you've ever seen because it keeps a running score of who has the most correct answers. The thing I like about it the most is that the least "hip" student usually wins.

I also made one app which I have never released, but shown to students and they absolutely loved it.

So I would have to say, outrageous, FUN creativity unleashed IS the way of the future in education. I'm just not sure where SL fits in. I wish LL would target that audience. 

Edited March 4, 2019 by Maryanne Solo