Yesterday I had the privilege of receiving a guided tour of Nortern Illinois University’s Second Life campus from its architect, manager, and evangelist Aline Click (RL) / Ali Andrews (SL). (This is one of those cases in which a person’s real name seems more appropriate than her Second Life name!). Ali painstakingly crafted a replica of NIU’s Altgeld building using some 9,000 building blocks, and the effect is truly amazing (see this photo album).
Below is my (new) avatar in the Altgeld conference room, used for orientations:
Yet despite all this effort, Ali explained that the virtual campus is primarily for show. “I get a lot of criticism that why would you replicate a brick and mortar building when you could make your classrooms look like anything and I agree.” She walked us out of the building and over to the bus stop, which she had scripted to behave as a Star Trek transporter. In seconds, we were beamed up to classrooms in the sky, where the real action happens.
The main area is modeled after the Black Sun in Snowcrash (the Homeric narrative of Second Life); here students can lounge around, meet in groups, and pick up their assignments. The assignments are posted on the walls and are copied into your inventory when you click on them (conveniences of virtual reality!). Teachers can also stream videos encoded in Quicktime for students to watch together, though we had some trouble because I apparently did not have the most recent version of QT installed. Getting students’ hardware and software up to snuff must be a hard job, indeed.
Ali then showed me a grad student project, a room designed to teach students ESL. Every object had its English name floating above it; when you clicked on it, a voice would speak the object’s name. Reading over the assignments, I saw that the teacher met semi-weekly with the students and engaged in Skype calls. It looked extremely exciting, and Aline tells me that he gets very high grades on RateMyProfessors. His secret? “he has a lot of energy and tons of great ideas… he has the student’s learn by doing.”
Ali had lots of thoughts on how to teach and administer classes in a MUVE; I’ll just post some of them straight here (these are copied and edited for clarity from our chat transcript):
On classes that lend themselves to SL experiences: experiential, constructivist… where the student has to come and enteract, build up their knowledge by experiencing something which is easy with some topics (cyberculture, virtual communication… journalism)
On obstacles for learners: just the initial learning curve; once over the hump even the resistant students love it. [Technical access] is a big problem. all our course so far offer a computer lab as an option. younger students usually have the technology as it is needed for most game environments. but older learners… scary
On teaching approach: it can be very hard if you go about it in a traditional way. I mean standing in front of a group presenting or even giving directions. because everyone is moving around, clicking on things and you can’t tell if they are listening. [Is it boring?] well yes and no. I have been a “student” in many presentations from groups like Dartmouth and I was so interested in the topic I was on the edge of my seat to learn what they had to tell me but it always comes back to motivation doesn’t it. I was motivated to learn all I could about SL. they built a sim for homeland security grant — first responders simulation — and they presented like this, text chat and a slide show. I was able to copy the chat and save it to notepad for future reference and screen capture some of the slides, presenter, environment and audience to save with my notes.
On the state of voice-chat in SL: no[,] voice is bad in my opinion. it makes it impossilbe for those without voice to participate because they haven’t found a perfect solution for vopice. every product I have been involved in has had some problem and some of the audience hasn’t been able to “hear” the presentation. well Bryan and I use Gismo when he is in his class and I am in SL but it has an echo unless he is on head phones which he isn’t when he is in front of his class. the only good audio is like DJ so if you can stream in a live presentation through a “radio station”. we talked to a company who was developing something liek that There.com’s integrated voice] for SL. they wanted $ per student plus charge the sim owners thousands to it set up… so no interactive audio, just one way and the questions are asked through chat
It was a great tour, and I’m thankful to Aline for giving it. I have to remember to go back and look at the class assignments for inspiration; there were some interesting activities the NIU professors were having students doing.
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