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Workshop: Educational applications of virtual worlds @ State of Play V

Gene Koo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:10:35 +0000

I will be one of the facilitators of the workshop, Educational applications of virtual worlds at this year’s State of Play conference in Singapore:

Some theorists argue that games are great environments for learning, but terrible tools for teaching. Is it true that we are still struggling to incorporate games and virtual worlds in the classroom in meaningful ways? Organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, this workshop convenes leading game designers and educators together to examine the ways that games and virtual worlds are already shaping the learning processes of children and adults. During the second half of the session, participants will apply these insights to real-world case studies, developing a concrete list of best practices that will be useful to designers and teachers alike. This Workshop will be led by Catherine Bracy and Gene Koo from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Aaron Delwiche from Trinity University.

My hope is that, as a workshop, this will prove to be a useful and action-oriented session. On a personal note, I’m excited to be going to Singapore (never been) and have the chance to swing by Taiwan afterwards to see my father’s family, whom I haven’t visited since 1987.

State of Play Academy Spring 2007

Gene Koo — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:08:05 +0000

After a winter hiatus, State of Play Academy is back in session with an exciting new series of forums touching on a number of legal and legally-related topics ranging from Public Disclosure and the Fourth Amendment to Election 2008 and the Remix Culture. Sessions will run through June 8. Times for each class are different, so check the SOPA calendar.

“Legal anthropology” in virtual worlds

Gene Koo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:39:06 +0000

About a week ago, Prof. Pete Fitzgerald of Stetson Law School dropped me a line inquiring about using Second Life to offer his first-year Contracts students to engage in what I might dub “legal anthropology.” The fact that Linden Labs was now processing millions of dollars of transactions caught Pete’s eye, and he realized that with all of these transactions occurring, surely there was a legal property/contracts regime emerging before our eyes. (Indeed there is, and denizens of Terra Nova would probably have some insight into that).

Briefly, Pete hopes to set up a “clinical” of sorts, allowing Second Life residents with contract-related issues or disputes to ask his students questions. (The students, of course, would not be offering “legal advice,” but I would leave the specifics of how that would work to legal ethicists to parse through). The purpose would be less about giving students an opportunity to practice and more to help them experience law as a malleable, organic, socially-constructed system.

If a virtual world is good for anything pedagogical, it would be to offer students an immersive experience, whether “real” (in the sense that real people would bring real problems) or simulated (scripted or otherwise pre-planned). I am hopeful that State of Play Academy would offer similar opportunities for exploration. In the context of legal education, being able to see and experience alternative legal regimes (Second Life, while governed by a EULA and California law, also presents a separate jurisdiction with its own rules and customs) can help students better understand law as a whole.

Our correspondence, which Pete graciously agreed to let me post to this blog, after the jump.

(My email to Pete, responding to his initial query, follows.)

1. Contracts “Clinic”

I like this idea because it provides a unique, authentic learning experience. You might want to do some legwork initially with the SLED or other lists just to familiarize yourself with the substantive contract issues that do arise to ensure that your students will actually encounter issues that speak to your class topics. (I would be surprised if not, but it’s good to be prepared).

Your biggest challenges will likely be (a) getting law schools acclimated and comfortable with Second Life — and using it; and (b) getting the word out about the clinic and having SL residents bring their issues to you. (a) is a known variable, but (b) is not — spreading the word in SL is a bit like a HS student body election. You’ll need popular SL residents to help out (e.g. through newspapers, blogs, and word-of-mouth).

Once you overcome (b), you’ll face the same challenges that any clinical faces — people who bring issues that are irrelevant to your purposes, personal conflicts that obstruct the substantive matter, “client” communications in general. You might want to chat with your clinical profs to get a sense of what these challenges might be and how to deal with them.

Do you envision the setup being a courtroom, an arbitration, or just counseling?

2. Contracts Simulation

I’m a big proponent of simulations (in fact, sims will be the centerpiece of the whitepaper I’m writing for the Berkman Center), but in this case I’m not convinced of the value to your class. The problem is one of establishing context: the students would all need to immerse themselves in SL and care about it before they will have anything worth contracting and then disputing over. You could build a simulation to make that happen, but suspect you would find it easier to do without making use of the MUVE (c.f. negotiations simulations from PON Clearinghouse). If you were teaching a property, class, on the other hand, then I could easily see the value-added.

But before I get too down on this, please say more about what kind of simulation you imagine. I would suggest that a contract simulation would be of immense value to the rest of the legal teaching world. As a matter of sequencing, however, I see it happening after you do #1, the “clinic,” so that you get a feel for what kinds of issues do arise in SL and how you might model them.

3. SL as Communication Platform

IMHO, SL is best used for immersive experiences, not communications. Presumably your students already meet face-to-face; SL is just not as convenient as instant message or phone calls. I find SL incredibly cumbersome for things like messaging and communicating, to be frank.

More feedback follows…

Fitzgerald, Peter wrote:

1. Opening a “Law Students’ Contracts Clinic” in SL

Since SL has developed a vigorous economy based upon transactions in Linden Dollars, SL residents may have questions regarding their transactions. The “Clinic” would provide a venue for SL residents to ask questions of second semester law school students in my Contracts course regarding the legal (or should that be “virtual legal”?) aspects of those transactions.
FYI, one of our project teams from last semester tackled the issue of LL seizures of property. Ultimately they lacked the legal background to get very far with this, but I can put you in touch with the team members who might have some insights from the various interviews they conducted, etc.

Of course, the “law” at issue would be not only the express terms of the real world Linden Lab Terms of Service (including its reference to California law) and accompanying licensing and policy documents, but also the custom and practices associated with conducting transactions in SL. Those customs and practices are not unlike the basis for the “common law” that first year U.S. law students study (or the “lex mercatoria” that sometimes figures in to more advanced discussions of international transactions in upper level courses).

It seems to me that if you did nothing more than use this opportunity to investigate an organically, visibly-evolving property scheme, that would be quite revolutionary and exciting! Doing that investigation could itself be more authentic and engaging than anything else. Unlike most contract regimes, your students can actually talk people who’ve seen the entire lifespan of the culture evolve to its current state (whatever it might be).

Accordingly the “Clinic” would provide an opportunity for the students to practice applying the basic principles they are learning to the issues that are identified by their virtual clients – the SL residents. The issues the SL residents identify would in essence substitute for the hypotheticals we ordinarily use in a real world law school class.

True — although one of the major advantages of hypotheticals is that you can dictate what issues they will, in fact, encounter. (On the other hand, the excitement of real discovery should be underestimated, either).

In doing so, we’d be consciously side-stepping some of the real world concerns/debates regarding the sources and role of “law” in a virtual community but, however interesting, those are more appropriately issues addressed in the context of a technology law course. (However, if this Clinic scenario were expanded to also encompass students enrolled in an International Business Transactions course it would be easy to incorporate more advanced discussions about the issues surrounding the choice of an “applicable law”.)

I’m very excited by the possibility of you expanding this to an advanced law course, where part of the need might be to break down doctrine and adopt a bit more of an anthropological perspective. Virtual worlds are more akin to a foreign jurisdiction than some set of US or California law.

2. Creating/Running Simulated Transactions in SL

This is a step back from the first scenario, where the “Clinic” is only open to those enrolled in the law school course, affiliated with the law school, or other wise approved in some fashion. That is, rather than being a venue open to all SL residents, the students (or other approved individuals) themselves would identify the issues to be discussed based upon their own dealings in SL. Alternatively, animations could be developed to present predefined hypotheticals for the students’ consideration and analysis.

3. Using SL as a 3D Communication Vehicle

Alternatively, rather than establishing a “Clinic” like venue, SL could simply be used as a place to meet and discuss issues raised in class. This is a further step back from the first and second scenarios, and obviously the easiest to implement, and would be an easy substitute for the existing class listserv and similar tools. However, it also makes the least effective use the potential the SL MUVE potentially offers over other tools.

State of Play session on education in virtual worlds

Gene Koo — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:55:47 +0000

State of Play Session MP3 (large!)

Below are raw-text notes I took at the education session at State of Play. I’ll write something more coherent when I catch some time. At right you can see Becca and me participating in our own ad-hoc backchannel via Berkman Island.

Doug: transferability. Games as terrible environments, not for learning, but for teaching — because gamers are subversive. MMOs as spaces for both real AND the virtual without the two competing. Critical vs. productive disposition: interpretation vs. meeting others’ needs. WoW learning as fusing critical + productive: learning how to process information and build in relation to the specific, personal, and contingent. Where does learning happen: in world, boundaries between wrlds, boundary spaces: forums, guild sites, wikis…). Games are better at setting dispositions than content — consider games and learning, not games and teaching.

Lauren: State of Play Academy. How to take advantage of this space to teach law + tech more effectively. Use concept of place to change the kinds of teaching we do. “Distance ed on steroids.” Most of the class participants have never been in a virtual world before class — goal is to bring more people in, not just attract the natives. Add granularity to experiences that students can get — they don’t make commitment and can come to individual classes. Rethinking higher education — how do people learn. In relaunch, reconsidering classes as conversations — teacher has only a short moment to hit 5 bullet points before students start talking back. Greater opportunity for teaching: lots of people in the world with expertise, but not much chance for them to be involved in the educational process. How do we open up for students to learn from people other than professors? Like a next step from blogging — an open conversation opportunity.

Aaron: hype has been good for convincing administrators to run with an experiment. Topology of course locales: all-virtual, blended, dedicated sim modules (e.g. roleplay). Echoing Doug, need to give up control — can’t just do a powerpoint. But other extreme: go learn about new media, is too scary. Challenge is to create structure for students and let them go. Things will go wrong — you can invite students to help debug the course. Another challenge of computer literacy — there’s an assumption that younger students are cyborg tech jocks. Use the computer jocks as course assistants — pull aside early. Convince students that it’s OK to use VW as homework assignments. Check out NMC in Second Life + SLED. Also check out earlier work in text-based MUDDs.

First question: Games/VW as appropriate for teaching, how to adjust pedagogy? Doug: What can VW’s do uniquely? Those things move away from traditional transfer model. But let’s not celebrate that games can solve all of our problems. Math is a terrible forum for exploratory learning. Lauren: Wouldn’t just transfer regular Stanford class into VW but rather try a different approach.

Second question (Becca): When a University wants to start an Island, a problem with GC’s being willing to sign TOS.

Third question: Why all this focus on SL — is there something about a fantasy world that puts off teaching? Andy: Tools in SL for building. Why can’t we renegotiate the EULA — must it be institution-to-institution? Does university’s interest in $ get in the way.

Fourth question: “Crafting” (in rules) Creation : What is it that you want ppl to learn.

How to learn the new craft of teaching? Situated Learning, see Constance’s work @ Wisconsin, Gee @ Wisconsin.

Dispositions as being more along the lines of social organziation. By contrast, episodic and violence. Grief-playing as a disposition. (Killing as part of the game, vs. griefing as doing violence to the game?)

Simulation environments for business learning — role-playing power of virtual worlds + data-driven simulation. Lauren: example of flyover rights in There as a way to convey property rights (exploratio). vs. simulation where you can recreate case or facts. (Seems like this is a crucial identification of how virtual simulations take advantage of both role and processing power of computers).

Games as no different than other areas of education that aren’t straight knowledge transfer: same kind of resistance. Doug: idea of building stuff is itself a new pedagogy.

How do you “feel” about law? Using simulation of acting out scenario of implementing Nazi law on Guernsey Island. But frustrated with drawing the magic circle — is there a solution that VW provides?

How to evaluate the learning in that environment?

Last quip: Let’s rename “No child left behind” to “no child doesnt’ make Level 60

Aaron Delwiche (Trinity University); Lauren Gelman (Stanford University); Doug Thomas (University of Southern California)

Techniques in Virtual Lecturing

Gene Koo — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:44:34 +0000

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to lead a lecture/discussion in Second Life for CyberOne-Extension about relationships, networks, and how to build relationships through one-to-ones. (We are asking students to interview a SL personality to lay the groundwork for their projects, and I thought that the grassroot organizer’s approach was probably the best one to take since the projects have a grassroots feel to them). I had hoped to vidcast the session with audio commentary from myself and my wife Rachel (who is an organizer, and whose ideas about the topic shaped my talk), but the perfect being the enemy of the good and all that, I’m now settling for text.

The night before I had attended a training by Milosun Czervik on behalf of the SL Library Group on presentation tools available in SL. Milosun had introduced the topic to the SLED listserv with a heavy dose of disclaimer yet still received admonitions from active-learning fundamentalists. I tend to anti-lecture bias myself, but teacher-centered presentations are crucial even to the most student-led educational experiences. After all, students still need to know how to conduct their activities.

I picked up some really useful tools at the Milosun’s presentation, most notably a chatfeeder (works like a teleprompter — you pre-write the talk and press a button to “speak” each line from the text) and AngryBeth’s whiteboard. These two tools allowed me to prepare my presentation in advance, crucial to ensuring that the discussion stay focused and on-schedule. What’s more, the chatfeeder helped me overcome what I find to be the biggest problem in text-based presentation: typing speed and the time gap between a speaker and a respondent. With a press of a button, I can issue a complex and thoughtful idea that would otherwise take as long as a minute to formulate and type. This ability gives the presenter an “edge” in pushing conversation forward in what can otherwise be a chaotic free-for-all. Partly this is because people can read faster than they can type, so audience members can easily take control of a discussion just by sheer weight of the amount of text 30 people can generate simultaneously. (As I’ll eventually get around to writing up, text-based chat is excellent for egalitarian, non-linear discussion, but by the same token difficult to anchor).

In preparing the presentation beforehand, I also made sure to incorporate audience interaction, which seems paradoxical, but was quite effective on Thursday. So, every third line or so I asked a question that usually succeeded in setting off audience discussion that seemed quite engaged. Probably more importantly, I used the prepared text as the backbone of the talk, but then interspersed them with live chat that responded directly to audiene input. Here is an example:

GeneKoo Li: question: How might new technologies or media change commercial exchanges into relationships?
USA Brody: more resources
GeneKoo Li: (I think we are already covering that, but any further thoughts?)
Cordelia Moy: cooperation?
Mith Feingold: Businesses use customer databases and preferences to shape their offerings and make targeted ads
Dancer Morris: new technologies allow more interaction between a business and a customer
GeneKoo Li: OK, is there a difference b/t what Mith and what Dancer describe?

In this segment of the talk, the first line I spoke was through the chatfeeder, and the other two were “live.” What then followed was several lines of animated discussion among the class which continued for a while even after I moved on to the next item in the prepared speech — which is fine pedagogically, since it’s important for the audience to “own” the learning even as the lecturer tries to maintain a strict agenda, but presented a technical challenge that I’ll turn to now.

Despite what I felt was a successful discussion, we also ran up against the boundaries of the chat discussion. As several students have now complained, SecondLife (and There.com) lack a threaded chat capacity. The result was a huge blob of undifferentiated text, and one student even requested that the instructors preface their lines with some kind of special character so our words could easily be segregated from the audience’s. (Not a bad idea, either, for indicating whether a line of text is live or canned). Hopefully I’ll take up the topic of chat’s architectural biases shortly.

What has impressed me most about this event how the students took ownership of it afterwards. One student took the trouble to create a color-coded transcript (PDF courtesy of another student), and another posted a video capture of the event. Ergo, my desire to overlay a conversation on top of the video in “director’s commentary” style afterwards, which I still hope to do at some point.

Finally, I am writing up some best practices for the State of Play Academy on how to deliver a lecture in a virtual world. Because There has speech capabilities, the chatfeeder is unnecessary, but the need to prepare is universal. Also, the likelihood — in fact, the desirability — of audience cross-chat is consistent across platforms. For presenters used to linear, one-way lectures or facilitator-controlled discussions, text-based chatting is probably the most alien experience as it demands a different way of thinking about audience engagement as well as the capacity to keep track of multiple discussion threads simultaneously while still driving the agenda forward.

ODR in MUVEs (guest-starring some Lindens)

Gene Koo — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 07:16:05 +0000

In probably our most successful Academy lecture to date, Colin Rule, EBay’s Director of Dispute Resolution, presented a lecture on dispute resolution in virtual worlds. Here’s an excerpt of the class description:

…On August 27th I led a class at Southern Methodist University in Plano, Texas through a negotiation simulation in There.com. After spending about an hour and a half orienting the 22 students in the class to There, each student was assigned a role and given a confidential page of background information. The students then found their negotiating partner and wandered off to find a place in There to work out the dispute…

Not only was the lecture well-attended and involved significant class input, but it also featured some unexpected guests in the person of several communty managers of Linden Labs, the makers of There.com competitor Second Life. (Pathfinder Linden is sitting third from left on the bench, looking remarkably like his Second Life self). They were able to shed some light on DR in Second Life.

Also notable for this session was that we finally got voice working for everyone, thought text-chat was still preferred for offhand comments and even most audience questions. Despite the fact that this would probably the most MUVE-savvy group we’ve ever had, Lauren still spent a good 15 minutes helping participants set up, mostly because they needed to inhabit avatars that were preconfigured with voice. Because we’ve yet to achieve a stable, repeating group, every session seems to involve some amount of technical setup. I’m not sure there is a way to avoid this given the ad hoc, day-by-day nature of the Academy presentations.

edit: Unfortunately, I neglected to record this session in either audio or video. Another big disadvantage of voice over text is that it’s harder to memorialize meetings in a usable format. It’s relatively easy to scan the text of a chat to find interesting bits or reread confusing part, but listening to an unedited MP3 stream may not be as accessible. I know of some efforts to bridge text and rich media — Illinois Legal Aid Online, for example, manages to not only videotape but also transcribe to text their trainings — but it’s not a cheap or logistically easy operation. Perhaps one day with better (and cheaper) speech recognition software we’ll get there.

Legal MUVEs picked up in Law.com’s Legal Watch blog

Gene Koo — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:37:53 +0000

SOPA and CyberOne both garnered some attention today from Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch. Hopefully with more people paying attention to the phenomena, MUVEs will gain some level of acceptance and become both potential media and subjects for legal study/teaching.

Good Grief!

Gene Koo — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:33:51 +0000

We had our first potential conflict I know of in State of Play Academy last night. A bunch of kids (I’m guessing young teenagers or tweeners) showed up towards the end of class and started milling around, doing their There thing. For the most part they were respectful, though somewhat intrusive. Luckily most did not have or use voice chat or just standing around in our vicinity might have potentially overwhelmed the lecture. However, right at the end, one pulled out a paint gun and started pointing it at us, which prompted the dean of the University of There to issue a stern warning. Nothing really happened until the class ended, at which point the paintballs started flying.

I was amused to see Lauren thrown halfway across the field by the force of a point-blank paintgun, and I also admit to some pleasure in knocking some of the hooligans around using my hoverboard. Lauren was fairly good-humored about the incident (which, if nothing else, was a good learning experience). But for future reference, we might consider making the class an official event so we’d have the power to eject real griefers. (On Thursday in CyberOne, Rodica will be excluding all outsiders from Berkman Island not just to prevent griefing, but also to prevent lag.)

Blogging and Liability at the State of Play Academy

Gene Koo — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:28:23 +0000

This Tuesday and Thursday, 8:30-9:30pm EST, Lauren Gelman will be discussing legal protections for bloggers at State of Play Academy. Here is her description of the event:

Learn about legal protections for bloggers at State of Play Academy!

Are you a blogger worried about your liability for things others are posting on your website? Your commentors, co-bloggers, or columnists? Dean of State of Play Academy Lauren Gelman will speak for 45 minutes about the statutory and First Amendment protections for bloggers, recent cases that might affect them, and things you may need to worry about on a citizen journalism webblogging site.

Attend both sessions or just one. Tuesday’s class will focus more on First Amendment issues and Thursdays class will focus more on Copyright issues but there will be some overlap on general liability issues.

Lauren is soliciting questions from interested participants at the State of Play Academy course website (login required if you want to post; otherwise, you may just click “guest access”). If you’re interested in attending and have never been in There.com, Lauren can hook you up with a prefab avatar with voice chat enabled — just email her at gelman at Stanford dot edu, and don’t forget to test your headset before the class starts!

Back to School in There

Gene Koo — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 03:40:58 +0000

On Tuesday we resumed our twice-weekly courses in There.com. Though we encountered our first serious technological glitch (the lecturer was unable to log into the space from work, likely for firewall reasons), we ended up having an interesting conversation nonetheless about what and how to teach in virtual spaces. For example, is it necessary for these first few courses to focus on the MUVE itself, or is it possible to teach about “real world” topics?

Oh, and I bought a puppy. You can see it running around this pool we ended up retiring to.