Learn 4 Life

Gaming Education - How to create a culture of learning through designing real world games in education

July 28, 2010 on 11:37 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Foundation, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Tools, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, mobile learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

Gaming Education

I have been looking at a lot at “Real World Gaming” and Education recently. This is a subject I have returned to again and again in the course of the last few years. Taking the idea of the culture “around” gaming I outlined in previous blogs, I thought I might explore the natural extension of those ideas into the classroom pulling together various sources and reflect on possible ways forward for teaching and learning.

Real World Gaming

In “real world” gaming the content of the game is contributed by the players, making it simply a set of tools enabling players to interact and compete with one another while on the go. Except it’s a bit more complex than that…

Recently a number of real world games linked to the geo-positions of users’ smart phones have become very popular; things like Flook, Gowalla, FourSquare rely on transparency of information about places and services.

Partly based on serendipity and partly on user input of information to gain points and badges - these “game” (verb not noun) “reality” giving users incentives to share and inform. Of course the trick is that all the heavy lifting is done by the game players who are crowdsourced and who, in effect, build the game resources for each other and, ultimately, the company running the game service. People come back to the game because it has a level of authenticity - it’s what they do in real life anyway as they go about their daily business. So it is turned into a game process whereby they receive awards and status.

Now why can’t we do that in education?

(update: One such app that was brought to my attention today is Mission:Explore and there is also GPS Mission )

Jesse Schell - gaming in education - Learning design and so much more

Look at the videos below by Jesse Schell - he talks specifically about education and how we might design a better way of doing things there with the ethos of gaming behind it - he pulls out specific qualities such as :

Beautiful
Customised
Shared
Real

and to that I would add

transparent
ongoing
iterative
rewarding

another presentation you might like to look at is:

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

where he discusses the “psychological tricks” employed by gaming or virtual world companies to get users to engage and to return to the game again and again.

Learning Design

It was Drew Buddie who first pointed out Jesse Schell’s work at TeachMeet Milton Keynes last month:

http://blip.tv/file/3907169

Drew talks at length on the process of using “learning lenses” adapted from the ideas in Schell’s book.

Negotiated Learning - co-creation of your learning journey

I was also interested to come across Neil Hopkin’s video on Negotiated Learning which reminded me very much of the ideas on Co-Creation that were espoused by Steve Rubel coming from the commercial world back in the middle noughties. There are obvious parallels there for me. I tend to look around at the corporate world and see what innovation is taking place there and how that might have some corollary with education. Certainly quite a few blue chip companies now employ the process of co-creation and extend that into the workplace as well.

Certainly the co-creation of learning using school community is a start but now imagine this in your classroom, school, district overlaying that process as another educational “skin” or “patina”.

How can you “game” the classroom?

Base your learning activities and aquisition of knowledge on collaborative working and transparency of learning. Give points for those students who make transparent their ways of working and sharing their knowledge.

Make sure those “learning” especially, the more dependent learners, that may take some time to “get it” always level up.

Design levels of expertise - so students can Pay Forward to each other knowledge and skills modelled and facilitated at first by the teacher, and then given external inducements by way of points badges and levels for collaborative working.

Of course these ideas are not new to anyone who has been through, or seen a “traditional” education involving “houses” and “teams” will recognise certain common elements as will anyone who have been through the scouting movement. But that’s where the comparison ends…

The difference here could be that the elements of teaching students to teach each other to learn through peer instruction and review could itself be gamed.

It’s not something imposed and mediated from on high but built into the very fabric of the way people could run their classes giving rewards for both the teachers and learners involved but levelling them according to - off the top of my head :

knowledge

expertise

competency

design

application

engagement

reflection

peer review

In effect, through a social gaming mechanism you build a ‘culture of learning’ that allows pupils to collaborate or to self-study in certain instances given enough initial scaffolding and modelling by the faciltator.

Not only would you use a process of learning lenses to design activities as outlined by Drew above - seredipitous triggers to get yourself to reflect in your planning but also you get the students to iterate and reflect on their learning by extrinsic rewards built into the system when they have achieved certain goals. Building in opportunities to both capture the process and use the documentation of the process as a resource would be an ideal use for ICT.

In that way you can build up a portfolio of work and a set of exemplar material to use for revision, starters, explication, modelling. The list is endless. How would you do it?

Game On?

Why are we still arguing over Gaming in Education?

March 3, 2010 on 9:14 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, distributed networking, informal learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

When I was little (between 5 and 10 years old) I grew up in the early-sixties, post second world war era London of bombsites and grey realities.

Like most boys my age at that time, I watched an endless succession of Brits Vs Germans war films at the saturday cinema club, on (the newly acquired) TV and bought things like the Commando Comic - which was every bit as gruesome as anything you’ll find today in Call of Duty :

I used to have endless cap gun fights with my friends in the streets. I used to take the bus to Southend so I could walk down to the pier and play a very early version of an electronic video game involving a real periscope and a U-Boat on screen. I used to spend hours and all my pocket money on that infernal machine torpedoing things from freighters to enemy gunboats. I can’t say it scarred me for life or affected my cognitive development - it was all pretend and excellent fun.

REALITY vs FANTASY

I haven’t forgotten the thrill it gave me as a child but I wasn’t naive enough to think that all I consumed was anything other than fantasy. The realities of the Vietnam war and other adult intrusions into my life were more than evident and I can still remember the bowel freezing moments of sirens on police stations being tested in London leading up to the nuclear confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So when I read about the supposed dangers of gaming and the numerous negative references to their application to education I remember my own history in this area with a wry smile. When the ZX Spectrum came out twenty years later I bought one immediately and played a fair few of the games at the time. By that time I was teaching and I started to learn Basic and brought the machine into class so I could program animations for pupils and start to teach them how to code.

Five years ago, when Second Life came out, I was an early adopter - I’m still in there working out smart ways of using the immersive environment to teach and learn effectively. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not really into reminiscence or nostalgia for times gone by - I prefer to live in the present but where relevant, the past can give an insight or long view into events going on today so long as we learn from our mistakes…

BACKLASH AGAINST GAMING AND MORAL PANICS

The sudden backlash against online Gaming and the arising of concerns about possible changes in brain activity in Teens and  “unethical” lack of responsibility makes me wonder. And I had, to be honest, one of those WTF moments (if you don’t know what that means cover your synapses I won’t provide you with a link).

You see they are only pretend - ask any teenager if they consider the war games they play to be real…The whole process bound up in gaming is, strangely, a ludic one - this may be news to some people-  it doesn’t have to have real life repercussions. Just as the imaginary number of people I shot dead when a child never turned me into a rampaging serial killer - it isn’t real. But then nobody was giving me brain scans at the time - it’s probably too late now…

ONLINE GAMING HAS A LONG HISTORY

More than 30 years ago, in 1978, before the personal computer got going in homes - people like Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw adapted interactive book text adventures and Dragon and Dungeon board games to make the first MUD at Essex university .

That’s 32 years ago and it has spawned a grand tradition of variants - but no cognitive casualties or people bereft of ethical sensibilities I can see despite its long history. Only recently have we got the long tail of moral panic beginning to emerge on this.

WHY TEENS LIKE TO SUBVERT GAMES?

Now you may consider me a bad father but I let my son play Grand Theft Auto. Shock horror you may think but rewind a little and consider this. He’s almost always playing it in front of me - his maturational age in some senses is way beyond his chronological age - I monitor his gameplay and I’ve never seen him do anything other than subvert the game with his mates online. Today’s teenagers are extremely sophisticated and are aware of the nuances, the genres and the possibilities of such games - they pick up on stuff older people might well miss - here he is talking to me about what he finds intriguing about the “Game”.

Link to interview

What seems to cause the most outrage in using Games for Learning is the “content” - which I agree can be quite dubious in some cases - but most of the kids I have observed in his agegroup (mid teens) seem more intent on working together to subvert or solve problems rather than worry unduly about the ethical repercussions of the roles they are taking within gameplay. Remember it’s make believe. That’s not to say that some games are entirely inappropriate for various agegroups but used with discretion, insight and understanding the elements and social activity “around” gameplay are a powerful motivational force in learning.

CARTOON VIOLENCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS

One of the very first disturbing things (to me) that  I came across when I first encountered the web was a site called: “Kill Barney“.

Doing a bit of ad hoc informal research I was interviewing pupils at my school back in 1994 - a few of them liked to spend some time at home (those few with internet connections) playing online games and I was interested in finding out what was popular. Amongst the 10 and 11 year olds at the time regardless of gender - KIll Barney was among the top three. The site consisted of an early Flash or Javascript animation whereby you could stab, shoot and otherwise mutilate (in cartoon form) Barney the Dinosaur.  At first I was shocked but my pupils regarded it as something to be dismissed as completely devoid of the ethical baggage I had invested in it. They reassured me it was only a cartoon character and that what they were doing wasn’t related to real life in any way. It was a disapprobation of the saccharine like nature of the character - they saw it for what it was - poking fun (although in an extreme way) at the preprocessed cartoon character they had grown out of. I hadn’t observed any perceptible change in their playground or other behaviours to give me concern at the time. Sometimes a game is just a game no matter how you dress it up.

Now compare this to the use of “drones” controlled by non-military staff through consoles 2,000 - 5,000 miles away from the “target” kill. These are being controlled in the home-counties by non-combatants who can drive home to their families at night without the slightest concern. Without wishing to get overly political on this point I know this causes extreme ethical discomfort in me- this is “real killing” where serious games and the death of individuals at the other end are part of a continuum - not just some scary “story”. “That” is the difference between real life and made up I would think and worth reflecting on in this context. This is happening right now in our country and I would consider that far more noteworthy than moral panics about “horror tales” corrupting our youth. Sometimes you have to “get real”.

PROCESS vs CONTENT

Which brings me to the present and the efforts of nay-sayers to belittle the positive effects of gaming. I have observed gaming for over 20 years both in my family (my sister is an avid gamer and has been for two decades) and in my professional life. It seems to me what people always go for is the content and never the process behind what is involved in gaming. With the advent of social media around gaming - online activity and reflection there seems to be an added element of communites of practice that could be harnessed for educational purposes.

In the nineties I was involved with the trialling of “Toon Talk” - part of a research project by the Institute of Education investigating the designing and playing of games. This was fascinating because it used a video game to teach the elements of programming and maths and is still an excellent resource - it can be downloaded free here for Windows. What was missing then was a process to quickly share, through social media, the results of game play and exemplars with a wider audience.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY AROUND GAMING

What has radically changed gaming, at present, is the social activity “around” these games and particularly the synchronous online elements of communication now built into the more powerful boxes. People are able to share activity and insight in a way they were never able to do before. Most “gamers” are a subset of people who know how to coalesce around content and build ad hoc communities of practice to enable rapid learning or modelling of skillsets - it’s all pretty “meta” activity around the actual game and perhaps our focus should be on the processes behind that activity. We could learn things from this activity.

So what are the elements of this social activity - well here are a few I’ve observed:

• Ad hoc communities of practice
• Use of Forums to debate technique
• Transparent Sharing of Skillsets
• Willingness to create learning exemplars using new media especially online video
• Subversion and repurposing of content underpinned by humour
• Highly dynamic learning is going on
  

Gamers seem to come together and coalesce around games and the skillsets involved in playing online games - they appear to have quite a good fluency with ICT skills in general and always seem quite willing to show off their prowess or provide online tutorials or “walkthroughs” of game elements whether this is a “cheat” a “glitch” or a other techniques in the games.

If gamers want to “cheat” or learn to navigate through a game (which can be a highly complex set of skills) - what do they do?

Well they discuss what they do on forums - they make transparent what and how they do things - they make walkthroughs for games for other gamers - they tap into a community of practice. They work together to evolve a little ecosystem of learning by making films, screenshots and putting them up on sites like YouTube and these help others learn those skillsets. These often involve “in-jokes” around gaming culture.

Now if a similar culture were developed in teaching where pupils are encouraged to share and build pathways of learning for others wouldn’t that be a good thing? As a teacher I had many abilities in my class - some kids needed a context for learning for it to make sense for them others could abstract knowledge almost seamlessly - if I had access to tools like Screenr and other film making resources I could have made them little interactive primers to repeat again and again if they were finding it hard. When teaching in Second Life I encourage adult learners to make a record of their sessions using these tools so they can share them with others.

HOW SOME EDUCATORS ARE EXPLOITING GAMES FOR LEARNING USING “REAL LIFE” SOCIAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS

So far in this blog I have underpinned the fact that most games are make believe, pretend - not real - er that’s why they are “games”.

However if you are going to introduce Gaming into an institutional context without killing the enjoyment of them stone dead and exploiting the best elements of gaming for educational purposes - how do you do it? What evidence is out there that it works and how do you evolve a pedagogical model that both rings true in terms of epistemology but also allows the ludic and enjoyable elements of gaming to come to the fore?

Fortunately there are some great practitioners up and down the country doing some great work that is beginning to bear fruit in terms of research.

EXEMPLARS OF GAMING IN EDUCATION - “SOME PRACTITIONERS”

I could mention a host of people but, for now, I will mention a handful of pioneers - there are many many more educators following in their footsteps.

TOM BARRETT‘S ENDLESS OCEAN

First up, inevitably, is Tom Barrett, look at his blog postings about the use of games as a medium of delivering the curriculum:

http://edte.ch/blog/tag/endless-ocean/

DAWN HALLYBONE

Look also at Dawn Hallybone’s project using Nintendo DS consoles in Class:

Notice the amount of planning to make the games as intuitively and genuinely pertinent to curricular activity and skills and the planning of social activity “around” games to create “real life” community activity in both exemplars. Notice too the outcomes both academic and social.

OLLIE BRAY AND CONTEXTUAL HUBS

Ollie Bray’s use of Guitar Hero as a Bridging project on a wider scope should also be pointed out here - he goes into the “Contextual Hub” idea rapidly emerging in his excellent blog posts here:

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/guitar_hero/

DEREK ROBERTSON

No pantheon of gamer educators could pass by without Derek Robertson and his work with Ollie at the Consolarium - his latest podcast on the use of Samba de Amigo and the allied learning “around” the game and the resulting social infrastructure and bonding between schools is just the latest case study in a long list of very successful gaming projects that bring authenticity of learning and fun into the classroom.

TIM RYLANDS

Lastly anyone who has seen Tim Rylands working with Myst and the activities he binds pupils into “around” and “interweaved with” the program is also a case study in how to blend the playful and engaging into the curriculum and achieve palpable outcomes.

What do all these people have in common?

They are:

• early adopters
• risk takers
• self-starters
• highly reflective about their practice
• highly innovative
• blog in detail about what they do
• use social media in a tightly focused way for professional development
• build extremely focused communities of practice with their peers
• have the vision and confidence to muster and orchestrate gaming resources to bind into the curriculum
• evolve both hyperlocal and wider scale educational social communities and events

I could go on and list more and more qualities but then I’m not a researcher, merely a videographer and documenter of the activity.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE STUPID

What comes across most forcibly for me is that all these individuals are at the hub of social activity that has engaged and transformed learning in their local area and that they have managed to amplify this practice globally to a wider set of educational professionals.

This is the beginnings of much of future education in the 21st century - these individuals and many others are beginning to transform how we plan and execute the curriculum; making learning more relevant and fun for future generations. I for one, welcome that change.

They may only be using “make believe” but they are deadly serious in their intent to transform and improve teaching and learning. Through the TeachMeet movement and multi channel social media they are beginning to effect change in this area and anyone who wants to know more would be well advised to subscribe to their blogs and follow them on Twitter.

COMING EVENTS ON GAMING AND EDUCATION

MIRANDAMOD GAMES AND LEARNING

On March 9th 2010 - I will be filming and live-streaming the MirandaMod session on Games Based Learning - sign up for the debate and the Wiki here:

http://mirandamod.wikispaces.com/Games+%26+Learning

There will also be a Flash Meeting as well - it all kicks off at 16:00 hours. We hope you can join us.

TEACHMEET GAMES

There is also a TeachMeet GameOn on at the Games Based Learning Conference on March 29th

BETT 2010 - halfway there…

January 15, 2010 on 12:59 am | In BETT 2010, Educational Change, Innovation, Learning Content, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Virtual Worlds, advisory, mediascapes | 0 Comments

I have had an amazing BETT 2010 so far. Most of my time has been spent at the Open Source Cafe and on the MirandaMod stands streaming video out in real time and making small vox pop videos like this :

But the most interesting part of the BETT2010 show so far was the AmplifiED event held on the Thursday night - about 20 people of the projected 60 turned up but the evening was a fantastic success. As usual my Mac is chuntering away in the background encoding video of all the sessions but in the meantime before I go to bed here’s a very quick and jerky video teaser I threw together quickly to whet your appetite for the HD quality films to come.

Tim Rylands had to leave early, but, as usual, his input was both entertaining and informative - the quality of discussion was very high in all three convos - thanks to Drew Buddie and especially Danny Nicholson for organizing everything - I hope to have the video of the sessions out next week - it was a lively evening. Interesting to get some cross-sector opinions and lively debate - I definitely want more AmplifiEd events to stir up debate across the country - excellent.

The amazing Joanne Jacobs liveblogged the evening as well - more coming soon.

TeachMeet tomorrow night should be very interesting…

What happens when you give a class of 8 year old children an iPod touch each?

September 17, 2009 on 4:01 pm | In Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Handheld Learning, Innovation, KS2, Learning Content, Learning Tools, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Primary, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mobile, mobile learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

The wonderful thing about my job is that I have a network of people I can visit who are involved with prototyping the use of new technologies in education. My latest outing was to a Junior School with a difference this week.

Peter Barrett, an old colleague of mine, had told me about the seed of this idea some months back. Knowing Peter I guessed it would be quite ambitious. We have worked on a number of innovation projects in the past and he never fails to surprise me…

As well as the school going through a massive rebuilding programme, they have also introduced a set of iPod touches into one year 4 class, for each child, to see what happens.

All the touches are networked through an Apple Airport Extreme and out onto the internet through the school’s connection. It is not every day you see this sort of thing.

So I offered to pop along and make a video of their progress after a couple of weeks. In the first week that the children have had them, they seemed to be quite at home using the applications and devices - but it’s early days…

Here is a brief video record of reflections and practice of that use…

I’d like to thank all the staff, children and parents for help in making this film.

Educators in Virtual Worlds on Open Sim - the pioneers…

September 10, 2009 on 2:18 pm | In Adult Learning, BSF, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Tools, MUVE, Mediated Reality, Moodle, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Scottish Learning Festival, Second Life, Uncategorized, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, open source, pedagogy, sloodle, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

WHY VIRTUAL WORLDS - WHY NOW?

Image attribution Chealion on Flickr under this CC licence

This series of posts is intended to be a comprehensive look at the use and development of Virtual Worlds on Open Source technologies in Schools. It is to be the basis for a book I am writing to be released early next year on Lulu about Virtual Worlds, Open Source and Education.

Over the last six months, through a series of interviews with people from around the globe, I have been mapping out some of the major developments in this field. The trouble is that presently, technological advances are happening so fast, some days, in this area, that 12 hours can make all the difference between one exponential breakthrough and another - the field of virtual worlds is moving so fast!

By next year the technology for Virtual Worlds will be in the browser and at that point they will become mainstream - already firms such as 3DI are going down that route and others such as RealXtend are working on making it possible to interconnect several different types of Immersive Environment to enable the eventual building of what is termed, a hypergrid, and even more recently there is talk of a Universal World Web Client WebHud. There are exact parallels, here, to the construction of the early World Wide Web.

So let me take you on a journey with the help of a few of the main players in the United States, Canada and the UK and see and listen to their stories and reflect on why so many people are putting so much effort into building this vision…

This first blog post is the start of many that will be a testament to the perseverance and drive of those individuals involved in constructing these whole new immersive landscapes. I would like to thank everyone involved, (especially Vicki Davis, her students and their parents) for giving me time and access on this project which seems to have grown with every passing day.

WHY THE TIME IS RIPE FOR MAINSTREAMING VIRTUAL WORLDS - AND WHY OPEN SIM AND OTHER OPEN SOURCE IMMERSIVE WORLDS?

Image attribution Torley under this CC licence

My involvement with Open Source and Virtual Worlds goes back quite a few years - during this time I have watched quietly, as the technology has gone from very geeky, obscure wikis, where enthusiasts are compiling and sharing code, to a more mature commercial enterprise with sophisticated clients and browser interfaces being rolled out and developed on a weekly basis.

For the past few months I have been interviewing the main players in the field of Virtual Worlds in Open Sim, Cobalt, Wonderland et al in education around the globe and taking footage and interviews with people in avatar form both inside the worlds themselves and in real life using Gmail video and Skype.

I have taken literally hundreds of hours of video of interviews with people to try and get a grasp on what is happening at the present time. This is the sum of all that work - I hope you feel it is useful and can guide your own choices of using virtual worlds/immersive environments in your school district or class…

Remember, these are interviews with serious educational professionals working in this field; they are the pioneers risking professional and academic reputation and the businesses promoting  innovative, “edge” technologies in a highly commercial world. Why should they do that - what is the appeal?

THE ‘V’ GENERATION

Image attribution hawken.dadako on Flickr under this CC licence

The future is here and it will serve the V Generation - the 5 year olds and upwards who currently use sites like Club Penguin and Disney Fairies and any number of the 200+ Virtual Worlds out there at home who will have much higher and more pronounced expectations of any future education system that they will enter and pass through in the next 10 - 15 years.

Global research firms such as Gartner have a very good understanding of how this use is beginning to work -

“Generation V is the recognition that general behavior, attitudes and interests are starting to blend together in an online environment.”

• Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators
• Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors
• Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists
• Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers

(source Gartner June 2008 - my chart)

and, regardless of age, they will be using a variety of different Virtual Worlds or Immersive platforms for work and play.

And one year on, since that report, commercial entertainment firms such as Sony Playstation…

… XBox 360… :

are beginning to dabble in the realms of carefully scripted interactive augmented reality avatars. This technology has been around for some time in fact I interviewed Dr Adrian Woolard at the BBC a few years ago about an augmented reality  project he was involved in then:

Click on picture for Archived video at archive.org

But only recently has it become as sophisticated and fully mature for commercial release. This is the latest iteration of that technology in the commercial world:

Now my point is that the current generation of children will expect this level of sophistication in the future. It would seem quite feasible as Moore’s Law progresses that projection systems and more photo-realistic landscapes will be dreamed up and sold in commercial outlets to the home market.

We, as educators, need to start to map out these terrains before us and learn to use some of these platforms effectively in truly transformational ways as they will become the mainstream in time.

WHERE CORPORATE AND EDUCATION WORLDS MEET - BERNARD HORAN - SUN MICROSYSTEMS

Already large corporate companies are involved in projects geared towards working in distributed environments and they are evolving technology to provide solutions for their workforce. Working virtually is a reality in many cases. Listen here to Bernard Horan, senior staff engineer for Sun Microsystems Laboratory talking about how Sun Systems are developing project Wonderland for the corporate and educational worlds - here he talks about the reasons behind the development of Wonderland and the MIRTLE education project - they are very practical:

An adaptation of Wonderland is being adapted for use in Boston by the Immersive Education Initiative there to work with young people for distance learning at the Roxbury Institute of Technology, again, in extremely practical ways:

and yet where are the other equivalent R&D activity in the schools system - where are the models - very few in the main? But they are slowly evolving. Certainly in Second Life there have been a number of educational exemplars over the years, mostly tied to work done by academics.

But what I think marks out people working in Virtual Worlds based on Open Sim or Open Source technologies, is that they are usually teachers who are trialling the system for themselves, independently of academic bodies and those contstraints, and often some very rapid prototyping of models of education are going on in there and, again, often with the help of fully blown commercial partners in ad hoc relationships that benefit all parties. The individuals concerned are often capable of working across silos to bring those different talents together and build exciting new engaging environments. This will be something I highlight in this blog as happening again and again. Often academia follows but does not drive the innovation and that is the main difference…

It is my contention that it is not always in the world of academia that the most rapid innovation happens but only when cross silo partnerships begin to coalesce around a highly focused project to create new and more effective adaptations of the technologies involved. Sometimes the realism and practicalities of markets and audience often determine how innovative technologies move forwards and we need to be aware of this pattern of development if we are going to understand how these platforms are used in the rest of this century.

WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW

Which one is real?

As Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor Designate of the Open University, pointed out at the recent Alt-C conference, there is a massification of Higher Education going on globally, there is a need for innovation and multi-channel ways of educating the present generation using multiple platforms if we are to keep up in terms of world-wide competition. Virtual Worlds/ Immersive Environments will be one of those channels without a doubt in HE, FE, Secondary and Junior school systems within the next few years.

In this blog I outline some of the major developments that are taking place right now, in this and allied fields and what I think are the major elements needed to introduce these technologies into schools. This year marks the point where I will begin to train teachers in mainstream education in the UK on the use and best practice of Virtual Worlds and to that effect this blog is setting down some of the landscape and exemplars of what is possible in those areas, some of the shared vision of the pioneers and many of the possibilities surrounding the whole arena.

I outline some of the most innovative exemplars at present and a tentative roadmap of how these technologies can be used to augment genuine learning in real life education communities across the board. I will be mentioning several parallel educational initiatives and binding them into the overall picture where possible. This blog post is the summation of that activity at this time and it is intended to be a strong pointer to the future. The time, I feel is ripe to show and tell what is happening…

As you read through this blog and watch the video interviews I would urge you to dismiss any previous preconceptions you might have had about Virtual Worlds. This is frontier territory - sit back and enjoy (or otherwise) the ride - if it challenges your expectations of what education is or can be, then good - I welcome any and all comments and counters to that vision in the comments box at the end of this post - I merely lay it out before you as the current landscape of what could be in the best of all possible worlds…

OPEN SIM, OPEN SOURCE, DON’T SPILL YOUR BEER ON THE COMPUTER

Part of my journey started in the noisy Greyhound pub in Knightsbridge in London in the UK earlier this year and a meeting with Giannina Rossini - one of the pivotal figures behind the introduction and dissemination of Sloodle technology in Second Life.

She had something I wanted to see - a virtual world running on a small Asus laptop - indeed from a memory stick attached to an Asus. So we arranged to meet at the Greyhound  where she showed me Open Sim running off that tiny machine - in that noisy environment in a busy London pub, I began to get an inkling of what could be, given the constraints of Open Source software, and the interconnectedness of personalised worlds - little did I know where it was to lead…

Bear in mind this was a very early iteration of the Open Sim software - there was a fair bit of compiling of code and launching of viewers to make the thing work. But it was a start and so I was off on my hunt for others to show me the way.

Giannina is one of the leading lights behind Sloodle, a technology that binds in Second Life and Open Sim to the Moodle VLE. Basically it allows for a registration system of your Virtual World Avatar on Moodle and the interoperability between the two and various objects in the Virtual World and the learning platform. Giannina was responsible for the main build on Sloodle Island in Second Life and there are regular free workshops there every Tuesday.

VICKI DAVIS - TEACHERPRENEUR

‘…it’s been such a powerful year that I don’t want to go back…’

My next port of call was with Vicki A Davis - award winning teacher from Georgia - and her students who talked to me over Skype about the Open Sim world they had built in four weeks on DigitTeen Island on Reaction Grid.

Vicki is the person who first used the phrase ‘V Generation‘ to me. She beams confidence and authority and is one of the new breed of teachers, globally, who is trialling these technologies with her students in highly successful ways.

She has an amazing ‘can do’ authority about her - no equivocation, nay-saying  or dithering, she just gets right on down and does it as she has done with Web 2.0 tools for the last four years. Like all the individuals I have met along the way - she’s a self starter with a whole raft of awards around the internet projects she’s been involved in.

There’s no doubt who is in charge in her classroom but all her projects are highly collaborative and emergent with time built in for reflection on the part of the students. Vicki is one of those new breed of global teachers who just simply changes the system by sheer force of work and dedication.

DYNAMIC CURRICULUM

Suddenly I was confronted with an educational community that was involved with genuine dynamic curricular activity using a Virtual World. Their World, DigiTeen, part of the Learning on the Edge complex on Reaction Grid run by Trevor Meister - (of whom more later), is a perfect exemplar of how to get it right. The wiki is a practical dynamic documented case study in effective use of virtual worlds and stands as good record for anyone wanting to attempt a similar project. This isn’t an academic study but an extremely practical ‘action research’ guideline to development and scaffolding of new standards and opportunities for day to day working teachers.

Watch the interview with students below in Real Life and Avatar form and then the next one with Vicki see how eloquently she comments on these new learning landscapes. I would hold that interview up as a seminal exemplar of someone who knows exactly what they are doing in this field and if I had my way it would be required viewing for anyone who has doubts about the efficacy of using Web 2.0 tools in education and the systems and infrastructure that can be built around them. I would also point people to the award winning wiki on the global Flat Classroom Project for further reference - the Digiteen project is just one small subset of that whole activity.

In order to build these new systems you need to be a risk taker. At this point in time Reaction Grid was in early alpha but that didn’t stop Vicki and her students from forging a whole new way of working. Using the lessons learned when they used Google’s (now defunct) Lively they have evolved a very effective way of working in virtual worlds in education.

In the interview below with Vicki - she shares how she implements new technologies in the classroom and how she makes it work, practically. She is literally laying out a whole new curricular model and embedding lessons learned by using such a dynamic curriculum - it is an inspiration to hear the ethos underlying what she does and the vision behind it. Her students are a credit to her - notice how they talk of ‘teaching’ using the phrases ‘When I was teaching’ - a lot of co-collaboration and co-teaching goes on all the time. This is truly a 21st Century classroom. I was absolutely inspired by this interview.

Note how practical her models are and how focused she is on the teaching and learning aspects - she’s not shy to address any problems that might occur in using these new environments. Her opinions are borne from years of experience; not “what if” something happens but “when it does we do this”.

I have to say that is breath of fresh air to my ears as so many people will voice opinions and doubts based on hypothetical circumstance that so often prevents people from trialling technology like this - it’s good to hear from a practitioner out there doing it for “real” and doing it so well. Vicki is being given excellent support by the commercial owners of ReactionGrid to help fast prototype her and her students’ ideas.

RICH WHITE INNOVATOR

Rich White at GreenBush Labs in Kansas is another amazing innovator/developer/educator working in the field of Open Source virtual worlds. He is one of those mutli-talented individuals who understands both the technical and pedagogical aspects of using these platforms. In the interview below we only just touched on the surface of the many, many innovation projects he is involved with. Again, we met on ReactionGrid which is something of a touchstone for innovative educators on Open Sim.

Rich is involved in so many projects that sometimes it is hard to keep up - he seems to innovate on a daily basis and I would mark him out as one of the leaders in this field globally. When he’s not writing about, developing and demonstrating Augmented Reality and Shape Shifting technologies he’s busily devising and trialling cave video, interactive whiteboard environments and projects like the excellent CSI Virtual World and Edusim in the videos below.

Rich’s background is, again, in a variety of fields including commercial and academic - he’s more likely to issue a White Paper on his work rather than an academic thesis and is typical of the crossover of individuals between silos of activities - a recurring theme in this blog. These multi-faceted individuals are a completely new breed and synthesize their expertise in different fields, business, academia, education to evolve whole new ways of working in this area.

Just the sort of skillset we would want our children to have in the 21st Century surely and if not why not? If we are to pull ourselves out of the increasingly anachronistic 20th Century education system we need more teachers like Vicki and Rich in the workforce.

Overwhelming, unrealstic? - I doubt it - I would argue that they are boilerplating new ways of working and laying down the foundation for excellent Continuing Professional Development in this area in education. I will continue to back up that claim in subsequent blogs and videos/ case studies with innovative teachers in the coming months.

DEREK ROBERTSON - SCOTLAND - THE WORLD’S BIGGEST EDUCATIONAL VIRTUAL WORLD - MAINSTREAMING IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Back over to the UK again for this Skype interview with Derek Robertson, National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning in Scotland, who has managed to help mainstream Virtual Worlds in the Scottish Education system. As with so much that happens in Virtual Worlds, events have moved on since this video interview a few months back.

Scotland now has the biggest mainstream Open Sim Virtual World platform in the world called CANVAS.

Once again, Derek has a background firmly rooted in teaching and academia and other cross-discipline areas. CANVAS is part of the Scottish GLOW (the world’s biggest educational intranet) connected by Shibboleth. He is already well known for his seminal work on using commercial computer games in mainstream education and, together with Ollie Bray, has devised a number of practical ways of using these with local communites - all their work is underpinned by serious academic research.

CANVAS has to be the biggest mainstreaming of Virtual Worlds globally and is no mean feat. As I stated at the start of this blog - this is happening now - it’s not an idea or academic trial - it is live and working already.

Last year I did an interview with Mark Duffy of Second Places about his involvement with Open Sim. Many of the elements I questioned him about then are now in place.

Click to play

DAVID BURDEN - VIRTUAL WORLD PIONEER - CHATBOTS - VISUALISATION - MULTI-PLATFORM DELIVERY OF TRAINING FOR REAL WORLD COMPETENCIES

In this Skype discussion with David Burden of Daden some months back we discussed, amongst many other things, the rollout of Pivote an open-source authoring system for learning in virtual worlds. This is an Open Source multi-platform authoring system which can be used on anything from a mobile phone to a web browser. It has been put to use in the training of paramedics and all academic research and money underwrote the development. It was then released as an Open Source application and can be freely downloaded.

Again another example of “real world” use of Immersive Environments to train and orient professionals…

AARON WALSH - IMMERSIVE EDUCATION - WORLD STANDARDS FOR EDUCATION - OPEN SOURCE - OPEN STANDARDS - OPEN DEPLOYMENT

My video interview with Aaron Walsh, director of the Immersive Education initiative at their summit in London back in April, again earlier this year highlighted a much wider scope when considering the future rollout of Virtual Worlds globally.

Aaron’s connection with Immersive Environments goes way back to the very beginning of international standards for 3D on the web in the 90’s - what was then the VRML consortium subsequently named the Web 3D consortium.

His main vision is to help collectively forge Open Source, Open Standards, Open Deployment of Immersive Educational Environments so that assets, tech and platforms can all work seamlessly together. This will be future proofing of technologies to some extent and will guarantee that all systems will work interoperably and be extensible and scalable.

The Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative has set up a number of working parties to investigate not only the technical but also the social aspects of use of Immersive Environments including the possible deleterious effects on mental health of addictive behaviour and engagement in-world.

Two of their recent projects are the development of an Immersive iED table and the announcement of the STEM (Science , Technology, Engineering, Math) Rocket World initiative.

Listen to Aaron’s thoughtful answers and reflect on them in the light of all I have revealed about the current state of the technology in this blog posting.

TREVOR MEISTER - CANADIAN API WIZARD - REACTIONGRID

Trevor Meister’s Pachube helmet…

But probably one of the most inspiring individuals I have met on my journey has to be Trevor Meister. When I first encountered him I should imagine he was working virtually 20 hours a day on various educational projects on ReactionGrid.

The first thing he showed me was the use of Scratch for Open Sim. He had adapted Eric Rosenbaum’s code to work entirely in the immersive environment of Open Sim on ReactionGrid. Watch the video below - to see what it can do…

Trevor was also in the early stages of bringing in data into Open Sim and plotting it on Dynamic textures on primitive building blocks. I returned a couple of weeks later and it was obvious he had made enormous strides with development and adaptation of APIs from external spreadsheets to plot data more fluently.

But if that wasn’t enough he was experimenting with innovative Pachube sensor technology via a home made space helmet.

Trevor has over 20 years as a Maths and Physics teacher in Canada and with that track record he thinks this platfom a viable way to teach students and I entirely agree with him. What is so amazing is that he is now able to use the Immersive platform itself to flesh out his ideas about how it can be used.

I am personally astounded at how quickly he has developed several educational technologies in- world in such a short time. I think his expertise would be a boon for any government or educational institution wanting to use Virtual/ Immersive environments effectively in education.

He is currently seeking academic or governmental sponsorship and I am amazed he hasn’t been offered immediate funding for his work but I am sure it will not be long coming.

REACTION GRID -  CHRIS HART, KYLE & ROBIN GOMBOY

This interview is with Chris, Kyle and Robin of ReactionGrid without whom much of the access to educators and business people I have met on Open Sim would not have been possible.

Out of all the Open Sims I have visited in the last few months theirs has been the most approachable and welcoming towards education and their policy of a PG Island with appropriate protocols has been a model of use for the way access is going with virtual communities in Open Sim.

They have given amazing amounts of time and advice about their particular education and business sim and at no point have they refused to answer my copious questions about the process of getting schools onto Open Sim and their Gridizen policy.

In the interview above they introduce themselves and outline the ReactionGrid ethos. Of all the emerging Sims at the moment I would point educators, in particular to their grid. They are sure to get a very warm welcome and lots of advice about using the technology.

SUPAREAL

In the light of all this research into Open Sim and Immersive environments in education I am launching a new Virtual World consultancy business next week with my business partner, Julia Blagbrough, called SupaReal.

I feel the technology has now got to a point where Virtual Worlds are indeed a viable option for education at all levels - not just Secondary but also Primary schools and eventually a whole global network - a backbone of Open Source servers, will break open entirely the way we do things in education at the moment - a whole series of interconnected 3D learning environments that will almost certainly, in time, lead to a Hypergrid of interconnected learning spaces that will act as an intellectual crucible for innovation, creativity and new practices for 21st Century learning. It will be the 3D web…

It’s an exciting time and one I’m happy to be alive in to see how the road opens out before us as we continue into 21st Century learning. The seeds are there - it is up to us to make them grow and flower into new ways and pedagogies for our children and all our futures.

Sept 2009