Well, there's actually one thing that I am happy about regarding week 4 and 5 and that was to see librarians actively involved in the learning environment. Something I argued for already 9 years ago (Roes, Hans (2001), Digital libraries and education: trends and opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, July / August, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/roes/07roes.html).

On to the reasons why I am not happy.

1. I already commented on the Boellstorff chapter. Many stories in there about how people experience SL, but in how far is it relevant to the subject of the course? I asked for perspective, but did not get a real answer. In week 5 we get a very similar text from Taylor, this one from 2002 about a virtual world even crappier than SL. Again, stories about how people experience this world, again etnography.

My point is that you can learn something from these texts, but what you learn is how people experience these 'worlds' as a gaming annex social environment, in both texts there is absolutely nothing about how these 'worlds' would be experienced as learning environment. In both texts the word 'learning' is almost absent.

Also, both texts are ethnographies about people that immerse themselves deeply in such worlds. My question would be how deeply people - students, and teachers - would need to immerse themselves in such 'worlds' before they become adequate environments for teaching and learning? I am not sure, but see the next point.

2. In week 4 and 5 I attended 4 meetings in SL. Yes, I can see some progression in how the tool is being used in discussions. The discussion I attended last night was much more focussed than the one last week. On the other hand, we had only 5 participants last night, including the tutor (Pancha / Marshall, hey hey, a librarian!). Also unlike the discussion last week, Pancha was now present all the time and was actively steering the discussion. So I wonder what caused the progression, the fact that the students were more experienced, or the facts that the group was smaller and actively being led. I guess the latter factors are more important. And an important takeaway for me: I suspect 5 to 6 participants is about the max a group chat can have. (From my teaching days I remember research into the optimal / maximal sice of working groups, I'd suspect that there is research as well in this area.)

And of course, like I said last week, the meeting is still basically a group chat. Yesterday night I discovered that for the most time I just concentrated on the chat, and when I looked at the screen, I was mostly looking at the avs' names rather than at the avs themselves.

Okay, maybe it is just my lack of imagination. In this regard I'd also like to respond to a remark by Clara last week about whether or not I was experiencing 'flow'. A concept I always liked (although I wished that the guy who came up with it had an easier to spell name ;-), and also a concept I have tried to apply in my management positions: challenge people beyond their abilities, but not too much beyond. Incidentally, the Gee text also describes flow, second paragraph on p. 70, without any reference, but than there are no references in the Gee text at all. Back to 'flow' for me in SL. The simple fact is that I don't feel challenged by SL, let alone intimidated, as I have the impression some of my fellow students are. Again, it maybe my lack of imagination, but it's something I can't help.

Now, of course it is important for me to know how people might experience a 'world' like SL, and in a sense I can really follow all these stories in the Boellstorff and Taylor texts. But again, I am dearly missing the link to the relevance of all these stories for learning.

And, more importantly, I think Clara remarked a few weeks ago that technologies in a sense can also hinder learning. Now, I don't think SL is an obstacle there, but chat is a tool that at least for me is not really suited for a good discussion. It forces one to use short sentences, and slows my thinking down to the speed at which I can type. Maybe it's my background as an economist, but I can't help finding it a most inefficient way of communicating. The Yee text for me confirms this: games are all about slowing you down.

3. Learning then. Here we have three texts that at least have the words learning in their titles. Warburton, Dickey, and Gee. The first disappointment here is that Gee and Dickey are from 2002 and 2003 respectively. It made me want to shout at the librarians involved here: surely you could come up with more up to date texts here?

I will not repeat what I said about the Warburton and Dickey texts last week. I had another look at the Dickey text and although her analysis in terms of affordances and constraints is worthwhile, the example she uses - Intro to RWX Modeling - is in the end not a professional example. At the time she researched her article one would probably not find such a professional example, but that only reinforces my point that a more up to date text would have been very helpful.

4. Which brings me finally to the Gee text. Gee (that's a pun, yes), I thought, so now we have a linguistics professor that seems to be developing his own learning theory based on his individual experiences with a particular computer game. And gee, not a single reference in that text except for a short bibliographic note at the end that mentions some research into learning. Already on the second page (52) he puts me completely off with the remark 'your character - that is you'. No, you are playing your character, there's a fundamental difference there. And there is this strange second paragraph on p. 57: "One sort of limitation video games certainly bring up to real-world baby-boomers like me is that they do not reward - in fact they punish - some of my most cherished ways of learning and thinking (e.g. being too quick to want to get to a goal without engaging in sufficient prior nonlinear exploration)." Now, I recognize what Yee said about games slowing you down, and, being a baby boomer myself, I can see his point of too quickly wanting to reach a goal, but too quickly wanting to get to a goal is _not_ a way of learning, but hey, I am not a linguist, and English is not my first language, so who knows.

On p. 58 and 59 we find paragraphs beginning with "It is not uncommon ...", and "It has been argued ...". Citation needed, I thought, Wikipedia style.

On p. 61/62 we get to what seems to be the core of Gee's learning theory: entice to try, put in lots of effort, achieve meaningful success. Seems plausible to me, but my theoretical background in pedagogy is just not good enough to judge the validity of this. I really would like to have seen some discussion here (I might start one today, I am not that active on the discussion boards). Also, an interesting question would have been, assuming there is some validity to his learning theory, how Gee's principles might apply to the design of e-learning.

So there you have it, the reasons for my unhappiness. And yes, maybe I do want to get too quickly to my goals ;-).

 

In the article Assessing the global accessibility of the Internet, digital divide is caused by different level of computer skills, and factors such as ethnicity and language. It also compares infrastructure cost, including connectivity infrastructure and service cost, among Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and North America, by using methodology and finding with discussion method. The result provides the gap exists already and how to narrow down it is still an issue to look into, for example who will pay for that progress?

Experiential learning by means of playing games either in real life with other participants or virtually in an online gaming environment according to Gee (1) draws on the experience, beliefs and moral values of the player’s real world identity. In turn the player gains knowledge by experimenting safely in a learning environment, knowledge which then blends into and transforms his real identity that as a result promotes change to a new identity. The centre of learning therefore is based on own subjective experience and it is experience that guides what the person learns and when it is learned according to David Kolb (2). The desired outcome is a transfer of emotions, notions, capabilities that derive from a safe learning experience where the learner has had an active part in the evolution of the learning environment and the events that have lead to the learning experience.  Thiagi (3) and many other use games regularly as a means to destructure and restructure learning.

Unlike Boellsdorf virtual identities in SL Gee’s players enter a set framework given by the game design with a choice of “unique backgrounds” and features. The creation of the virtual identity is framed by design and not as in SL a free choice and construction of the person. Consequently a game seems to be a more structured way of learning than an identity in a SL environment. Throughout the game the decisions made and the development of the game add to and develop the gamer’s virtual identity as foreseen by the game design, whereas in SL the rules and rewards are defined by the social conventions created and implemented by each individual group (assuming that we don’t enter a preset domain but that we meet on ‘neutral’ grounds’). The choices made according to Gee are filtered by a projected identity that acts an intermediary between the real and the virtual identity. While in both cases the environment provides anonymity the mandatory gap between the virtual and the real world Boellsdorf stressed as being foundational in Gee’s version seems to be bridged by the projected identity that serves as a ‘transmitter’ or ‘synapsis’ between both worlds.  In my previous post I pointed out that in my view even in SL there is a reciprocal ‘contamination’ between the experiences in the real and the virtual world. Gee’s view on using games to transfer and enhance learning seems to confirm this impression. The express purpose for playing online in Gee is to learn. So why and how can playing be an effective learning tool?

Experiential learning expert David Kolb proposes a model of learning cycle with four learning styles: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active, experimentation, which all engage the learner at some stage of the game. Kolb suggests that a learner enters the game with his own personal style and moves along the cycle during the game experiencing and interacting with all four styles. By playing the game the person is actively involved in the choices and decisions, thinks before and after about the alternative choices and their consequences, is able to take the experience out of context and to a meta level of understanding where it will enhance what the person already knows and will support with ‘tangible’ activities that promote learning-by-doing.

http://holyroodpark.net/danielag/files/-1/1091/diagramm0004.jpg

Learning cycle

Source: http://weatherhead.case.edu/executive-education/programs/subjects/e

To have a successful learning transfer Gee sees three basic requirements that need to be fulfilled:

1-     The learner must be enticed to try (…)

2-     The learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she begins with little motivation to do so

3-     The learner must achieve some meaningful success (…)

How can that be achieved? Gee admits that video games are good for some type of learners, so that would confirm Kolb’s different learning styles and different approaches to learning. How can games be used effectively in education, higher, professional or any other education to provide an interesting entry point for all learners?

Based on my experience as an experiential outdoor facilitator games have first to be designed carefully and then briefed and de-briefed well. The briefing serves to set down the framework, similar to a game design in an online environment with its basic rules, choices, characters and roles. The de-briefing serves to transfer the findings of the game (the virtual world and the identity the learner assumed there) into the real world, they need to answer to the question of “how can I apply this in my daily life/work?” and serve as a bridge between both worlds and both identities.

Briefing and debriefing should aim at enticing the learner to try, to offer a safe environment to learn detached from his real life and the identity he or she is required to have in a specific semiotic domain. A feeling of safety is important as well as willingness to commit which might be achieved by showing first that there are no repercussions in real life and second ‘what is in for me/him/her’ or expressed differently “what will I get out of it?, what will my success look like?” And it must be clear that success is closely related to how much effort is put in the task. It should be clear to the learner that the responsibility for success and reward are in his own hands.

Is that enough to motivate people to risk doing something which might make them look stupid, inept or clumsy? Indeed, this is a major obstacle in the real experiential world which requires a lot of ‘pedagogical care’ (Barnett, 2007) or as Gee phrases it, to learn actively and critically. Personally I quite like the idea of identities as an ongoing development program where knowledge is used as a catalyst for developing a new identity and to form bridges from the one’s old identity to the new one. The virtual world has the advantage of offering anonymity which provides a feeling of safety that in turn reduces risk and increases the risk readiness for the learner to allow himself to get involved in the game. How can we ensure that the real world identity will profit from the virtual world identity?

 (1)   James Paul Gee, (2004) “Learning and Identity: what does it mean to be a half-elf?” from What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy”, pp51-71, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

(2)   David Kolb, Learning from Experience, http://www.learningfromexperience.com/ accessed on 17^th October 2010

(3) http://www.thiagi.com/

In the article by Luyt, the system of XO seems have its own product line. So I was wondering besides the hardware cost, what is the potential software and resources cost further to enhance a better using of the XO.

I had already mentioned that I did not find the core readings for this week very helpful. The Warburton article too technical and only in passing mentioning some uses of SL for learning. The Boellstorff chapter not even mentioning the word learning (and not even learn, for that matter).

So, I was hoping for something better when I started reading the Dickey article. One thing that struck me was that the article is from 2003 and not about Second Life. But then again, the way Active Worlds is described shows very much similarity with SL.

The distinction being made between discourse tools, experiential tools and resource tools seems useful to me.

The analysis of the affordances and constraints of Active Worlds is something that for 90 percent also carries over to SL. It makes you wonder just how little progress there has been in this area in the last 10 or 11 years, Dickey somewhere (ah yeah, p. 109) mentions that her data are from 1998 / 1999.

So, where does this leave us all?

1. I am still not over the feeling of being lost. I know how to move around in SL, how to get to the meetings in time, how to chat there and, hey, even to save a chat in a notecard and drop it on Pancha. Where I am lost is that I don't see how this week fits into the overall idea of the IDEL course.

2. I had intended to do a search for some more recent literature on the educational uses of SL, but haven't found the time. It's hard enough already to catch up after the lost week and in the final weeks of my employment of Jacobs. I also would have liked to explore some SL educational sites. Frank had a reference somewhere in the discussion boards, but again, not found the time to get around that.

I'll be having a day off on Wednesday so I can do the week 5 reading, and be on track again.

After reading Yee's (2008) The Unbearable Likeness of Being, a couple of thoughts occurred to me.

One is that I wonder whether this whole fuss about bodies might have to do with our conception of what virtual reality is (or could be). Yee's article starts with a quote from Barlow ('Suddenly I don't have a body anymore ...') If this was a virtual reality thing with like video helmet and data gloves (the movie Tron comes to mind, or, even more extreme, The Matrix trilogy), than, yes, I could follow that people feel disembodied in a virtual world. To describe Second Life as a virtual world in this sense is ridiculous, because you are very aware of yourself sitting behind a screen looking at the back of the head of your avatar, looking at other avatars. Hell, not even the experience is 3D, it's an utterly flat world and you really need to stretch your phantasy to imagine it as being 3D. Somehow this echoes with Yee's observation that in a textual multiuser online game his embodiment was 'salient in a way I'd never experienced in either physical reality or graphical worlds.'

Yee has two other observations that ring a bell with me.

The first one is that 'Games are all about slowing you down ...' This was the experience I had in the two Second Life sessions we had last week. The second session where we discussed, or rather should discuss, the literature made this awfully clear. The tutor was hardly around, spending her time picking up lost avatars probably. The discussion was a chat, much like the Skype chat we had two weeks earlier, with second Life functionng effectively as a wall paper to that chat. It, the chat, took well over an hour, if you reread it, it takes you about 5 minutes. What an inefficient way of achieving things.

What really hit me is Yee's following remark: 'If you were using a virtual world for work, why on earth would you want people to walk places, open virtual file drawers, be blocked by virtual walls, or have to figure out what to put on in the morning?' Exactly. Our thinking about how we have always done things offline influences pretty heavily the way we do things online, and as a consequence, we are many times disappointed in what technology has to offer.

>>Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.<<
>I agree.  But why?<

I think my whole point here started with the observation that Dreyfus opposes f2f and distance learning, where as, from a more pragmatic point of view, the difference is only gradual. In a sense, f2f learning has always had a distance component, simply when it comes to doing your homework for a course. When I read a text, that text is not 'passed on as information', I am trying to make sense of that text, trying to connect it with things I already know, and finding new points of view. In other words, there is not only 'information passing on', there is also 'information processing' going on. In fact, the whole idea of information passing on could be seen as a deliberate disembodiment of a student, where the student is seen as a vessel into which information is being poured. Which is obviously wrong.

>For the 7 stages, I think one of the issues is how Dreyfus views skills (is that the only product of learning?) and how he assumes skills are learned in f2f education.<

I am not sure what your trying to get at with your question. I simply wondered why nobody questioned the 7 stage model itself.

>I’m curious as to why you think Stage 7 could also be stage 0.  (I have some idea why, but I’d just like you to tease it out a bit more.)<

All of a sudden there is no more 'progression' in the model. Even the examples about how culture is transmitted by how different cultures care for their babies shows this. In the end, I think it is more a stage in the argument that Dreyfus has been developing. Like: these are the things that you could never learn in a distance course. And of course he's right, but he only is drawing out a rabbit he put in his hat himself.

>Good point re emotions and embodiment.  I wonder if it might be useful to think of how emotions are tied to social practices to and what that might imply for the issues of embodiment and risk as Dreyfus sees it.  I think you are doing this in some of your notes on pages 37-39, for instance, and with your kite anecdote, but it might be worth drawing these together more.<

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. My simple point of view is that body / mind, ratio / emotion, social / individual distinctions are only helpful to a certain extent. In the end, you and I are all of those things at the same time.

>>p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.<<

>Why?<

Based on my own experience teaching economics for 5 years. If you try to imitate a style, your students will pick that up as not authentic at once. You need to develop your own style with which you are comfortable and only then can you connect with your students. (Teaching bodies could be a whole subject of its own.)

>It might be useful to move from the notes-style to trying to write posts on particular themes or concepts, drawing together the readings. E.g. making your own argument about embodiment and risk, drawing on the readings to support or counter your claims.<

I am not there yet. I see myself as being in a dialog with the readings for the moment. That might change as soon as I get some more perspective on the course as a whole.

>> I am still not sure what the authors exactly mean by the notion of 'embodied knowing'. It echoes things like tacit knowledge, learning-to-be, but that is as far as I get.<<

>I think that it is partly that, but it’s also an epistemological stance.  It’s saying the only way we can construct knowledge is *through* the body, it is the way in which we experience, and thus have knowledge about, the world.<

I think I was hinting at that when I said that mind / body distinctions &c. are only helpful to a certain extent.

And finally regarding Twitter:

>>There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.<<

>Interestingly, I’ve had folk both argue for and against the ‘retrospective twittorial’.  Some, like you found it especially hard to follow, others found it a worthwhile detective experience, a puzzle to piece together that gave them further impetus for learning.<

I can imagine that some people like detective work. But I am more of a pragmatist, technology should help us achieving our goals more efficiently, if it gets in your way, than don't use it. I think I made a point a while ago that I gave up looking television years ago because the signal noise ratio was near to zero. I have a similar feeling here.

Again, I can see some scenarios where Twitter could work in teaching and learning.

>>…false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.<<

>I wonder if this is also because time is different for each member of the discussion.  For instance, in Skype we are all on simultaneously and know that’s basically how each other is experiencing it (albeit with a bit of lag).  On the db, we know people are unlikely to beon at the exact same time as us and that they may read things in different order.  On Twitter, we might be online at the same time as some, and because of the unthreaded nature, cannot guess at how others might enter the stream when they do come online.  So perhaps this makes for an even more temporally strange experience?<

I don't think the experience is 'temporally strange', it's just another medium, and a medium which I think works best when you're in the middle of it, reconstructing it afterwards is too much work - although I could imagine you could write a script to condense such a stream so as to make it more readable (f.i. drop all the retweets but count them and put the number in front of the original tweet, do some tag cloud like things.)

Finally: I had the impression you were interested in the Power of Pull. I have added a file with my notes on that book to this blog post, but cannot discover how I can link to it from within this post.

After our Second Life Session I found myself comparing my perceptions of what had happened in that hour with the interaction during our Twitter and Skypechat tutorial. While the basic text-based exchange is common to all three the addition of visual information, such as seeing a person type on the keyboard, has had a regulatory effect on the communication flow. Our exchanges were more structured and there was a certain flow in the development of the discussion, which allowed to express and elaborate on a thought while it still was on the radar of all.

The impression of having an embodied entity in a dedicated environment contributed to my perception of a more ‘personal’ interaction between the various members of the course. It was interesting to see that the real life behaviours, such not more than two people sitting on a bench or keeping a certain distance to each other was the same in this virtual environment.

One aspect that distinguished us from other users seems to be that the main attractiveness for SL, its anonymity and freedom of behaviour and role choice, is not our main goal. We still seem to struggle with the anonymity of our bodily selves.

From a learning and teaching perspective I can see and think of a number of potential uses for SL, if the participants will buy into the technology part of it. I am still disoriented by the level of complexity of SL and if I were to use it, I would need more confidence and experience to support my learners in this environment. For me SL is not intuitive enough for a quick spin in and out of it.

I was away on vacation and without internet, so read the discussion board and tried to read the twitter stream only today.

Discussion board mainly about the use of twitter. At times it felt like a discussion between converts and non-converts, in group and out group, worlds apart.

So, on to http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/mscidel. Unfortunately, I can only see the 10 latest, and an export I can't seem to manage either. It's probably my stupidity, but if a tool is not really obvious I give up real quickly.

So, on to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mscidel as an alternative. What do we get?

• Frequent time outs trying to wade my way towards 7 days ago, I would have liked to make it to 8 days ago, but that was not possible, so already stuff is vanishing.
• Some people use twitter names that don''t relate to their real names, yes, I can look them up on the who we are where we are page, but that's a hassle. Talk about 'embodiedness' ;-)
• Okay, from 7 days ago, I started wading forward, just to give up after going through one day of tweets. Why?
• A lot of solo tweets, that is: not part of a conversation. People quoting some line from some article. 140 characters is just not enough to get some context here.
• Hey, some conversations are going on that can be expanded in Twitter search. Lots of them are short, lots of retweets, I don't get the feeling that there's much discussion really going on.

There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.

It also reminds me of the discussion we had in week 1 about a false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.

Up until now I find Twitter useful to relay information that might be interesting (have done a few times with the #mscel hashtag); when at a conference and people add information (other than retweeting the slides), or being used as a backchannel. I still don't like the tool very much.