Intro

There are certain domains in which virtual experience seems of little comparison to an in-world one (consider on-line confessions or learning how to skydive). And yet, some of our learned contemporaries never cease to prove us wrong.

Having heard of schools of languages offering classes in Second Life (such as the Lingualand school in Krakow, Poland), I decided to explore a less obvious example of SL use. Inspired by an idea in the Warburton’s text (the briefly mentioned PREVIEW project) and a number of other articles discussing e-learning in nursing and medicine (for a fuller list of my findings please check below) I decided to locate the Second Life PREVIEW project facility. And indeed, I had no problem finding it and was allowed to run a quick trial.

Please note that simultaneously a number of related projects are already available, including Second Life Medical and Consumer Health Libraries (Healthinfo Island—funded by a grant from the US National Library of Medicine) and VNEC (Virtual Neurological Education Centre—developed at the University of Plymouth, UK), as well as HABITAT, MOOSE and PLaNET projects.

 

 

About the project

The PREVIEW Project, provided by the Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences (a partnership between St George's, University of London and Kingston University) aims at training future paramedics in contextualised environments. The island is located here, and the project’s website with a more exhaustive description can be found here.

Provided with a nice welcome pack (including the ER outfit) the student is free to roam the training area between a number of locations (a street, an underground station, etc.) in which a variety of possible health-/life- threatening situations have occurred.

 

The PREVIEW experience

When a student approaches the emergency site a short text appears providing details of the circumstances (e.g. the cause of the accident, if the casualty is breathing or if there is any visible bleeding, etc.). What follows is a series of possible actions to be taken by a paramedic, the choice of which is briefly followed by another set of changing circumstances or new options to choose from. The accident site is often accompanied by a media-tutorial screen. Fret not, dear disciple, for there is no time limit to take appropriate action nor patients’ screams to be heard. What there is, however, is a fantastic opportunity to visualise the emergency situations in life-like contexts and practise various life-saving strategies individually or in a group.

 

More in PREVIEW

Apart from the Second Life interface, the project is supported by the blog, a dedicated Youtube channel, student experience surveys, related academic journals and links to useful/related websites.

 

Advantages

My short list of advantages of learning a medical profession in SL will inevitably map those of Warburton’s, with visualisation and contextualisation in the lead. With a number of various pre-loaded actions that a paramedic may take, experimenting and making errors poses no real threat. I can imagine that the SL training may greatly help in automating responses in at least the most common of circumstances. Through immersion and multiple repetitions a paramedic novice may practise ad nauseam, with the feeling of actually performing treatment.

 

Disadvantages

To the catalogue of potential drawbacks listed, unerringly, by Warburton (e.g. the Identity problem), I would like to add some specific dangers I perceive in learning paramedics online. Namely, the already mentioned comfort of no time limit to perform an action, or the potentially misleading selection of choices, while in real life these may be strictly limited by the very individual circumstances. I dread to think what possible harm could be done by sticking to the routine and ignoring other pieces of information that had previously been ignored by the virtual world builders.

 

Related resources

• Kamel Boulos, M. N. et al. (2007). Second Life: an overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health education. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 24, 233–245. (also available from Google Scholar)

 

• Skiba, D. J. (2007). Nursing Education 2.0: Second Life. Nursing Education Perspectives, 28, 3, 156-157. (also available from Google Scholar)

 

• McCallum, J., et al. (2010). Exploring nursing students' decision-making skills whilst in a Second Life clinical simulation laboratory. Nurse Education Today, doi:10.1016/j.nedt.2010.03.010 (also available from ScienceDirect.com)

 

• Honey, M., et al. (2011). Teaching With Second Life: Hemorrhage Management as an Example of a Process for Developing Simulations for Multiuser Virtual Environments. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, Vol(X), 000-000. doi: 10.1016/j.ecsn. (also available from ScienceDirect.com)