by Pete Wright
We have a development group under the Apollo Group umbrella called Apollo Publishing. The team there has mutated over the years a number of times from publishing house to licensing house to dev center. Today, it serves pieces of all of those, and more. The most interesting: it’s a skunkworks for projects in education technology that may — or may not — make it into the classroom.
I was there yesterday visiting Colin Smith, one of the developers there working on a side RSS project for me. We got to talking about Second Life, one of my all-time favorite time sinks, and he introduced me to Second life: Second Campus. It’s the Apollo Group foray into avatar based learning.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, Technology, University of Phoenix
New to Second Life? Imagine The Matrix.
You control your avatar, the virtual representation of yourself in the world, that you can control to interact with other users’ avatars. It’s rudimentary at best right now, but stay tuned. With every iteration of the SL software, the world becomes more robust, more clean, more efficient, allowing even more opportunity to complete integration with the world.
You can visit SecondLife.com for more. It’s free, so log in and see it for yourself. Once you’ve done that, you’ll appreciate the following virtual tour all the more.
See, we’ve purchased an island in Second Life. It’s our very own playground to test a next generation online learning model. I was given access for a spell and thought I’d run through a few of the key locations that Colin and friends have been working on.
We start at the Apollo Main building. This is our own internal cultural landmark; it’s a reproduction of our main administration building in Phoenix and has been for many years. In SL, it will most likely be our main landing space for new residence of our island. There are tutorials and instructions throughout the space to help acclimate new users.
As an example of a potential classroom environment the developers built out custom locales. This is an old west courthouse designed for law courses. Of course, the avatars in here will be encouraged to dress the part, including faculty members who will be adorned in either judges vestments or chaps and a six-shooter.
Second Life objects are scripted animations. This one, for example, is a proof of concept stock that the developers dropped in to the campus to take care of students who act up in that western law class. Send them out front for a sun baked punishment in front of all the townsfolk. In an earlier version, apparently there was a hangman’s noose with this stock, and when you were hoisted up into it, your feet twitched. The noose is gone, but the sentiment remains.
Here’s another stab at the learning stage concept — this time, it’s a Socratic Garden. Instructors should be fully equipped with togas.
In this space, the historical objects are scripted with supporting histories; click on a Grecian Urn and up pops the Ode, right there on it, for example. It’s a wonderful virtual museum space that can serve as either self-guided, or personal and interactive.
Here’s some additional Socratic-themed space. It’s a large public amphitheater designed to host lectures and such. Beautiful ocean view, no annoying sandy breeze, and no need to worry about your butt falling asleep on the hard concrete benches. It’s my definition of a dream teaching experience.
Outside the media lab…
And inside the media lab. Each of these screens is a passthrough for a web hosted media file. Students can come in and choose from a menu of course related supplementary material and sit right in front of a virtual screen to take it in.
Here’s the meeting room of the Library, in case you have any high-powered pow-wows to nail down when in-world. It’s surprising how effective in-world meetings around digital office furniture can be — particularly when you get the hang of the “camera”. You can break the metaphor of the real-world by moving your eyes around a room, through walls, and even track other avatars up to a certain distance by locking onto them. That makes zooming in on others around the table an effective social tool and actually makes these things useful.
Finally, the clock tower. Since you can fly in most environments in-world, you can zoom right up to the top of the impossibly tall clock tower and get all sorts of wonderful scenic shots from there. Colin tells me the devs have a base jumping set up on the Second Campus island. Oh, and since you can’t actually die in most settings in Second Life, falling from 50,000 virtual feet isn’t as much of a rush as you might think.
It still looks like a game. And for those transplants who haven’t spent much time in the worlds of massively multiplayer online games, those who don’t know the implicit culture that emerges, it looks less like the future of distance education and more like just another thing their kids are doing that they’ll never understand. But I think that misses the point.
The important point here is that there are people who are trying new things, trying to build environments that connect with learners in new ways, trying to find the tools that mete out challenges of content acquisition and integration in old classrooms to improve retention in the new ones. The binary ones. This is a big deal.
We’re not the first to try these virtual world classrooms. As a matter of fact, we’re going to be challenged more, I think, from the elementary education ranks to drive technology than we are our own competition. Take 3dLearn.com — they’ve been doing this for 7-12 grade kids for six years now. From a recent CNET article, even Harvard is on board:
Chris Dede, Harvard professor and creator of “River City,” has researched the effects of MUVEs in schools for the last six years. “Based on our results thus far, we’re excited about how MUVEs can provide immersive, engaging simulations that complement lectures, textbooks, labs and field trips as part of an effective science curriculum,” Dede says in a video promoting the project.“As a (teaching) supplement, this is the wave of the future,” said Numedeon’s Sun.
The guys working on our Second Campus infrastructure are blogging somewhat actively. You can check in with them on progress here: http://secondcampus.blogspot.com/. There are some great links there to more resources on Second Life that are worth catching up on, and of course, check us out in-world!
