JISC CETIS Conference - Beyond Interoperability, pt 1

This conference post is several days late…

I decided not to live-blog so I could participate more in the discussions. When I got home my wife was ill. When I got round to firing up the computer, I discovered the internet connection down. When I eventually got to work the day after (which took a while, because the car battery had died, I had to call out for AA Homestart and then go buy a new battery), my work PC wasn’t doing too well. It wasn’t all bad - the fan still worked. Nothing else did.

Anyway, on day one of this years JISC CETIS conference I gave a Sloodle talk, Mark Bell updated us on the Arden project where he is working with Ted Castranova and Sarah Robbins sold everyone on teaching with virtual worlds and web 2.0… more below.

I opened the MUVE session with a presentation on Sloodle. This was intended to be delivered live - so that I could demonstrate how Second Life and Moodle can provide alternative routes to accessing data within a Moodle database. Sadly we had access problems, so I had to resort to backup slides, which lacked the video clips I usually include. You can catch the slides here and Sheila McNeil of CETIS may be posting a slidecast with audio shortly. I imagine it will appear here at some point.

Andy Powell had some questions regarding the extent to which we were using Moodle’s APIs versus writing our own. A possible mis-understanding here, in that Moodle has an API for developing plug-ins which run on a Moodle server, where Andy was thinking of an API to expose the Moodle database to 3rd party (subject to authentication and authorisation, obviously) web-apps. While we do have in mind in the Sloodle project that much of our work should be more generally applicable and not be tied too tightly to either Second Life or Moodle, developing a web-API for Moodle does make sense for the Sloodle project. The potential here is quite something, but really requires us to get security very solid, very reliable and very trustworthy - and to think ahead of how such an API may be used and abused.

Mark Bell followed with an account of the Arden project, Ted Castranova’s project to develop an educational multi-user virtual environment based on Shakespeare’s Stratford (As an aside, Arden 2 is now in Beta, I believe, built on NeverWinter Nights - visit the project pages to sign up if you want to take part in the study). Mark’s presentation bravely focussed on where Arden project went wrong, looking at the mistakes they made along the way. Being too ambitous, too open ended, using un-tested tools which were not yet fit for purpose and attempting to develop a commercial quality experience with a project that was academic-led and used academics as developers were all stumbling blocks. The good news is that the Arden project *was* able to recover from this - and deliver on their commitments, but Mark wants others to learn from the Arden mistakes - and more importantly to report their mistakes too. I agree completely with Mark that academics should be more forthcoming about what doesn’t work as well as what does.

In fact, I’m put in mind of the Game Developer magazine ‘post-mortems’ which invite game developers of a wide range of games (from runaway successes to outright flops) to identify and discuss the five things they did right and the five they did wrong in their most recent project. We can all learn at least as much by sharing our mistakes as we can by sharing our successes.

Sarah Robbins opened her presentation on teaching and learning with MUVEs and Web 2.0 by talking through Chickering & Gamson’s 7 principles for good practice in higher education, summarised below:

1. Encourage contact
2. Develop reciprocity and cooperation
3. Encourage active learning
4. Prompt feedback
5. Emphasize time on task
6. Communicate high expectations
7. Respect diverse talents and ways of learning

It was good to see not only practical pedagogy to the fore here, but a particular emphasis on the role of human contact - whether electronically mediated or in person - in education. Indeed, this was one of the most appealing aspects of Sarah’s talk - the enthusiasm she carries for her teaching and for her students. Sarah is also a great example of the possibilities for teaching in virtual worlds for another reason - she teaches rhetoric and writing using Second Life, not the subject that first comes to mind when you think about using MUVEs to support teaching.

Sarah clearly articulated how Second Life allowed her to work with her students in ways simply would not be practicably possible without using such technologies. For example, to help students understand their own biases (which they often do not recognize themselves as having), she asks them to wear different bodies. Students are then asked to visit other areas, see how others react to them, and take note of their own feelings and reactions - which then becomes the basis for facilitated debate and discussion.

MUVEs are not seen here as a replacement here for student-staff contact, but a different way for students and staff to work together. Like other forms of eLearning, most useful where it can enrich the learning experience - not as an attempt to replace staff time with computer time. Sarah’s examples were particularly good in that they were not attempts to replicate the normal classroom, but to use the technology to do things not normally possible.