It's been a couple of months now in Second Life and I've gone through the initial rush of excitement and fervour. My real life has reasserted its priorities yet Second Life has so much potential to improve my real life as well. As a teacher establishing a small business cooperative of groups and individuals, I'm looking for ways to reach out to the market and ways to deliver my teaching. Second Life (SL) offers an enormous and innovative opportunity for distance education but it does still have some drawbacks.
I've recently joined the Action Learning Group, a research project tracking the activities of people in SL who are involved in educational pursuits and who are looking at SL as a means of delivery to learners. Each of these participants (labrats) will be developing an education-related project within SL. The advantages and disadvantages of SL as an education medium should become acutely visible through this research project.
The project is run by Lindy McKeown a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Southern Queensland.
Second Life identity: Decka Mah
Second Life Office:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/128/128
Last night we had our first session together as a group. Most of the group were new to SL and quite a bit of time was spent on the basics of moving around, sitting, camera (viewpoint) control etc. For me the focus was on the practicalities of running a class in SL, as that is precisely what I wish to do - and my students will probably be new to SL as well. This first session offered a first hand look such a situation and was most instructive.
For example Decka Mah (Lindy) had a past student helping manage the group. This was vital as there were the inevitable confused late arrivals. I also observed how streaming audio might be used in a class situation. I was a bit alarmed that the audio stream was delayed by 30 seconds which made life more difficult for the facilitator. It meant that there was a challenge in synchronising the facilitator's audio commentary with the presentation slides and dealing with questions (the latter two being in real-time). I think a proper voice chat function is crucial for SL as an education medium, but I'm curious how people have been dealing with the problem to date.
Decka displayed a slide show on a virtual screen on the far side of our group, which meant that that the learners needed some adeptness in camera control. I don't think this turned out to be a big problem, although in my own case I was a bit distracted for a few minutes when my camera view went out of control. As a consequence I missed some of the audio commentary. I think a transcript handout would be a good idea - and would probably make life easier as a facilitator as well.
A few technical problems occurred. People dropped in and out of the session due to computer malfunctions which would have been distracting for them and the facilitator, but again, handouts will help with this issue. On Decka's advice I logged in an hour early just in case I had to download a SL software update which happens frequently and can take 30 minutes to sort out. As it happened there was an update, optional fortunately as I tried three times to download it and couldn't for some unsolved reason. The interface control works best with a 2-button mouse and scroll wheel which made life tricky for Mac users.
Finally it took me a while to sort out the audio. I had succeeded in turning on audio streaming but the delay in starting made me think there was a problem even though there wasn't. That was confusing. I also tried the shoutcast (simulcast with SL via a webpage) and found that I needed to associate the PLS file with Winamp before the audio could play. There was no guidance of this on the webpage and I needed ten minutes of Google searching to figure that out.
One thing I noticed that didn't happen was overcrowding of the sim (local area) so we had no lag problems. Another surprise was that the shoutcast audio was synchronised with the SL audio. I thought that it would be real-time as the keyboard chat. Perhaps this indicates that the audio streaming delay is not a SL problem, but rather related to the source server?
After the 20min presentation we all gathered near the Surf Club to practice our interface skills (movement, menu manipulation etc) all through games such as mud-wrestling, dart-throwing, and hangman. Of course trained teachers would recognise this as being where most of the learning actually took place for most of the learners. I will definitely incorporate games and fun activities into my learning delivery strategies.
I look forward to participating further in Decka's Action Learning Group. I'm tossing up whether to do my project on dance or English teaching as I run a small business in both areas. More thoughts on this soon.
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