COLMSCT Conference Chat

A presentation by two Management educators at this conference http://conference.unctlt.org/ (April 13-15, 2010) discussed how MBA students are taken to a field trip within Second Life to meet people staffing a real customer-focussed business centre.

The educators described their experiences of holding MBA classes in Second Life where the classes are held in learning spaces which are similar to real-world lecture theatres to familiarise students with Second Life and to make them feel comfortable. By attending classes in Second Life, students gain skills of interacting in Second Life.

As a part of the MBA programme, students are taken for a corporate field trip. This field trip is conducted in Second Life. For example, in the last presentation, students visited IBM’s Green Data Centre in Second Life. The trip/choice of location was organised around the learning outcomes of the course.

In the conference presentation, the educators discussed their experiences of organising the trip: liaising with IBM, guiding students to come in their professional attires (avatars) for the virtual trip, and how the virtual field trip didn’t have the onerous arrangements that an organisation has to make for a real-life field trip (security arrangements, and so on). Also, IBM personnel from different locations could come to meet students in Second Life which may have not been possible in real-life.

A summary of the presentation and details of the presenters are available on the conference website.

Shailey Minocha

University of North Carolina, USA, organised its 11th Annual Conference on ‘Teaching and Learning with Technology’ from April 13th to April 15th in Second Life
http://conference.unctlt.org/program/index.php.

On 15th April, there was presentation that I particularly enjoyed and would like to share with you. The educators Lynne Goodhand and Susan Wells discussed how giving iPod touches to school students helped to facilitate collaboration, discussion and inquiry based learning. The presenters discussed their journey from the planning stage, how they overcame the fear of technology which parents had, how they set up mechanisms where each IPod Touch can be monitored and identified for wrongful use by a student and to the stage where they are now – where every student carries an iPod touch. There was a particular incident the presenters discussed about how a student who found it difficult to converse in English and was very quiet and disengaged in the class started using the picture dictionary on her iPod Touch to communicate and share her thoughts in the class.

An abstract of the talk and details of the presenters are available on the conference website.

Shailey Minocha

The University of North Carolina held its 11th Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference in Second Life http://conference.unctlt.org/ (April 13-15, 2010). The theme of the conference was Embracing Change: Innovative Teaching Through Technology. The conference was an excellent showcase of the various technology-enabled learning initiatives at the University of North Carolina.

There was one presentation on best practices for Elluminate use which I found particularly interesting and relevant to us in COLMSCT and OU, in general. The presenters Beth Shepherd and Greg Kraus discussed strategies for facilitators on how they could make the online sessions engaging for the students. They also discussed ways of how students can be guided to ‘Learn How to Learn Online’. (see the abstract of their talk in the programme for Thursday, 15th April on the conference website.)

The handouts which colleagues might find useful are at:

http://www.slideshare.net/pithlydawn/elluminate-use-at-nc-state-best-practices-handout

http://www.slideshare.net/pithlydawn/learn-how-to-learn-online-slides

I hope you find these resources useful.

Shailey Minocha

I presented the paper “Interaction Design and Usability of Learning spaces in 3D Multi-user Virtual Worlds” in a Human-Computer Interaction conference in October last year. This paper details our empirical investigation related to the design and usability aspects of learning spaces in Second Life which influence student learning and engagement. The conference paper has now been accepted as a chapter in a forthcoming book. If you are interested in the paper, please write to me.

The reason for bringing up this paper is to share with you the significance of conducting pilots before the main study in user-based investigations. During our pilots in our project, a colleague discussed usability of Second Life learning spaces and their impact on student engagement, an aspect which was an unanticipated thread of enquiry. Her inputs led us to change our interview materials and to develop an additional strand for data collection and analysis, which resulted in the paper I mentioned earlier.

In the pilots, we went through the entire process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to check whether our research questions were being answered. Pilots are time consuming but they provide a sense of confidence for the main study.

Shailey Minocha

I was recently invited to present our Second Life (SL) research as a part of the research seminar series of the Computing & Mathematics Department of Keele University. The abstract of my talk which took place on 25th November 2009 is on this webpage:

http://www.scm.keele.ac.uk/events/seminars/Dr%20Shailey%20Minocha.pdf

The presentation was very well-received. There were some queries during the presentation about how we conducted interviews and empirical research in SL? how is an island set up in SL?; what is the difference between outdoor learning spaces, open spaces and sandboxes? why are people so concerned about navigation and way finding in SL when they can fly in SL? how can SL support people with Autism? are there avatars around that can disrupt a class/interview? can one set up access mechanisms so that only some avatars can enter some spaces and not the others? does having avatars makes people disrespectful to others as people may not know who is behind the avatars, in other words, does anonymity encourage disruptive behaviour in SL?

I will be addressing these issues in my end-of-fellowship report for COLMSCT. In the meantime, if you have any queries/comments about SL, please do contact me.

I am enjoying a train ride in the SL picture below.

Shailey Minocha

On the first day of the Open CETL conference (15th December 2009), I presented the research paper based on our Second Life research (Designing Learning Activities in Second Life for student engagement). On 16th, I presented the poster. The files (pdf) are available on this site: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/sm577/news.html

Liz Thackray gave a demo of Second Life in the same session in which I presented. We received a number of queries from the audience: why are educators conscious of their (avatar’s) attire to establish authority during Second Life tutorials? what are the perceptions towards Second Life of those students who have experience of video games and other 3D gaming environments? which islands/places (analogous to websites in Second Life) should educators visit for gaining an insight into the potential of Second Life for teaching and learning?

The poster session (Bringing educators and students into Second Life: Design of socialisation and skills development activities) brought up some very interesting queries from course teams and educators: how much time does it take to induct students and educators in Second Life? which are the ways by which induction can be carried out? which tools are available to support educators in their teaching in Second Life? do I have evidence that Second Life enhances student learning and engagement? Do students continue to use Second Life even after our initiative on a particular course ends?

Colleagues in IET, Physics and Astronomy and HSC have followed up with queries after the event. I will address the queries listed above in the end-of-fellowship report of COLMSCT. In the meantime, if you have any queries/comments regarding the role of 3D virtual worlds in education and particularly, at the OU, please do contact me.

The picture shows a supervision meeting in progress involving me and my student.

Shailey Minocha

Over the last month, I have attended three training programmes organised by this company:

http://www.shapironegotiations.com/virtualprogramofferings.html

The story is that Mark Jankowski, co-director and founder of this training organisation, has presented training programmes for imparting negotiation skills, probing skills, etc. for over 13 years but recently he noted that organisations were finding it hard to offer training programmes to their employees due to lack of funds for travel and training. Mark is now experimenting with the Second Life platform and many of his clients are keen that he organises training programmes in Second Life for their employees as it would save travel time and money. Mark is currently evaluating the training events with an invited set of participants.

I have come across literature that states that role-plays are most useful for practising and developing interpersonal skills including conflict management, negotiation, influencing, active listening, giving and receiving feedback, and communication. Since 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life enable creation of simulated settings for role-playing complex scenarios, some of which may not be possible or difficult to construct in real-life (for example, emergency awareness and preparedness situations), these 3D environments provide excellent settings for training.

In the training sessions that I have attended, I have noticed that role-playing and the flexibility to change the 3D environment to match with the stories/examples being related by the instructor are very effective for understanding the concepts and for their retention.

Here is a snapshot from one episode of training on negotiation skills where the instructor  was relating a story of how he had negotiated the fees for Santa Clause(s) who go and sit in stores for amusing the children and shoppers, he changed the setting to a Christmas setting. In another scenario where he was relating a story related to a baseball player, he changed the setting to a baseball stadium.

Shailey Minocha

I’m blogging this at my own blog, so I’m just pasting the links here.

Vancouver

 Oh, conferences

 A bit more Vancouver

 Mixed bag

Last night

Elearn Wednesday

 Elearn Thursday

Elearn Friday

What I got from Elearn

My third conference of the summer. (I can’t be accused of not carrying out any dissemination activities!) This time it’s the Cambridge International Conference on Open & Distance Learning taking place at Murray Edwards Hall, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, just 25 minutes down the road from my home at the other of end of Huntingdon Road in Huntingdon. Well that was true yesterday; today it was 1 hour from home in the not-so-rush hour so I’m staying overnight tonight. This means that I can be here for the start of Grainne Conole’s keynote at 9am tomorrow without having to get up at the crack of dawn (I am not a natural earlybird).  

Grainne is the OU’s Learning Design evangelist (an area that, thanks to Anne Adams, I have recently discovered is key to my COLMSCT project) so I’m very keen to hear what she has to say. But, because of the nature of this conference, I’ve being doing that for the last day and a half. Grainne has been attending the conference and at this conference everybody gets to chat with everyone else – she’s even read my paper and she too is interested in looking at learning design from the student and tutor angle not just the course designers. Wow! Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round, me reading the keynote speaker’s paper and being interested in what she has to say? I’m suddenly feeling very grown up! 

There are only 100 attendees at the conference but the International in the conference title is well-deserved as the attendees come from 28 countries. The emphasis here is very much on discussion. There are four keynote speeches and after each one we break out into six groups to discuss what we’ve heard. This means that there is meaningful discussion that develops the ideas that were introduced in the keynote by putting them into the context of our own experiences and differing institutions. These home groups, as they are called, quickly put everyone at their ease and as a result we are soon recognizing faces and having relevant, friendly, coffee-time chats.  

The first keynote was given by Sugata Mitra of hole-in-in-the-wall fame. He was a very engaging speaker and his ideas about self organized learning environments, where children learn by using the internet in an unsupervised and unrestricted fashion, were brought to life by the experiments he has carried out by putting computers in remote villages in India and observing what children do with them. In contrast he has also carried out an experiment in Gateshead where children were shown to work much better when four children shared a computer to find out about something rather than when they worked independently. This has implications for learning in older age ranges where social interaction may produce better results than independent learning, one of the underlying themes of the OU’s new SocialLearn.  

The second keynote, given by Professor Morten Flate Paulson, reported on a regime of self-paced learning where students set their own deadlines for handing in assignments and the average turnaround for marking assignments is 2.76 days. This was compared to the OU’s commitment to two weeks turnaround time. 36% of students voluntarily teamed up with ‘learning partners’, students studying at roughly the same stage of the course, to provide each other with mutual support. Of course the implication of this figure is that 64% preferred to study independently. Again this has implications for SocialLearn. Personally I’m of the opinion that it’s horses for courses. Students are presented with so many different learning opportunities that it is important they find a path through the different activities that suits there personal requirements and learning styles. When finding this route they need signposts to alert them to which bits of the course are Essential, which are Desirable and which Optional – an EDO framework to be precise! – which leads me on to my own paper at this conference.

The format for the presentation of conference papers also puts the emphasis on interaction with the instruction to allocate just 1/3 of the session slot to introducing the paper and then encouraging those attending to make active contributions. My own session certainly led to many active contributions with discussions centring on the differing levels of internet access that were available to students both in this country and abroad. The idea of an EDO framework met with a favourable response which was a relief. I now need to think about how I’m going to develop it into something fit for a journal article. Perhaps my new friend, Grainne can help tomorrow morning.

Ingrid and I chat with Martin Bean at the ALT-C conference dinner in the stylish surroundings of Manchester Town Hall.

 You can find recordings of the keynote and invited speakers as archived files on: http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/. You’ll need to select the Recordings tab and the conference date (8/9/10 Sept 09) to get a list of sessions for that day. Elluminate is a powerful learning tool and watching/listening to a session, soon makes you realise the potential for a tool of this sort to bring current debates, in the form of experts and specialist speakers, into our own courses in presentation.

All in all a really inspiring 3 days and still lots going on. Join the network on Crowdvine if you’re thinking of coming to the conference in Nottingham next year.   

Ali