As I’ve been reading your comments on the advanced tools, it seems to me that I haven’t done a good job at explaining the potential for the tools relating to immersive environments. Your commentaries are good as far as they go, but I think we need to explore the notion a little more fully.
As we consider spaces like SecondLife, or Oddessey the value of those spaces is not as “virtual classrooms.” Remember that my belief is that classrooms are for teaching and not for learning. The last thing I want to do is take these opportunities for interaction and turn them into lecture halls. There is no value in creating a 3d space with 3d desks where 3d avatars (digital puppets) can sit and see a 3d teacher use a 3d projector to put a 2d PowerPoint-analogue on a 3d screen at the front of the 3d room. This is just pointless. It’s such an egregious misuse of the technology that I just don’t understand why so many educators believe that this is a Good Idea.
In a classroom, your options are limited. You can only do whatever it is that is bounded by your synchronous time frame — the class period. You can only do things that fit safely in the classroom space. You can only do things that involve the people you can get into that space during that time.
Compare that to a simulation of — for example — the anatomy of an eyeball.
In the classroom you can show a movie, draw a diagram, use a lot of words describing what might be going on. In a 3d environment you can shrink the class to 1millimeter size and take them thru the cornea and into the eyeball. They can do it in small groups and chat with each other — or individually when they want to. You can create representatives of authorities with whom the students can interact in order to learn more about the fovea or about rods and cones. They can look out of the eye and see the world upside down and trace the light paths thru the lens.
Which do you think would be more real? More engaging? More concrete? More likely to instill an understanding of the uses and operation of the structures ot the eye? Talking about it or experiencing it?
The problems with the 3d spaces, of course, is that they are expensive in terms of our ability to create them — they require specialized tools and platforms which in turn require a lot of specialized knowledge to create and operate. They also carry some hefty requirements in terms of computer and bandwidth to get them to work reliably. That is where the text-based tools like MUDs and MOOs come in.
Using the relatively simple tools required to design and run a MUD or MOO, you can create these immersive experiences using textual slabs of experience. The servers dont take a great deal of expertise to run (by comparison), and the creation tools are simple enough that thousands of kids have mastered them over the years. The bandwidth and display requirements are based on a “pre-web” network which means they’ll work on the slowest and least powerful machines currently out there now.
And that’s assuming that what you want to teach is content that lends itself to this kind of immersion, but what if you’re trying to teach reading?
Personally, I’ve seen the reading curricula used in schools. I’ve seen more engaging matchbooks. As an instructional designer with no particular insight into how to teach reading, I have to say that I’m horrified. It’s no wonder kids don’t want to read. The stuff they’re required to read is stultifyingly boring. At a point where you need kids to get practice in reading and interpreting text, why not give them something they want to read? Why not give them some kind of incentive for digging deeper? There’s a well-known axiom in education that says that doing is better than showing and showing is better than telling.
Well, in the case of reading, why not use a MOO and have the students create the space. What do they need to do? Read. And as they read, they gain practice in reading. They gain insight into sentence construction and the power of words. They test themselves and their reading skills against the documentation and the computer and each other to create good, solid, tight text. They learn to recognize flabby prose and appreciate obfuscating structures. They learn reading has value and they learn it in a context that — if properly positioned — is not merely engaging but consuming.
In reality, many of you taking this class don’t have those kinds of resources available and are dealing with kids that are too young to read thru Lydia Leong’s MOO programming manuals. For younger kids, just get them to play in the MUDs or participate in the role-play in MOOs. There are plenty of family friendly spaces out there. And there are plenty of opportunities to engage them in online reading that do not involve playing “Jeopardy” clones or taking online quizzes in thinly devised games.
Your goal as educators is to foster learning. In considering the uses of immersive environments — and when you think about it, distance education is all about creating a kind of immersive environment — you need to get over the classroom. MOOs and MUDs give you an opportunity to begin thinking about what that means in new and creative ways.