Second Life Ruminations Week 3

Okay so this is my third week blog post and reflection on things that are in my head about our class, virtual worlds, and Second Life in particular. To start off, I have a funny story (okay, at least I think it’s funny).
So we’re in this highly technologic class, and meeting twice a week in a virtual environment, and on Thursday morning after Wednesday night’s class I fly to the big Island for a four-day vacation at Kona Village resort, which is the antithesis of technology. No TVs, no radios, no telephones, no air conditioning, No room service, no locks on the doors, all of the Hale (units) are individual, separated by considerable distance, with dirt pathways leading to the main beach and eating area. the entire resort is enveloped in serene silence — the sound of the ocean, birds in the trees, nothing else. Info here They do have free Internet access only in the business office available 24 hours a day, so I would go over late at night with my laptop and work on my assignments from there. To say the difference is stark between our Wednesday class, and this little slice of heaven on earth with no technology (how many times have you gone four days without carrying your cell phone or laptop with you?) Is putting it mildly. So one of the humorous things that happened, was me walking by the pool one day then glancing over it and seeing the heads of people in their lounge chairs and bobbing in the pool and waiting for the picture to rez better so I could see their name and title above their heads… I am not making this up it actually went through my head for a couple of seconds! I wonder if anyone else in our class has had the experience in real world.
Producers vs Consumers
So anyhow, my thinking on class this week, is on producers versus consumers. One of the goals that I’ve had for my staff as we have adopted a broad range of technologies on our campus, has been to evolve teacher thinking from assuming premade content and activities with technology to developing activities with their student’s that make them producers. For example, it is one thing to have students view a lesson in a science class or concept being taught through a video or YouTube. It is an entirely different thing to have students create instructional videos that they can use to teach others. From a standpoint of cognitive hierarchy, is an entirely different thing to teach a lesson, design the scope, storyboard the concept, shoot, arranged talent, edit, and manage the resource than it is to be just a consumer of someone else’s. It’s very reminiscent for me that early in my modeling physics training at Arizona State University in 1995, that when the complaint came that students doing physics — really doing physics as a community of scientific researchers, was painfully slow and challenging. When the complaint was raised that we could cover the material faster by just telling the students about it, one of our mentors, Larry Dukerich, reminded us that the definition for “cover” was “to obscure from view”.
So where does this fit in with Second Life? The last two weeks in our class we are taking time each meeting to learn how to construct objects — a purse which contained objects, the media station, selecting and editing clothing, etc. None of these are particularly easy, certainly not intuitive to do. So it’s been bothering me, that if I were going to convince a teacher to use Second Life, they would almost certainly need to start and maybe stay, for that matter, as a consumer. By that I mean, they might go to sites that already have been made: a tour of a virtual gallery, flying inside the cell, sitting in and participating in a Socratic dialogue on algebra, you get the idea…
But my main stripe is to have teachers and students create things, not just consume them. Thus, the inherent tension for me, because the amount of time it takes to understand how to build objects in Second Life, makes this an almost impossibility for most students in classes.
Does that mean Second Life can’t be a powerful learning environment for teachers and students? I don’t think so, but I do need to rethink my approach to looking at it. I need to think of this as more of a social space than a laboratory space. Perhaps, at least for now, a powerful aspect of Second Life for me as a technology director, is its ability to be used as a social format. Teachers could meet here with students and teleport to interesting places together — to experience and learn as a community. Perhaps a teacher might take students to an MIT lecture, or arrange an expert to comment and demonstrates something to a class. Powerful? Surely. Best use of the environment? Not really, but until the tools or the students own prior knowledge allow easier construction we are still looking at Second Life as a consumer environment, not a producer environment.
And that’s the way it is… for now