Second life, social networks and online learning

If you completed the survey to the left, I would love your comments and elaboration here.

I learned about Second Life from, of all people my spin teacher. Now Biray is an amazing teacher and very, very adept at staying current with instructional technology so I thought I should find out about this social network. So I rushed out and 6 months later, here are my thoughts and questions. I would love to hear what you all have to say.

In addition to the recommendation by Biray, I learned about social networking in the Graduate Certificate Program in E Learning and Online Teaching. Den, Susan, Datta Kaur, Kay and Lisa are accomplished facilitators and online mentors and, in one form or another, they have all pointed out the possibilities of social networks in the evolution of learning communities.

So, as an economics instructor, I became intrigued by the costs and benefits of these social networks and the impact that they may have on teaching and learning. Below find a representative sample of what my indepth use of google revealed.

I would say that, in order to build effective learning communities educators need to be aware of the boundaries of their discipline, some learning theory, some instructional design, a bit of assessment and some awareness of how their students interact and in what environments their students interact. All of these will inform how we develop and delivery instruction and what approach we use to facilitate our classes.

Further, if we see any value in constructivism, we need to be aware of, to quote Biray, "where our students are". If they are in social networks - Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, then perhaps we need to know a bit about these networks.

After all, our learning communities are not about us, they are not about our disciplines, they should be about how learners access and integrate content in an authentic and relevant manner. We should remember that authenticity and relevance are jointly defined.

So, here they are, a few sources about Second Life.

My next post may be about teaching economics on youTube.

University of Cincinnati Second Life Learning Community (UCSLLC)

The University of Cincinnati Second Life Learning Community will evaluate the feasibility of using Second Life, a 3D multi-user virtual online platform (3DMUVE), in online instruction for the purpose of distance learning and to enhance traditional face-to-face courses. Our major goals are to share and develop resources as we examine the use of the Second Life virtual environment for instruction, pool our talents to build reusable learning objects and spaces in Second Life, and ultimately create a web-based resource for other educators that describes our process, the results of our experience, and our recommendations for its future use as an instructional tool.

At colleges, real learning in a virtual world

They may be college teachers and students, but they're also pioneers — exploring strange new worlds that exist nowhere on Earth. That's because their classes and field trips take place only on computers, using an online digital world called Second Life.

Some 60 schools and universities have set up shop inside Second Life — most in the past year. They join a population that includes real-world business people, politicians, entertainers, and more than 800,000 other "residents" of the virtual world.



Getting an Academic Life in Second Life from the Chronicle of Higher Education

Colleges around the world are opening virtual campuses in Second Life, a three-dimensional, colorful environment that can be accessed via a computer. One of those campuses is New Orleans Island, which was built by Merrill L. Johnson, an administrator at the University of New Orleans. What is the appeal of Second Life, and what kind of classes does the university hold there? Is Second Life a useful distance-education platform or just frivolous entertainment? Mr. Johnson will answer those and other questions.

Unintended Consequences

Doug Simpson's weblog of research on the collision of law, networks and disruptive technologies.

Virtual worlds are increasingly becoming subjects of serious research by law and economics scholars as well entrepreneurs. Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a virtual world called Second Life, with the help of several embedded "avatars" living there, and comparing their reports with the thoughts of leading scholars in this emerging field.


Academic research on Second Life

Although you may not realise it, Second Life has a huge group of educators active within it, many of whom have been active for some time. The process of writing academic papers however, is long and sometimes painful. We are starting to see these papers appearing dotted around the place:

Pros and Cons of student centered communities

This outstanding question was posed by the co instructors of EDUC 761 Collaboration Communities one of the course in the sequence for the UofW Certificate in E Learning and Online Teaching. I am blogging about in response to this excellent question.

Background Information

Vygotsky's constructivist theory, which is often called social constructivism, has much more room for an active, involved teacher. For Vygotsky the culture gives the child the cognitive tools needed for development. The type and quality of those tools determines, to a much greater extent than they do in Piaget's theory, the pattern and rate of development. Adults such as parents and teachers are conduits for the tools of the culture, including language. The tools the culture provides a child include cultural history, social context, and language. Today they also include electronic forms of information access.

We call Vygotsky's brand of constructivism social constructivism because he emphasized the critical importance of culture and the importance of the social context for cognitive development. Vygotsky's the zone of proximal development is probably his best-known concept. It argues that students can, with help from adults or children who are more advanced, master concepts and ideas that they cannot understand on their own.
Source:

http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~ichen/ebook/et-it/social.htm

Working from the definition above:

Cons:

Time, the social constructivist approach, just like all learner centered approaches, is much more time consuming for the facilitator for a number of reasons. This approach implies instructional design for multiple learning styles, multiple paths for learning, a variety of access points and, at the community college level, more than a nodding acquaintance with learning theory.
A second con lies in the assumptions about both the learner and culture. A pessimist might argue that both are ill prepared for the demands of liberal arts and rigorous inquiry.

Personal experiences of con

Since beginning the UofW Stout certificate program in E Learning and Online Teaching I have attempted to redesign the online courses I teach at MCC. This had been unbelievably time consuming process and trying to do this while teaching has been a challenge.

Given the time demands, I do not have a course ready for delivery in revised format, further illustrating the challenge or negative impact of time demand on course revision.

This brings up another negative from my experience. I am the only economics faculty member in my department pursing this line of analysis for my delivery of courses, either online or in person. All the other economics faculty are content centered and I mean, real, content centered. This merely reflects the nature of the discipline, but increasingly I find I have less in common with the economists in my institution and more with the philosophers. Ah, perhaps this is as much a positive as a negative.

Another negative is the heterogeneous makeup of my students. While some are clearly subject to the assumptions of androgogy some of the more optimistic assumptions of this theory and social constructivism may not apply to the more academically immature learners.

Pros

Learning about social constructivism and the related issues of a learner centered approach to instruction have simulated my thinking about how economics can be taught. It lead me to a great analysis by David Colander The Complexity Vision and the Teaching of Economics and has presented a set of instructional challenges that I find to be very interesting.

Greg