Thursday 10 May 2007

virtual worlds, real learning? Eduserve Symposium

Not the only (virtual) life...

This was a really excellent (and well organised) event. Eduserve described the symposium as an "attempt to look past the hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life and evaluate whether they offer real opportunities for learners at UK educational institutions". Although it did touch on a few other virtual worlds, it is fair to say that the content of the day focussed almost exclusively on Second Life. The speakers provided a diverse range of inspiring and thought provoking views on SL and learning, ranging from the very positive (Jim Purbrick, Linden Labs - no surprise there) through to the extremely sceptical (Stephen Downes, OLDaily and Institute for Information Technology, Canada).

In addition to the 'real life' event in London, the symposium was also being streamed live into 3 venues within SL (with a 6 second delay, which was interesting at times!). Eduserve also screened the live SL symposium activity on large screens within the venue, adjacent to the presentation screens. I'm not sure what others thought of this, but I really liked it as it gave me a good feel for the audience outside of the congress centre that were joining us. Having this beamed to us also highlighted any techie problems that SL delegates were having, which though did not appear to be many, was nevertheless interesting (to me anyway!). Those participating in SL could also (and did) pose questions to the speakers/panel - and I think that worked pretty well. However, Eduserve have clearly been engaging, and building, in SL for a while - and I do think you need that kind of technical know-how/familiarity with SL before it is sensible to try anything like this - so JISC would not be quite ready for something like this just yet!

I learned a few things (which is always good). In particular - that the evidence (so far) suggests that SL works best as a communication and collaborative tool, that although it is probably the best known virtual world/life, it certainly isn't alone (1), and that there are lots and lots of creative ways of using SL as a learning tool - the best examples of this came from Jim's presentation including designers, filmakers, business studies and marketing.

Not particularly surprising, but worth noting is the strong sentiment that very few (if any) of the speakers really knew where their dabble with SL would take them, nor what the future was likely to hold.


(1) A range of speakers gave lists of alternative virtual worlds - the most comprehensive was within Roo's (IBM) presentation, but another reasonable review of some of the alternatives was also given by Hamish (Edinburgh University).


Presentations available at: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/presentations
Location: Congress Centre
Wireless: Good
Power: Not great - but with the help of Alice G I managed to get a socket :)

Thursday 3 May 2007

a bit of a game

Unless you have been involved with the putting together of a short (in this case, 4 pages) glossy briefing paper I'm not sure you can fully appreciate just how much work goes into these 'brief' documents! I'm extremely pleased (relieved?) to report that after weeks of amendments and various versions that the 'Game-based Learning Briefing Paper' has now had its very last checks and is (as I type) winging it's way to the printers... The paper will be distributed at the forthcoming eduserve symposium virtual worlds, real learning? next week, which I will be attending and reporting on.

Update: The briefing paper can be downloaded from here.

Tuesday 1 May 2007

peer review workshop - 25 April, Bolton



The second peer review workshop was held in a rather cloudy but warm Bolton. The focus of the workshop was very much about getting the projects to work together to share their findings and experiences of reviewing with their peer project(s). It ensured that they also had the time and space to consider the areas within their projects that could realistically be strengthened within the time/resource limits of their projects. To facilitate this, all of the morning and part of the afternoon was set aside for group work. Using the information in the Workshop Introduction guide, and completed SQA/OSSM review forms which peered projects had been asked to work on prior to the workshop, the (pre-defined) groups went through their review forms, feeding their findings to their peer project and then working on building roadmaps of priorities for their projects.
The latter part of the afternoon gave the four peer groups an opportunity to feed back to the wider group the issues, good practice and learning that they had identified during the peer review process so far. The presentations are available from the workshop page. Some general key themes emerged from these presentations:

Good practice:
  • Code tended to be well commented and clear
  • Generally there was a good level of documentation available on project websites
  • In most cases the software was available to download
Issues:
  • In general projects needed to work harder on improving the design/navigation of their websites so that visitors could more easily find the information and documentation that is there.
  • In some instances more/better use cases needed to be made available on project websites
  • More thought on support/documentation around installation of the software provided needed
Learned:
  • The importance of ensuring the prominence of key documentation on the project website
  • The strengh of having an FAQ section
  • The usefulness of shared technical know-how with the peer project
  • Being given a deadline for peer review helped focus the development of the project
Generally the review process appeared to have been a positive experience for the projects and one which they found to be helpful, though a couple of useful comments were also made:
  • importance of maintaining flexibility within the review guidelines
  • OSSM should include some review of use cases
  • greater consideration needs to be given to how demonstrator projects (as opposed to toolkit projects) can and should engage with the peer review process

The code sprint debate
The day ended with an open discussion with the projects about the forthcoming Code Sprint day, allocated for early/mid June to find out what they would want to get from this and whether they had a preference for this to be online or face-to-face. From the discussions it was evident that there was not a strong requirement for this, nor a good understanding of how it would benefit them.

However, there was some consensus about the usefulness of working within their peer groups and that some kind of focussed support on getting them to their final deliverables stage at around that time would be helpful. The clear message was that projects either needed a much stronger argument for the usefulness/benefit of a code sprint day (regardless of whether it was online or face to face) or some kind or re-working of the day/event that would better reflect their needs. Myself, Wilbert, Sam and Warwick are due to discuss the future of the 'code sprint' day this week and I will be reporting back very soon on the outcome of this.