This document is licensed under a „Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Austria“ Licence (“Creative Commons Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Österreich”). Further details see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/at/

 

Author: Judith Molka-Danielsen, Molde University & Mats Deutschmann, Mid Sweden University, Sweden

 

 

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

 

 

Guidelines for Educators: Using 3D virtual environments for language learning

(Version 0,89 october 2010)

Mats Deutschmann

Associate Professor

Mid Sweden University 

Sweden

 

Judith Molka-Danielsen

Associate Professor

Molde University College

Norway

j.molka-danielsen@himolde.no

 

Executive Summary

 

This document is an attempt to provide guidelines and recommendations for educators and administrators who are considering setting up learning events or conducting language learning modules in 3D environments for the first time. It draws on information and experiences from all phases of the Avalon project.

 

The first section “Before you get started” will deal with some of the learning philosophical and practical issues that motivate the use of virtual worlds from a pedagogical point of view. The second section deals with issues of technology readiness and administrative issues are discussed in sections  3. Sections 4-7 include more practical hands-on guidance on specific technical and administrative issues related to Second Life in particular. 

 

 

Outline

Executive Summary 1. Before you get started -Why Virtual Worlds?  New Learning Paradigms  New Learner Profiles  2. Becoming Technology Ready  Deciding what virtual world to use Finding a Home and Moving in. Learning Administrative Systems Teachers as Learners

 

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1. Before you get started -Why Virtual Worlds?
 

Using virtual worlds for language teaching/learning is in many ways quite complex and often very different from more traditional forms of teaching, face-to-face or online. Although we would argue that moving into a virtual world learning space as an educator is an extremely rewarding experience, we would also like to point out that it is not the same thing as adopting a new version of a word processing software or a new learning managing system. Teaching language in virtual worlds often requires a new way of thinking in terms of how to use of the environment in the learning process and demands a completely new set of professional skills (in addition to the ones that you already possess). We would thus argue that it is thus not something that you simply “throw into a course” and hope for the best. Instead, we encourage any educator to ask herself the question “why do I want to use the environment in my language teaching?” before getting started. If no good answers to this question come up, then it is perhaps time to find out more about the possibilities the environments offer. If after this you still cannot find any good reason to use a virtual world environment in your particular course design, it is perhaps not for you. If, on the other hand, the affordances of a virtual world – the ability to connect with learners and educators from around the world in a three dimensional virtual space where you can manipulate objects and build environments together, and where you can communicate in the target language using voice and text – open up new possibilities for language learning, then it may be a step worth taking. This document is intended to help you on the way.

 

New Learning Paradigms
 

The workplace has seen many changes in recent years. In many parts of the developing world, the “factory” metaphor to describe a work place no longer applies. The typical workplace in business or industry instead very likely contains a small group of people (very often dispersed geographically) connected to information through various information communication technologies. The people are very likely occupied with solving problems by gathering facts and applying their special expertise and experience to these, and by communicating and negotiating their findings with others. In response to this situation, society is seeing changes in the traditional learning paradigm too. Over the last decades, educational strategies in schools and universities are gradually transitioning from the lecturer-listener approach to problem based learning approaches where the student is more central in the learning process and more active in contributing to the content of the learning event. Such approaches are based on theories of Social Constructivist Learning (Vygotsky, 1978), and it is argued they lead to more meaningful learning, allowing recipients of learning to apply new knowledge to situations outside the classroom. Virtual world environments are in many ways well adapted for this type of learning. They offer good tools for communication and creative activities where a ‘learning by doing’ approach is arguably easier to implement than in real life where such approaches can be extremely costly and logistically complex. In language learning contexts they are of particular interest as the following excerpt illustrates:

 

“In bringing together learners from different language backgrounds, on-line environments, such as SL, increase the scope for cross-cultural interaction to the extent that the target language becomes the only viable option for meaningful communication. If, in addition, tasks are designed in such a way that the information needed is contained in the knowledge capital of the student group so that the students themselves become the source of the course content, two of the potential problems related to second language learning situations are addressed: motivation for using the foreign language and subject relevance.” (Deutschmann, Panichi & Molka-Danielsen 2009).

 

New Learner Profiles
 

In addition, there are new challenges presented by the changing profile of the student population.  Today, we see a growing number of students who are in fact life long learners, with the need to combine education with their work lives. For these students, it may not be possible to be a student 100% of their time, and they may even need to access educational opportunities that are not local.  Thus, society sees a growing demand for distance education, and many educational institutions find that providing such programs to be a strategic necessity. A great challenge is thus to provide a collaborative and creative setting even in those cases when students a geographically dispersed.

 

Some of aspects of this challenge are highlighted in the following excerpt:

 

“The rapid development of Information Technology (IT) and the World Wide Web (WWW) brings about new possibilities for distance collaboration, not least due to the development of Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs and social - network sites. The use of IT and WWW has certainly also affected the higher education in general and distance education in particular. Distance education is now often using web-based material and applications; concepts like online education and e-learning are now used more frequently (Hrastinski, 2007; Garrison & Anderson, 2003). In addition, the number of students enrolled in distance courses is significantly increasing (Hrastinski, 2007). At the same time universities are making great efforts to further develop their e-learning systems in order to provide students with adequate learning environments. In spite of these actions, it has been shown that online courses often have low retention rate (Carr, 2000; Simpson, 2004). One of the reasons for this may be the lack of the social dimension in these e-learning systems, since students do not actually meet fellow students face-to-face and are therefore not able to communicate spontaneously and in real time (Lombardi & McHill, 2004). It has been discussed that the use of Web 2.0 applications may offer new opportunities to improve online/distance education (Anderson, 2007). In order to facilitate the social dimension, the most promising applications are the Virtual World environments (Dickey, 2003).” (Creelman, Petrakou, and Richardson, 2008)

 

While a greater support of distance education must be addressed by both the educational institution and by the teaching team in a number of different ways, we would argue that the use of virtual worlds can go towards creating a common space for isolated learners and a sense of presence which is hard to match with other e-learning tools. This social presence is arguably a key motivational issue for online language learners in particular who want to use their newly acquired language skills in real communication. 

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2. Becoming Technology Ready
 

So having decided that virtual worlds are places for you and your institution to pursue language teaching, what is the next step? Where do you start? Here we would strongly advice you as an educator or administrator to first become familiar with the environment you intend to use but before you can do this, however, you have to decide which virtual world you want to use.

 

Deciding what virtual world to use

 

In the Avalon project, we have been using Second Life primarily as learning environment. There were several factors that made us decide on this particular environment:

•  Some of us had used the environment previously and were familiar with it
•  Some of us had extensive contacts with an educator community that operated in Second Life and that we could exchange experiences with
•  The environment was freely available for our students (but not to us as creators of new environments)
•  We deemed that our students had reasonably good access to high speed connections and modern computers
•  The environment housed an active community of regular users which was important for our ambitions of getting students to communicate with peers
• The design and culture of the world did not dictate what we could or could not do. Unlike worlds such as World of Warcraft, for example, there was no game design that we had to adapt to. 
• The affordances of the environment met our needs. These included communicative tools such as voice, chat and IM, as well as the possibility of movement, and creating object and environments that we needed for our purposes. 

This list illustrates the sort of questions that may be of importance when you decide what world to use. For example, had we been addressing our projects non-adults, Second Life would not have been a realistic alternative since there is an 18-year age limit in Second Life. Similarly, if we had wanted to use the game design of the world in order to pursue our learning goals, Second Life would not have been a good option since it does not have such an in-built design. Also, the fact that many of us were familiar with the environment was an important contributory factor. In this way we had a realistic picture of what we could, and could not do in the environment. One of the most important factors to consider, however, is the existing community in the world. In the case of Second Life, the fact that there already existed an active community of educators, which we could exchange experiences with, was extremely important.

 

Different worlds have different affordances and it is beyond the scope of this document to give a comprehensive review of all the worlds that are ‘out there’ but the following links may help you in this pursuit:

 

• A brief comparative study of some environments conducted under the project:: http://avalonlearning.pbworks.com/WP4-4+Comparative+study+of+3D+environments
• Virtual World list with recommendations and links to different worlds: http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/info/categories.shtml
• Some virtual world reviews: http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/
• Virtual Worlds Online Review Center, which gives a fairly good overview of the types of worlds available: http://www.virtualworlds3d.com/

 

Note that since we primarily used Second Life in our project, most of what follows is specific for Second Life. The general principles, however, are applicable to most worlds.

 

Finding a Home and Moving in.

Deciding on where in the world to conduct your teaching will depend on a number of practical issues. However, for the individual learner, either as teacher or student, to truly get started in SL it is important to have a virtual home, a place of one’s own to learn and experiment. In spite of this it may not be realistic to buy land initially and for those that want to get started all the same we have provided a list of spaces which are more or less open for educational activity given that you have reached an agreement with the owners of the spaces in question. Click on the following link for a list of educational Second Life environments with descriptions and contact details:

http://avalonlearning.pbworks.com/w/page/List-of-Second-Life-Environments

 

 

The creation of a VLE can be done by hiring builders to actually do the programming of the 3D design. However, this does require ongoing communication with the builders in the design process. The educational institution must have clear objectives about what the space is to be used for, and must have an understanding of the profile of its customers (the students). It is often advisable that the building specifications are not too detailed, because the often the learning objectives can be achieved with many types of visual representations and the teacher may not know (or wish to know) the building constraints of the environment (like SL).

 

An alternative to building ones own classroom in a VLE is of course to use someone else’s. In this second approach the educational institution must shop around, and may hear of existing designs through conferences and special interests groups such as those offered by EUROCALL.

 

One example of an existing environment is the Kamimo Island that was used for various language courses since 2007, including “Social English for Doctoral Students”.  That course had meetings in world in Second Life; where students and teachers had interacted using role play. For example in one meeting students were asked to present themselves at a conference dinner that is to break into the social discussion around the dinner board. The course consisted of in-world activity and follow up reflection sessions. The settings on Kamimo Island for the discussions were both a “traditional” virtual classroom with chairs facing a presenter and an overhead media board and, other non-traditional spaces, such as a campfire out in nature. The students represented by avatars sat around the campfire and role played the mentioned task at the conference dinner. The advantage of preparing the island is that different spaces could be used for different activities, and the teachers involved in the project had access and knowledge about how to used the teaching artifacts (such as media tools, and special chairs). 

 

Similarly, in our AVALON project, the project partners are developing a Business Barn to be used with a course to teach language that engages the use of language that is typically used in a business work environment. The virtual spaces consist of “office space” for posting information and for holding meetings. It also has a meeting location with chairs for an audience and a media screen for presentation of materials. This can be used for activities such at “dragon’s den” where students can present business ideas before a panel of judges.  Figures 1 depicts the interior of the Business Barn.

 

 

Figure 1 The Business Barn

 

In addition to the Business Barn, other spaces on the AVALON Learning Island in SL are used with the business language course. The students that are successful in the “dragon’s den” activity will be given building rights on AVALON in a campus area. This will give them further opportunity to enhance their language skills through the development of everyday objects. The campus area is depicted in Figure 2 and the Business Barn can be seen in the background.

 

 

Figure 2 The student campus on AVALON Learning Island

 

Finally, some activities are less seen in advance, and so other 3D tools can be used to build more temporary scenarios. One 3D tool know as a “holodeck” will allow the teacher to call up different scenarios within a box. Scenarios can include for example, a London bus station or a movie theatre. These virtual places can then be the focus of conversations. AVALON is experimenting with the uses of such scenarios in language learning. While it is easy for the teacher to select one scenario from a list, it takes building knowledge in the 3D world to create new scenarios. Some examples of 3D scenarios are depicted in figures 3 and 4.

 

Figure 3 Scenario of an old movie theatre using a holodeck

 

 

 

Figure 4 Scenario is a London bus station using a holodeck

 

Finally, it is possible to visit a multitude of other virtual spaces that are developed by others. Many of these can be representations of real world places others may have cultural influences but are not intended to replicate any one place. These virtual spaces are frequently visited by persons with language skills that align with the owners or developers of the representation. Figure 5 depicts several examples of these.

 

 

Figure 5 Avatar visiting a temple in virtual China and visiting virtual New York City

 

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Learning Administrative Systems

 

Once a virtual “classroom” is adopted, the next logical challenges have to do with administering the course. The extended administrative abilities of Learning Management Systems do not for the most part exist within Second Life. However, the educator will be concerned with issued such as: attendance, sharing information, and evaluation of work. We will address these issues in this section.

[More is needed on:

• Test and evaluate different teaching and learning activities in SL (courses, projects, meetings, role play)
• Test and evaluate how effectively SL can be used in fostering cooperation (between faculties, universities, business)
• Test selected learning tools or elements together with the virtual environment

]

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Teachers as Learners

 

In traditional education the teacher has been seen as the source of authority. Students would come to the source and be enlightened. This however, is a fallacy. The teachers are and have always been learners. They have the opportunity to learn from the situation at hand and from their interactions with students.  In the virtual world of SL the teachers can be more acutely aware of this fact. SL can be an unfamiliar world to many educators, and for those experiencing it for the first time, it may not be a “comfort zone”. Support from experienced persons, such as those available in the AVALON project, can help “new” virtual world educators to get started. We recommend joining discussions on open project spaces.  (http://avalon-project.ning.com/).

 

[More is needed here.]

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References

 

Anderson, P. (2007) What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education, In JISC Technology & Standards Watch, available from: http://www.jisc.org.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

 

Carr, S. (2000) As Distance Education Comes of Age, the Challenge Is Keeping the Students, In Chronicle of Higher Education, vol.46, nr.23, p. 39-41.

 

Creelman, A., Petrakou, A. and Richardson, D. (2008). “Teaching and learning in Second Life - experience from the Kamimo project”, Online Information 2008 conference”, London 2-4 December 2008.

 

Dickey, M.D. (2003)Teaching in 3D: Pedagogical Affordances and Constraints of 3D Virtual Worlds for Synchronous Distance Learning, In Distance education, Vol. 24, nr.1, p. 105-121.

 

Hrastinski, S. (2007) Participating in Synchronous Online Education, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Informatics, Lund University, Sweden.

 

Garrison, D.R & Anderson, T. (2003) E-learning in the 21st century: A Framework for Research and Practice. Routledge/Falmer, London.

 

Lombardi, J. & McCahill, M.P (2004) "Enabling Social Dimensions of Learning through a Persistent, Unified, Massively Multi-User, and Self-Organizing Virtual Environment," c5, pp. 166-172, Second International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5'04).

 

Richardson, D. and Molka-Danielsen, J., (2008). "Assessing Student Performance" in Learning and Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life, eds. Molka-Danielsen, J. and Deutschmann, M., Ch.3, Tapir Akademisk Forlag, Trondheim, (forthcoming).

 

Simpson, O. (2004) The impact on retention of interventions to support distance learning students, In The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, vol. 19, nr. 1, p. 79-95.

 

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Harvard University Press.