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Autor: Gerhilde Meissl-Egghart, talkademy.org
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.
Second Life is a registered trademark of LindenLab coorp., San Francisco other mentioned trademarks are respected properties of their owners.
Introduction
This deliverable describes the plot of some of the AVALON action learning events. It is linked to the other deliverables in this work-package and the work-packages 3 and 4 of the AVALON project. It provides a general description of the AVALON island (which is the 'stage' for the action learning events) and of some action learning events itselves.
Audience
The special focus of this deliverable is to show how story-telling can be used as a part of a course design.Thus the intended audience of this deliverable are course designers, and content creators.
Motivation
In an environment, where you cannot take the attention of the participants for granted, telling an entangling story may be a crucial success factor for the intended learning events. In a physical place students are present and usually will not be disturbed by external events. Thus the educator is not in competition for the student's attention with anything. In a 3D environment however, there are a lot of potential disturbances – from the physical environment (the mobile phone) to other applications running on the participant's computer.
Maybe even more important in a 3D environment a participant can always multitask. Thus a story needs to be very entangling to win the competition for the attention against “everything” else. Indeed, we need to come up with a interesting plot to glue our participants to our action learning event.
Methodology
We decided to split this deliverable in two parts:
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The general framework-story of the AVALON island and some of its action learning events, focussing on the atmosphere and the scenery. The more detailed aspects from the story shall be derived by the results of the action learning events, which will be iterated. Thus we can build the story “bottom up” based on the “ad hoc” reality we experience when execute the different courses. For each of the described action learning events, there is a description of the story, the roles and how the participants become the co-creators of their experience.
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The demonstrator “UKnow” implemented in WP4-3, defining the detailed content of this demonstrator and the specific learning event conducted in the demonstrator, focussing on the game-play. We build the story “top down” with a very strictly controlled user experience through the action learning events based on this specific scenario.
All courses that are run within the Avalon project have their base on ‘avalonlearning’, which is a place (an ‘island’) in Second Life, that was rented and designed as part of the Avalon project.
As the appearance of the surroundings contributes a lot to the general experience, the island was designed to look friendly and appealing - and at the same time provide all the spaces that are needed throughout the project.
This is the place, where a visitor, who teleports to avalonlearning will arrive. At the point of arrival, the visitor sees the flags of all the project partners …
Picture 1: Point of arrival - partner logos
and a 3D-teleport map to all the important places on the island:
Picture 2: Teleport map
Furthermore, there is an exhibition area, that informs the visitor about the Avalon project and upcoming events and shows some of the results of our courses:
Picture 3: Exhibition area
Finally there is a ‘stargate’, that connects avalon-island to other language learning related islands (e.g. the British Council, Kamimo, EduNation):
Picture 4: Stargate
Connections to other islands have in important place in the island’s philosophy: We do not want to replice things, that are available somewhere else but interlink them into Avalon. This is also the reason, why we have a harbour with regular boats going to Kamimo island:
Picture 5: Harbour
From the point of arrival, there is a nice winded path down to the village:
Picture 6: Path to the village
Those who do not like to walk can take the cable car for a complete tour around the island:
Picture 7: Cable car
Social spaces are spaces that are not dedicated to a certain purpose, but encourage people to meet, chat and hang out. This is especially nice, when people wait for their course to start or want to go for a chat afterwards. One of the main social spaces is the village with its pub:
Picture 8: The village
Picture 9: The pub
In the pub, there is a bar and a stage for smaller performances. There is also the possiblity to play darts.
One basic design principle in regards to learning spaces was, not to reconstruct spaces that we have access to on other islands. This explains why there is no lecture hall on avalonlearning. Basically the whole island can be used as learning space. Especially the village with all the buildings and objects that can be found there, offers many opportunities for language classes. However, there are some spaces, that are especially dedicated to the courses:
The sandbox is very useful if the trainer needs to rez special objects, that are not available on the island (e.g. a board game):
Picture 10: Sandbox
For the Business English course, there is the ‘Businessbarn’. It is a revitalised barn, that provides space for presenting and discussing business ideas.
Picture 11: Businessbarn - outside
Picture 12: Businessbarn - inside
Furthermore, there are sound protected parcels in the ‘settlement area’, that are dedicated to teams of students in the running courses, e.g. the teams in the Business English course.
Picture 13: Settlement area
As mentioned before, there are no lecture halls, but there are 2 meeting rooms, that can be used for formal (small) conferences and meetings. One is the ‘teacher’s area’, where most of the Avalon-meetings are held.
Picture 14: teacher's area
The other one is at the first floor of the pub, the ‘skybox office’:
Picture 15: Skybox office
The last important area is the festival area.
Picture 16: Festival area
It has a big stage with much space infront and is the ideal location for big community parties.
There is a campground nearby for those, who didn’t find accomodation in the village :-)
Picture 17: Campground near the festival area
Business English Course
The story
Students find themselve in a businessplan competition. They need to develop their businessplan and prepare a sound presentation for the final session in the 'dragons den'. In each session, the progress one step forward toward the final product, which is the presentation. Important steps are: Finding a topoic, taking over team-roles, midterm-presentation, projectplan. There is no explicit English teaching, but the teacher is the trainer, who helps them with the language they will need for their final presentation.
The roles
Projectmanager (the manager of the team), product manager, marketing manager, chief financial officer; if more roles are needed (e.g. for 'drop ins'): sales manager, quality manager.
Roles become assigned as the result of a job interview in the 2nd meeting. Ad hoc changing of roles is possible, but will not be enforced. Students are expected to stay in their role all over the course, thus they permanently should contribute to the team's work from their role's view, which obviously is different in each role.
How to make the participants co-creators of the learning experience?
Participants choose the topic for their businessplan themselves as a result of research and a guided discussion process, thus the topic they are talking about in class are determined by themselves.
Detailed-Plot - The Demonstrator "UKnow"
For the demonstrator in WP4-3 we have a set of very strict constraints we need to meet, like that we want to allow people to participate without installing a special 3D software. This shall enable people to join action learning events even if they do not have the skills, resources or time to set up a 3D compliant computer. It shall also serve as a “teaser” for people who do not know a lot about AVALON and therefore need to be “dragged into” our world over the lowest threshold possible. For more details on the motivation and constraints, please referee to “AVALON-WP4-3-GUI_configuration.doc”.
The chosen setting is a quiz show in a TV like format. The different mutes, footages and drafts are included in the results from the subcontract Nr. 6 “Experience Design” which offers different proposed plots and includes a detailed one which has been sub-sequentially been implemented as a demonstrator. For detail information please refer to “AVALON-WP2-Experience_design concepts.doc” and "WP2-Experience_design demonstrato".
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