Turning the Supertanker

The latest installment of our remote teaching, ‘dial an expert’ initiative has just taken place and how different this lesson was from the last four.  How far the students have come, how more relaxed we all were at using this method of instruction.  Helen and I have spent the last couple of Friday evening/mornings (depending on which time zone we were in!) ironing out the wrinkles in my real time teaching experiment, where the students would not only hear and see me and me them, but see the program being demonstrated in real time too.  We still have have a few image quality issues to resolve, but in essence we have proved, even if it is a little clunky that we can teach via this method.  It just needs refining a little more before we launch the procedure on a live class.

Tonight’s lesson was a cracker.  We had to use the method that we developed last year, but that was not a hinderance.  The students by now have got used to the whole method of me teaching them from afar, although the music teacher who came in to claim a few students was amazed that this kind of teaching could happen at all.  It helps that by now the students have mastered the basics of Inkscape and tonight we were able to push on and do some more interesting design work.  You can see the resources used in tonights lesson at my latest skrbl page.  What really impressed me most about tonight’s lesson was the students.  They were coming up to the microphone and webcam and asking questions and further supplementary questions just as they would to a physical entity in their class.  Crucially I asked them to give me feed back, ie come back to the camera to let me know that what I had told them had worked and that they had understood it.

Virtual teaching will never replace teachers in classes, but it does have its benefits.  Virtual teaching will not enable the education of masses of students for the price of one teacher, but what I hope that it does blossom into, is the whole ‘dial an expert’ model.  If you have a skill, why should it be locked up into your classroom so that  only 30 or so students are exposed to that skill at any one time?  If you have a skill, be it musical, artistic, whatever and you want to share beyond your current class/ school/ district/ country then let me know, I am sure that we can set up a directory of skills and teachers that can be accessed to benefit students no matter where they are….  Oh and the best bit, I was eating ice cream as I taught!  Try doing that in the class!

I have long been intrigued with the whole notion of online collaborative gaming and its potential for education.  Shoot ‘em ups, although strategy games, are still blood baths and not really suited to pre-teen education, I can see the letters from parents now (note not e-mails, what does that say?)!  As a result, I have been intrigued but have not persued it further.  Second Life, on the other hand, I immediately saw as having huge potential in the education sector, but how?

I recently embarked on an experiment with Helen in the UK to see how we could exploit Second Life to enhance our learning partnership and to really develop a sense of community between our two schools.  I wondered if we could not work together on a collaborative construction project as devised by the students.   I envisaged many student avatars all working collaboratively to create some edifice and leaving instructions and queries for the next shift as we sailed through time zones…

Helen and I both created our Avatars, mine is a hopeless representation of me!  I tried to be honest about my appearance and my efforts ended up looking like some ring worm suffering alopaecia sufferer!  Anyway our experiences on Linden as newbies were enough to put us both off!  Helen was bored to tears with some overbearing architect with too much too say.  I guess that if you are a bore in your first life you bring that imprint with you into Second Life!   I just jumped straight in and clicked on the first ‘popular’ tag that seemed to be in the centre of Linden and promptly ended up in a strip club!  Now I could definitely not only see the letters from the parents if I let my students loose here, but my resignation letter too!  My only defence being that it would have been genuine discovery learning!

My interest in Second Life was re-kindled at the recent Ulearn07 conference, when Tony Ryan talked about not only our Second Life, but our Third and even Fourth lives.  Since then the I have seen the following:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7038039.stm

http://rampoislands.blogspot.com/2007/09/need-more-evidencee.html

I have come to the conclusion that there is too much here not to be used by students, but still the un-restricted access issue is one that has to be wrestled with.   Not least the fact that Second Life is filtered on School Zone and I have a sneaking suspicion that the ports that it communicates on are locked by our tech support company,  just as Joost is (an easy fix but an irritation non the less). How do we protect our students from the adult aspects of Linden?  If a 10 year old were to attempt to walk into a strip club in our First Lives, they would be prevented from doing so by the moral imperatives of the  adults in or around the establishment, not to mention the legality of the situation.  Second Life has no such moral or legal imperatives, it is the wild west and that, for many, is its appeal and I for one would not want to restrict or control that, for adults.  Second Life is a masque ball, we can be who we want to be, the assumption is that all around us are voters and tax payers, ie adult.  Our Avatars have and give no visual clues to the genuine age, gender, ethnicity and identity of those whom we meet.  That is Second Life’s appeal for adults and its Achilles heel for students to use it.  So how do we get our students into Linden without invoking the wrath of parents?

I have been discussing this idea with Fiona and she has come up with a fantastic idea that we are going to be working through this term with my G+T students.  The students will be observers of Linden, by proxy though our Avatars.  I think that this has potential and am looking forward to it.  We will be the guides and as such can teleport our students to  resources and experiences suited to their needs.  This however will not enable the students to ‘experience’  and explore unfettered the environment of Second Life.  What is needed is an island that is the sole preserve of educators,  who  will be able to allow their students to roam freely.  Until this happens or some other solution is devised, our students will be passive observers of a world that is not meant experienced passively.  In the mean time resources such as the ‘International Spaceflight Musuem’ are too good for education not to utilise.  I will keep you posted of our progress. If you would like to be part of this experiment, let me know and I will work out a way to include your or your students.  I am planning to do this on Friday mornings at 11:00, but will keep you posted.  If you want to find me in Linden I am ‘Alban Sicling.’  If you see me in a strip club, it is not me, but my identical twin, honest…