Second Life as Experiential Learning

Second life as experiential learning.
Dan Riordan, 12-20-09
Second Life should be viewed as a spot for experiential learning, not as a game. This thesis holds a number of implications for educators wishing to use this 3D immersive environment.

One avenue of thought about the use of Second Life, or a 3D immersive virtual environment, is that instructors should reconfigure courses so that they provide the same type of environment as video games, thus providing the learning benefits that those games provide. Games are intriguing, but hard to pin down for this stage of use of SL. Games include, as Michelle Dickey explains, narratives that are used to solve problems. Educational narratives would contain an initial challenge, potential obstacles, personal roles, an environment with specified dimensions, a back story, and ‘cut scenes’ (basically check points that affirm a decision or set a new course of action).

While there are similarities between Dickey’s framework and the structure of any investigation, at this point most instructors are unable to visualize their course as a narrative. Even if they can so envision a course, the technological difficulties of creating the interactive environment in SL are insurmountable for most instructors. Just as the web did not become a popular site for educators until it became extremely easy to upload items to a website, so SL will not become a site for redesigning courses into games until the creation mechanism is simplified. Many, probably almost all, instructors will not spend the time and energy needed to create a game environment/narrative for learning, for instance, quadratic equations, microeconomics, or inorganic chemistry.

A key game possibility, however, is that games allow participants to create identities. Educational spaces also allow students to create identities. Sarah Robbins, in a talk at the University of North Carolina, discusses how all spaces project and create identities. She points out that a lecture hall creates two identities, the person in charge and everyone else. She notes, though, that a lab creates an identity where a student can ‘play’ (or practice, or assume the identity of) a scientist.

In terms of Second Life, then, a different and interesting question presents itself: Can an immersive 3D virtual environment help instructors create the identity we want students to assume in our courses? Robbins uses examples from her own experience of teaching composition and rhetoric in Second Life. She assigns research problems, requires students to create solutions, then requires them to create ‘poster sessions’ to which residents of SL are invited. Students become the kind of researcher that most composition courses require. The 3D environment provides a space for them to conduct and report on research, in addition to the activities and writings in the face-to-face component of their course.

Experiential learning implies face-to-face as well as outside-of-class activities. The goal of such experiential assignment is to help students focus “on the two fundamental activities of learning: grasping and transforming experience” (Holzer and Andruet). In Humanities courses these experiences reflect “the desire to restore to the humanities its liberal education mission of fostering involved citizenship and active ownership of ideas” (Nikitina 43).

Typically in introductory experiential learning situations (as opposed to advanced situations like an internship where students are usually not in a formal class) students are centered in a face-to-face class, working with an instructor. In the class they familiarize themselves with essential skills related to ‘playing,’ or practicing, the type of expert that this particular class develops (historian, mathematician, engineer). For the experiential assignment, they spend large amounts of time outside of class engaging in activities that require them to use the skills and build the attitudes and expertise that the course promotes in the curriculum.

Could immersion in a virtual world provide the experiential learning in a course? Like hybrid web-enhanced courses, students would meet regularly face-to-face but then spend research/experiential time in Second Life, completing assignments that fulfill the call of Nikitina and Holzer and Andruet to experience, own, grasp and transform their in-class learning. At present it seems to me that this should be the chosen path of those who wish to experiment with teaching in a virtual 3D world.

It is possible that eventually we will be able to create a ‘math space’ or a ‘grammar space’ where the student, given the identity of problem solver in a narrative game world, overcomes obstacles and collaborates to achieve the status grammar hero. But for now, it seems much easier for us to consider thinking of and using virtual 3D worlds as ‘field trips’ or ‘in-class service learning’ or ‘internships’ in which we send students out from our classrooms into the ‘world’ in order to experience situations that will encourage the expertise we desire.

Michele D. Dickey. “Game Design Narrative for Learning: Appropriating Adventure Game Design Narrative Devices and Techniques for the Design of Interactive Learning Environments.” Educational Technology Research and Development 54.3 (2006), 245-63. Viewed 12-20-09:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h3gn553h68002q47/

Siegfried M. Holzer and Raul H. Andruet. Experiential Learning in Mechanics with Multimedia
Viewed 12-20-09: http://www.succeed.ufl.edu/papers/Expmechmult.pdf

Svetlana Nikitina. “Applied Humanities: Bridging the Gap Between Building Theory and Fostering Citizenship.” Liberal Education. Winter 2009, 36-43.

Sarah Robbins. “Creating Authentic and Engaging Community-Oriented Learning Spaces.” March 17, 2007. UNC-Chapel Hill. Viewed 12-20-09 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueAcz7ZyFpM&feature=related

Changes in Blooms Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy Is Now Different


In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl and others published A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. This team made some far ranging changes to the original 1948 version of the Taxonomy. This note deals with three of the changes.

First, what is an objective? Anderson and Krathwohl say that an objective contains a verb and a noun. The verb “generally describes the intended cognitive process, and the noun generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct (12).” This definition is the key concept for the entire approach. A sample objective is “Evaluate commercials from the standpoint of a set of principles.” The verb is evaluate and the noun (noun phrase in this case) is set of principles.

Second, what do the verb and noun tell you? They tell you where the objective belongs in the new taxonomy. The new taxonomy has a major change—it is a table, not a pyramid. In other words, it is two-dimensional. The cognitive domain is represented by 6 columns and the knowledge domain is represented by four rows. Any objective falls in a cell in the table.

The six cognitive domains are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The four knowledge domains are factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive. In two excellent chapters the authors define all ten of these concepts and their sub-types. An important differentiation from the old taxonomy is that the authors do not claim that a lower level must be mastered before a higher one can be mastered. Instead they focus on retention and transfer. They say that both are important educational goals. “Retention is the ability to remember material at some later time in much the same way as it was presented during instruction. Transfer is the ability to use what was learned to solve new problem, to answer new questions, or to facilitate learning new subject matter” (63).

This distinction is the basis for splitting the table. Remember is the process related to retention. All the others are related to transfer, which the authors say is ‘meaningful learning.’ The goal for educators is to help create meaningful learning, thus educators must use objectives that focus on transfer.

The layout of the table, however, shows educators that the various cognitive processes for meaningful learning can be spread over four different domains of knowledge. A student could analyze conceptual knowledge or analyze procedural knowledge. A student could understand factual knowledge or evaluate factual knowledge.

Third, to use the table the authors ask educators to ask four questions—the learning question, the instruction question, the assessment question and the alignment question. These questions frame the way instructors teach. Of particular importance is the alignment question.

Here are the questions

1. What is important for students to learn in the limited school and classroom time available?

2. How does on plan and deliver instruction that will result in higher levels of learning for large numbers of students?

3. How does one select or design assessment instruments and procedures that provide accurate information about how well students are learning?

4. How does one ensure that objectives, instruction, and assessment are consistent with one another?

In the last half of the book Anderson and Krathwohl focus on answering these questions by analyzing a set of six vignettes sent to them by practicing teachers at different educational levels. These analyses illustrate how a teacher can use the taxonomy to set up types of learning that will become meaningful and also how to guide their work so that what they do has consistency, or aligns.

Sesame Street and Laptops in Class

Malcolm Gladwell offers in the Tipping Point concepts to consider in a laptop environment. Gladwell contends, among other things, that small changes in environment can cause large changes in behavior. I would like to explore using his ideas in our laptop environment. One of his examples is the clean-up of the New York subway system. As he recounts it the system in the 80s was essentially a ‘rat hole.’ Its cars were filled with trash, the trains were slow, the level of petty crime and annoyance high. To paraphrase him, many people acted like rats because they were in a rathole. The fix occurred when authorities went after petty crime, notably turn stile jumping and graffiti painting. Using different techniques the authorities effectively ended both activities and, so the account goes, other crime decreased. In Gladwell’s terms, changing the environment changed the behavior and that change because authorities found a way to ‘tip’ the actions and eventually the attitudes.

As I read the book I kept wondering whether the tipping point concept could be applied to the laptop issues that are apparent at Stout. Depending on whom you talk to, on the negative side, the essential issue is that students display an insulting lack of respect by using laptops to distract themselves from the content being covered in the class, or they put themselves in the inattentive position of not learning what they should learn. Still, before I go on, I need to point out that the DLE surveys conducted by BPA indicate a high degree of satisfaction with laptop involvement in learning. Students point to areas such as posting course content, organizing course content, providing feedback, and extending the classroom outside of class time. Interestingly that list of responses essentially contains items that function outside of class not inside class, which is where the usage issue I am focusing on occurs.

Anecdotal and some empirical evidence indicates a wide range of attitudes and actions. Instructors have told me that they have no policy and let students use laptops however they wish, that they have the class make the rules about laptop usage, that they force students who intend to distract themselves to sit in the last two rows, that they have converted to finding ways to focus class activities on laptops’ capabilities, that they refuse to allow any laptops in class, that they have covers up and covers down periods in a class, that they police usage and deny continued usage to individuals who get caught often enough. I have heard much less from students. In at least two places they reveal some of their attitudes. In the Digital Learning Environment Survey Spring 2009 report (BPA, http://www.uwstout.edu/bpa/ir/surveyresults/laptopfin09.pdf p. 31)some students indicate that they are annoyed and distracted by other students surfing. In the Speech Academic Transformation Project report (http://www3.uwstout.edu/ntlc/OnCampusOpportunities/upload/ATP-Final-Report_Fundamentals-of-Speech.pdf) a majority of students reported at least some use. The most frequent responses were occasionally or seldom, roughly 65%. Never received about 20% and frequently received about 15%. Also in the Speech ATP report students indicate that they do not feel that they miss any of the content of the class, essentially maintaining that they can pay attention to two things at once. Overall, the majority of students [roughly 70%] … reported disagreeing or strongly disagreeing that they missed important class information while on non-related websites during class. But that means 30% either agreed or strongly agreed that they missed course content. At least one group has complained to the chancellor about other students’ usage for non-class related sites.

At one point Gladwell discusses children’s attention to television. He is interested in the topic because he is explaining ‘stickiness,’ the quality of any message that makes it memorable. He indicates that in the early years of the Sesame Street program researchers tested how distraction affected comprehension. The researchers discovered that children derived the same level of comprehension of content as they watched the show regardless of whether they were in a room full of toys as they watched (and played with the toys) or in a room that had only the tv to watch.

The study he references was conducted by Lorch, Anderson and Levin. As the authors speculate on the meaning of their findings, they contemplate one possibility that that could explain the children’s retention of information about the show: “we suggest that children monitor the sound track primarily at a superficial level of detecting the presence of auditory attributes which indicate informative content or which indicate changes in content (726).” In other words the children had learned to listen for certain cues, somewhat like the situation of being drawn out of one conversation when you hear your name mentioned in another conversation. Lorch suggests that children learn to listen for signal words or cues “for informative and comprehensible program content” which thus “elicit[s] their full attention (726)”

They further speculate that children pay attention to the visual imagery (the tv show on screen) “until the content becomes either incomprehensible, redundant, or not otherwise visually and auditorily attractive…at which time the children return to their alternative activity (726).” And lastly, for this piece, they indicate that “those portions of the program which were most poorly understood received relatively low attention whereas those which were better comprehended received relatively high attention (725)”.

As I read the previous sentence, I wondered if we could substitute for ‘comprehension’ the terms ‘cared about’ and ‘related to’ and find that the same phenomenon exists in our courses. On the other hand, does this study indicate something about the relationship of comprehensibility and attention? Do we give incomprehensible class times? Granted the students in this study were pre-schoolers, still, is there a chance that considering this work would help us find ways to view the laptop learning issues other than many of the ways now in the culture?

Is it possible to tip the situation so that the emotion goes away? Instructor attitudes seem to revolve around How dare you and student attitudes seem to resolve around Whatever. Can we affect the situation in any way? First, I suppose we could find out how many of each group have that attitude. Second we could propose or activate a strategy to tip the situation so that it feels and acts like an effective learning situation for both instructors and students.

Could we just ask a large number of students ‘Why do you surf while you are in class?’ And could we probe to find out if they are bored, disengaged, listening for cue words, not comprehending the material, actually feeling disrespectful, simply following their instincts? Could we ask instructors about their emotions and policies in laptop classrooms? What complexities both personal and professional would we find in those results?

Lorch et al suggest, not very specifically, that “At least for preschool children, the most effective production strategies appear to be those which enhance comprehension and thus, also, visual attention.” (726) Well, sure, but what would those ‘enhance comprehension’ strategies be? Clarity? Organization? Examples? Narratives? Sesame street approaches?

Academic Transformation Pilot Project for Fundamentals of Speech. [UW-Stout]. June 2009. Prepared by Wendy Marston and Amanda Brown. Available at http://www3.uwstout.edu/ntlc/OnCampusOpportunities/upload/ATP-Final-Report_Fundamentals-of-Speech.pdf
Digital Learning Environment Survey Spring 2009. UW-Stout BPA, July 2009, Available at http://www.uwstout.edu/bpa/ir/surveyresults/laptopfin09.pdf)
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. New York: Little, Brown, 2002.
Lorch, Elizabeth Pugzles, Daniel R. Anderson and Stephen Levin. The Relationship of visual Attention to Children’s comprehension of Television. Child Development, 1979, 50, 722-727.