Last week on Start the Week with Virtual World Watch, we introduced Kathryn Trinder and Ferdinand Francino from Glasgow Caledonian University.
In the second half of the two-part telephone interview, Kathryn and Ferdinand continue to discuss the issues that surround their Second Life, and virtual worlds, work.
Further background information on the CU There initiative at Glasgow Caledonian is online.
Virtual World Watch is speaking at a trio of JISC RSc events in March and April:
March 17th: Wolverhampton. Virtual Worlds in Education Forum. Organised by JISC RSc West Midlands.
March 31st: Cambridge. The Reality of Virtual Worlds. Organised by JISC RSc Eastern.
April 21st: Sunderland. Virtual Worlds Conference 2009. Organised by JISC RSc Northern.
If you are interested in VWW speaking at your event, about some aspect of the use of virtual worlds in UK teaching and learning, then please get in touch.
The Spring 2009 snapshot report is available online for viewing and download.
Summary
This report is the fifth in a series of snapshots of virtual world activity in UK higher and further education. It is the first to be conducted under the umbrella of Virtual World Watch (VWW). VWW and the previous snapshots are funded by Eduserv and supported by the Eduserv Foundation.
Questionnaire data for this snapshot began to be collected at the end of December 2008. Several staff within the JISC Regional Support Centres provided additional information; together with monitoring mailing lists, ‘soft’ information from contacts and searches of the web and Second Life, this contributed to a more rounded picture of virtual world activity in UK academia than was achieved in earlier snapshots. However, this report focuses on the 54 valid responses to the survey questionnaire.
Four main geographical clusters of academic Second Life activity have emerged in the UK:
• Edinburgh: the University of Edinburgh and nearby Heriot-Watt University.
• Milton Keynes: the Open University.
• The West Midlands: Coventry and the nearby universities of Birmingham City and Warwick.
• Leeds: the universities of Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan, and Leeds Art and Design College.
A number of universities, such as Lancaster, Southampton, Teesside and the West of England, have seen Second Life developments and teaching across several departments, and there is evidence that nearly every UK university is using Second Life to some extent for development or teaching work. However, in further education colleges the picture is more sparse, with evidence of development and student activity in a minority and little or no evidence of activity in the rest.
Eighteen uses of virtual worlds in UK higher and further education were identified, each described in several survey responses. Learning and teaching activities predominated, with these supporting many subject areas; however, the medical sciences, mathematics and art and design were mentioned more often than others. Simulations, the visualisation of complex structures and safety role-play were also described by several academic respondents.
Many universities are studying the use of virtual worlds – mainly Second Life – in education. There does appear to be a large amount of duplicated research in this activity. Some are using virtual worlds in courses about e-learning, while others are teaching staff how to use these environments to best effect.
Second Life remains the virtual world of choice for learning, teaching and research in UK academia. However, a cluster of universities, groups and lone academics are starting to experiment with OpenSim as an alternative.
Respondents to the survey reported mixed attitudes to the use of virtual worlds from both students and peers; however the large majority of respondents said they planned to do further virtual world learning and teaching in the next year.
The practice of solely creating an exact reproduction of the university campus in Second Life is now somewhat rare. Most institution-wide, in-world campuses make fuller use of available virtual world resources, for example providing teaching facilities for departments and courses, and exhibition spaces for student work.
Thank you
Thank you to the many people who responded to the survey, or passed on the details.
Kathryn and Ferdinand are active in the virtual world teaching, learning and development scene at Glasgow Caledonian University.
In the first half of a two-part telephone interview, they describe some of their work and the surrounding issues.
Further background information on the CU There initiative at Glasgow Caledonian is online. Kathryn can be found on Twitter, as can Ferdinand.
Virtual World Watch produces a ‘Start the Week’ podcast, made live every monday morning; look out for tomorrows episode.
Do you fancy being interviewed for this?
Eligibility
About the interviews
Interested? Then contact Virtual World Watch.
Virtual World Watch will be speaking at the Virtual Worlds in Education Forum on 17th March in Wolverhampton.
This is an all-day event, organised by the JISC Regional Support Centre for the West Midlands. There is no charge to attend the event.
The schedule is a downloadable PDF. Contact Jane Edwards – @lady_jane on Twitter – for further information.
In the first of a regular series, here’s a monday morning podcast from Virtual World Watch.
In this week’s episode, Virtual World Watch summarises the fifth snapshot survey report, due for release later this week. We hope this gets your week off to a relaxing start.
The Spring 2009 snapshot is complete and is undergoing some final checking before going live.
Several responses to the questionnaire call for this snapshot came from the University of Southampton. They have some interesting developments in their university (especially in the Chemistry department). Most of the responses came through Fiona Grindley, who describes herself as the:
Education Developer Adviser within the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit, and coordinator for Educational Activity in Second Life at the University of Southampton. I link people together. Since the CETIS/Eduserv workshop in mid January, I have been asked to be a guest lecture at Schools that I didn’t even know were doing anything in SL. Last year I organised a Second Life seminar for anyone doing an activity within the University – this was very useful. There will be another one in September this year.
This particular role/job title is interesting; VWW will return to this issue in a later blog posting.
The main University of Southampton island is open for visits in Second Life; it formally opens on Monday. I’ve just visited and spoken to Ian Pahute from Daden, who are developing the island. He chatted:
We have designed the island to promote activity. And there is lots here to support that – subtle stuff! Oh – huge feature – you can feed the ducks! The ducks are a real RL focus on the main campus.
Fiona outlined some more activities at Southampton:
Students on the MSc Teaching and Learning Innovation have now got a Second Life module included. Many more schools and professional services should be active in-world as we are in the process of allocating funds to mini-projects through internal funding.
Steve Wilson in the School of Chemistry introduced a few of their activities:
Still in early stages of development but we are working on a molecule render and a poster presentation.
Through Fiona, Dr. Simon Coles added some more flesh to this:
We are just embarking on the Virtual Chemistry Experience (ViCE) project which is using SL as medium for public engagement and enhancing teaching/learning in the domain of Chemistry. This work will range from galleries of ‘common molecules’, through observation of real laboratory practice to visualisation and interaction with molecules. The University of Southampton island will host this material when developed. As a research project we are also developing aspects of remote laboratory monitoring and large/multi-dimensional dataset visualisation.
Part of the ViCE project is concerned with ‘virtual poster sessions’, which 1st year UG and MChem students will partake in as part of their course. This is intended to add to their training in communication & presentation skills. We are also developing the ‘window on a lab’ concept where activity in a teaching / research lab can be streamed into SL – this will allow school children and undergraduates alike to get a feel for what happens in these environments.
We will be taking part in National Science and Engineering Week (7th March) with an exhibit which allows the ‘peptide fruit machine’ to randomly construct a tri-peptide, which is then submitted to a drug docking process, a result returned and the docked molecule rendered in front of the avatar. The docked molecule will get an ‘energy score’ which will enable a league table to be constructed during the event.
Again through Fiona, Julie Watson, Senior Teaching Fellow in eLearning in Modern Languages and School of Humanities introduced the JISC-funded M3 project:
The M3 (MUVE, Moodle and Microblogging-Twitter) project was used in teaching and learning. We have now transferred M3 project outputs (interactive learning resources for international students) to the University of Southampton Second Life island.
The project is an interesting one for how it integrated Twitter into the virtual environment; as the project description says:
A key aim was to investigate effective ways of embedding synchronous online tools, which are already establishing themselves as effective for social networking, and exploring the use of others that offer a 3-dimensional opportunity for learning. A Twitter plug-in for Moodle was to be one key deliverable of the project.
Julie finished with some past and future activities:
We also ran another project in Second Life called Cardenio. The final report is available online.
In the next academic year we will develop a language café in Second Life for the Modern Languages of the University island. We will adapt more language learning resources (‘learning objects’ and vidcasts) for use in Second Life, and will carry out further exploration of its potential for language learning.
