Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: ide virtual worlds and radical pedagogy: exploring educational possibilities ESRC seminar: social learning in virtual worlds City University, London 14th March 2008 Dr Steven Warburton, King’s College London and Prism(lab) http://www.prism-lab.org
2. Slide 2: project areas • MUVEnation (www.muvenation.org) - EU funded, 2 years • LLL3D (www.lll3d.org) - EU funded, 2 years • (Open)Habitat (www.openhabitat.org) – JISC funded, 15 months • these projects aim to: – examine: good practices; what works and what does not; contexts; development and testing of specific learning scenarios – target: different educational sectors; disciplines; specific educational issues e.g. motivation; specific target groups e.g. socially disadvantaged learners
3. Slide 3: MUVE affordances • Facilitating social interaction (death of distance), social presence and cooperation • Visualisation • Contextualisation • Relation to doing in the physical world (e.g. designing, building and scripting) • Informal learning opportunities e.g. language based communities • Affective nature of immersion, empathy and related motivational aspects • Simulation and experiential learning • Roleplay or taking on ‘new’ roles • Strong virtual communities and identity formation (coherence around groups, sub-cultures and geography) • Identity play • Ownership of learning - opportunities for content production that are both individual and owned
4. Slide 5: analysing in-world hands on workshops • workshop aims: development of specific competencies in building and/or scripting in- world objects • average length: one hour • organised by non-formal learning providers and offered to the Second Life ‘public’ • methodology: participatory observation (n=20) • followed by: tutor and instructor semi-structured interviews (n=10) • assessment: of quality of student learning experience • towards: developing a taxonomy of good practices • validation: by deploying the taxonomy against a new panel of teachers
5. Slide 6: taxonomy of Second Life practices
6. Slide 7: disorientating area of good practice Mapping control of the environment against pedagogy cognitive overload stressful, mechanical
7. Slide 8: is this the vision we have for education in virtual worlds? why do we strive for poor replications of RL/RW teaching settings?
8. Slide 9: forces us to question new digital literacies ethics identity context decentreing social capital dialogue assessment Informal learning collaboration creativity
9. Slide 10: rethinking teaching approaches for virtual worlds
10. Slide 11: augmentation (life 2.0) or immersion (alternative worlds)
11. Slide 12: the disappearing computer where do our bodies go when we are immersed?
12. Slide 13: teaching approach Teaching approaches immersion augmentation tactical, narrative, extension, flow*, strategic bridges culture, context, constraint, control, anonymity, play authenticity platform - culture? platform - tools? *Csíkszentmihályi (1990)
13. Slide 14: how do we break the monotony of augmentationlist approaches?
14. Slide 15: radical pedagogy as a critical pedagogy for socio-political action, critical consciousness (Freire, Giroux) radical pedagogy as a transformative process, participation in practice (Ascott) radical pedagogy as a discursive space for addressing education and change
15. Slide 17: Open architecture project http://www.flickr.com/photos/studiowikitecture/sets/72157604038184909/
16. Slide 18: art and design approaches dialogical transformative participation in practice perspectivalism revisability intuition creativity, inventiveness and innovation indeterminacy and improvisation instability and uncertainty interrogative disposition self-construction, self-realisation (Danvers, 2003)
17. Slide 19: towards a radical pedagogy • when designing our teaching approaches addressing the dichotomy of augmentation versus immersion provides a valuable filter for reappraising understandings of the possible • augmentation approaches question different issues such as platform choice and the affordance of in-world tool sets • immersionsist approaches question the richness of the culture and the seamlessness of activity, be it movement or narrative based discursive acts • virtual worlds challenge traditional notions of pedagogy and offer new challenges and opportunities and that might be addressed by appropriating the notions of radical pedagogy to provide a discursive space for tackling education and change
18. Slide 20: Dr Steven Warburton School of Law King's College London Email: steven.warburton@kcl.ac.uk Prism(lab) at http://www.prismlab.org Liquid Learning at http://www.liquidlearning.org Second Life: StevenW Bohm Final slide