It's Second Life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Renya from Second Life arriving in the transporter room

For Assignment 3, thought I’d investigate Second Life.

It’s definitely life, Jim, but not quite as one knows it.  Thought I’d keep a log of some of my experiences and see how they stack up with literature and other people's blogs.

Day one, 29  September… just doing the intro to SL and already I can see that distraction is going to be an issue!

Choosing a name… googled second life names.  Learn not to choose anything too basic.  Also apparently using numbers in names isn’t Quaite the Thing, dearies! (Although once on SL saw plenty of people using numbers.)  Settle on JuliaMt, as Julia was taken and I'm not feeling fancy.

Now - downloading, installing, and getting into the program.  Great excitement!  Some excitement.  Go on to YouTube while waiting, when I get bored and watch Lego version of "Cake or Death?" sketch in meantime.  Wow, Second Life took a long time just to get going!  Apparently my computer isn’t up to snuff either, as the friendly pop-up box lets me know. 

Never mind.  On I go, into the initial room that shows me how to use basic functions such as walking, chatting and some of the features I might meet in SL.  I also meet someone, and discover that the chat function works OK, but I watch this person leave for fresh pastures as my destination tab doesn’t give me any options.  Oh well…

Reload.

Destination tab works now.  Go for a walkaround in a different location, run across a few people, some who don't speak English, some who can only speak in Tourette's.  So far, so unimpressed.  More importantly, I check my data allowance with Slingshot.  Yikes!  It’s already ratchetting up there!  Second Life appears to be a bit of a data hog, but this could be due to downloading a few large programs lately.  I’ll check again tomorrow.

3 hours after getting into Second Life, I’m logging off.  And what did I achieve?  A couple of hellos, some confusion, got told off for going into one area where I should have been 10 days old before entering (new form of netiquette to master), and (ironically) the dispiriting reminder that my faithful Ye Olde Acer is at the venerable age of 5 or 6 getting a bit long in the tooth for this newfangled digital world, and I managed to walk around as a fox.  No – the animal kind, not the sex kitten sexy mamma variety.

On the plus side, I did manage to fly and get down again safely.  There was a slight problem with bumping the fox’s head on the ceiling, but avatars are resilient beasties.  On a more sinister note, I'm keen on getting back into it tomorrow to see if I can find myself some clothes.  The rot of SL addiction may already be setting in! 
  

So much for Day One.  What did I learn for potential use in education?  Primarily that unless the learner is a digital native or particularly exploratory in the internet, the tutor is going to have to take great care in setting up the exercise by orienting students into the particular area of Second Life the lessons are scheduled to take part.  A set of exercises to help a learner get past some of the initial frustrations and find specified goals would help. 

In the meantime, check out the flying fox!

Saras's question - part 2 "Keepin' it Real"

When creating websites for learning LLN embedded within a specific subject, this gives exceptional opportunities to develop particular skills within a situation the student finds relevant to their personal environment, goals and literacy practices.

“A social perspective on LLN recognises that these practices are always embedded in social contexts and purposes. This applies to LLN in everyday contexts of home, work, community, and also to LLN in educational contexts, although some practices more obviously have a purpose than others.”
Ivanic, Appleby, Hodge, Tusting and Barton (2006, p. 7)

When the “school” is not a classroom but a laptop in a kitchen or on a desk at work, creating authentic materials with an obvious purpose becomes even more important. Adult learners, being autonomous and goal-oriented, need a clear purpose for assigned tasks, or they can lose motivation (Beder, Tomkins, Medina, Riccioni, & Deng, 2006; Garrison, 1997), a major problem for distance learning.  If, for example, they are learning numeracy through horticulture, a website that allows them to learn how to calculate volumes of potting mix for their home garden or work site can give immediate, personal and practical application of the learning, and demonstrates the authenticity of the material.  For me, the Home and Learn website was a welcome quick-fix for my computer woes.

In a 2003 literature review by Herrington, Oliver and Reeves, the authors defined ten characteristics of authentic activities. Authentic activities:
1. Have real-world relevance
2. Require the student to define the tasks required for the activity
3. Involve complex activities the learner may work on over days, weeks or even months, implying a need for constant goal-checking and reassessment
4. Allow the learner access to various resources in order to investigate from multiple perspectives
5. Promote collaboration
6. Provide metacognitive development through reflection
7. Are applicable across multiple domains of life
8. Provide assessment representative of real world evaluation
9. Create end-products relevant to the learner’s goals
10. Promote diversity of outcome from multiple, original solutions (Herrington, Oliver and Reeves, 2003)

As we can see here, the need to have learning activities contextually embedded in realistic scenarios sits at the top of the list, and although the need for activities to directly reflect the learner’s goals is at number eight, as adult learners, those goals are crucial for engagement.  A website for LLN based around informal learning of a particular interest provides the learner to choose whether or not to engage with the material.  After the learner has decided that yes, this website is interesting enough to warrant further investigation, the other principles come into play. 

The importance of each successive criterion may differ according to personal ability of the learner, for instance criterion 10, where a Foundation learner may find it easier to focus on one solution rather than be presented with an array of options.  At higher levels, however, and as confidence increases, a learner might feel stifled by a single “correct” answer, and a tutor would promote critical strategies for the learner to aid selection of a particular solution – and perhaps point out that in some cases there is no one “best fit”. 

Time constraints for informal learning can differ wildly.  One learner might be studying up on numeracy skills to allow him to wow an interviewer and land him the desired job, while another learner might want to work out how to calculate dilution factors for liquid fertilisers and pesticides, with different applications needed at various times of the year.  A website with a clear progression and automated assessment might be better suited for the first learner, who wants more intense learning, while the second learner might prefer a site with basic principles that she can dip into at periodic intervals to refresh her memory, and may or may not need to learn another numeracy skill.

On a personal level, I have witnessed a learner with low self-confidence cheer up immensely after she created and printed a “simple” one page Word document of a poem she had written and – by learning a new set of skills – illustrated with a picture from the internet.  This dramatically illustrated the importance of an authentic exercise with a concrete end-product a learner could take away from the lesson.

Informal learning online pt 1

Saras's question 2. How would I create a website for the informal learning of say art or music or construction in which the content and instruction are embedded with LLN and online learning principles?

With the promotion of ongoing learning in modern society and increasing use of online media, websites for informal learning offer a new dimension for learners who might otherwise have relied on books or advice from family.  Wikipedia provides one example, with information regularly updated by a wide online community, and learners can access magazines, participate in online discussions or join classes.  For those learning computing, however, Wikipedia can get a little jargon-heavy and is better used for supplementary research rather than lessons.  One UK website I’ve recently discovered, Home and Learn, has helped me come to grips with Microsoft Excel, Publisher and PowerPoint.  I’ve found Home and Learn extremely useful to introduce a novice (me) to these programs.  Home and Learn is also easy to navigate around, and doesn’t require the user to be particularly net-savvy.  As a tutor, it’s made me more aware of how necessary it is to promote learner exploration of web-based resources, and to keep an inventory of sites that might be appropriate for the various learner abilities and interests I work with.

For someone engaged in informal learning – certain computer programs in my case – Home and Learn gives online lessons a learner can dip into at random according to need, although the teaching style is more akin to a work book than a tutorial.  Very “top down” in this respect, although as a beginner user of PowerPoint and Publisher, I appreciated Home and Learn’s methodical approach.  More advanced users might prefer more complicated, interactive resources, but as most of the LLN learners I work with have low or minimal digital literacy, a website set out in distinct steps with clear goals is one I would suggest my learners try.  Ideally, I would introduce the website in class to check for initial issues with the technology, but then expect the learners to tackle the website’s lessons with minimal tutor input.

Using a social practices lens to examine a website for potential use in a learning situation allows a tutor to reframe the question from “Is the student ready to use this website?” to “Is the website suitable for the learner?”  To expand on a learner-centred approach, identifying the particular use, meaning and approach a learner has for the digital medium in a given set of circumstances allows for a more tailored approach to education delivery (Gillen & Barton, 2009).  One-to-one digital literacy classes certainly make it easier for me to implement this philosophy, and luckily many of my classes are one-to-one.  Quite often the initial lesson plan goes out the window when, for example, the student shows up with a computer and wants to learn how to surf the net rather than conjugate verbs – which is fair enough.  From working with students who had clear digital literacy goals in mind and only wanted someone to help them get started, I’ve seen how easily navigated websites like Yahoo! email with clear, attainable goals can give a learner enough confidence to move onto other, more complicated sites, such as creating a Facebook  page and ordering books from the library. 

As a learner moves further into the digital realm, more possibilities for ongoing education become available.  Areas where they have not yet been developed suggests gaps an online tutor could address.  Given the variety of learner backgrounds, a narrow or broad range of websites may be developed to take advantage of interests and ability as well as just how deeply the learner wishes to delve into the topic.  A tutor developing a website might provide anything from an online textbook to a basic homepage with links to other materials and websites, or a self-contained website replete with highly interactive virtual environment, discussion board, multimedia texts, references, activities and assignments, and feedback via quizzes or exams.  Obviously, the breadth of the website depends not just on the learner background and needs, but also on the tutor’s resources (time, money) and personal digital literacy. (Aldrich, 2009)