Screenshots of a room I created in around an hour in Just Leap In – visit it at http://www.justleapin.com/shares/9299:7CWxWoP4

It’s as close as I’ve been able to get to a hospital ward with the available furniture and objects. The ability to import your own models is on the list of features to come.

The boxes in the top image appear as the room is loading – rather cute really.

It’s in Beta at the moment and I haven’t taken a huge look around but it is incredibly easy to use and the list of features to come is really impressive. I’ve been in touch with the developers and they seem very switched on and friendly.

I’ll post more about it when I’ve had a chance to play more.

I’ve also been able to embed the world in my other blog (edublogs is a little paranoid about embeddable content) – check it out at http://couchmedia.blogspot.com/2008/12/just-leap-in-diy-virtual-space.html

I came across some additional information written by Mathias Fuchs about this project that raised a few more ideas worth quickly sharing.

Fuchs discusses the power and nature of games and how they approached the purpose of the project.

“Umberto Eco proposed to investigate certain works of literature as ludic machines. These texts would work as structural units, whose purpose is, to get the reader involved in a game of words. The activity of reading would therefore resemble the process of playing a game – as opposed to the more teleological task of understanding a story. It seems that computer games, too, can be understood either as narrative devices or as ludic machines”

“Ludites state that the act of playing the game is an activity which is often driven by joyful improvisation. Especially when the elements of chance and vertigo… are predominant in a game, there is no need for a narration. Throwing the dices or going on a roundabout are such games. New media in general and computer games in particular inherited the twofold nature of games. They contain narrative aspects and ludic aspects at the same time.”

“When we started working on a computer game about Viennese museums we visited many museums and tried to find out what a museum-goer is actually doing. Does he learn about a scientific field? Is he led by a narration? Does he randomly drift through halls and have his eyes wonder around amongst miraculous objects? Does the visitor always want to keep a sense of orientation? What is the potential use of loosing  orientation? Is predictability the death of the marvel?”

A few quick responses – I’d say that narration and play aren’t mutually exclusive and narration offers motivation to progress through the game by bringing greater emotional connection. (Not always of course)
I like the term “joyful improvisation” – it seems to embody the concept of “play”

“Even though the virtual museum “Expositur” tells about objects and processes, even though there is a semantic framework and an underlying logic structure our knowledge space leaves ample room for alternative readings, it encourages the user to define their private paths away from the main roads. It requires the visitor to set up his personal speed, pace and rhythm for the access to information, for contemplation and for sheer surprise”

Contemplation/reflection is also something I haven’t thought much about yet – this I guess slots well into constructivist approaches (as do large chunks of this project even though I choose to associate it more with cognitivist theory given the deliberate designing of information to be more processable. )

On the homepage of this section of this website is a nice summation of the intent of this project:

fuchs-eckermann: ‘We are looking for something which Friedrich Nietzsche labelled “Gay Science”, ["Fröhliche Wissenschaft"] a mode of experiencing knowledge in a joyful as well as thoughtful manner. Nietzsche thought that you can only come across important insights if you discover them when “dancing”. And that’s precisely what the users of our computer game have to do. They have to move in order to find out facts, they have to dive and swim to get deep into certain areas of knowledge and they have to dance around to discover unexpected aspects of a topic.’

Following this methodology, the user of the virtual museum has to jump into a water zone in order to hear about the extinction of an ancient fish once populating the Danube River. The user has to operate triggers and barriers to learn about the dangers of machinery provided by the Technical Museum. Or he/she has to walk to down a spiral staircase to reach the hall of Sigmund Freud’s subconsciousness ["Die Traumdeutung"]

Stephen Downes links to a nifty blog on his site today – it’s called Second Life and Education. (Pretty straightforward title, I like that)

It seems to focus pretty well exclusively on Second Life (well duh) while our team is moving more towards a Croquet platform (meanwhile I’m still determined to see what can be done with learning in the FPS realm) but given the amount of interesting things that are going on out there in SL, it’s still a great resource.

While we’re looking at Croquet here for our work in virtual worlds in learning, there is a lot happening in education in Second Life that is worth investigating. Earlier this year an extensive conference was held there called Best Practices in Education and thanks to the kind folk at the Second Life Cable Network, you can see the better part of 12 hours worth of conference talks given by educators on the virtual world education cutting edge.

Some of the topics covered include:

• An observational survey of educational institutions in the virtual world of Second Life
• Student engagement in  Second Life
• Two Years of Introducing Educators to Second Life in 60 Minutes, or: Tips for Dinosaur Wrangling
• Fostering meaningful and productive relationships in a virtual reality environment
• Creating a community of practice and searchable database of learning objects in Second Life – The SaLamander Project
• Drawing on Second Life Experiences to Enrich the First Life

The Tips for Dinosaur Wrangling talk looks particularly interesting here as a starting point as getting institutional support to get these things set up (and past the firewall/security issues) is currently our first and biggest hurdle.

It also reminds me a little of this movie, though doesn’t get quite so detailed in it’s examination of the possible evolution of the media in general and how information and knowledge might be managed. (Click on image to view video)

Croquet is an open source virtual world system (like Second Life) that is rapidly growing in popularity among educators for its extra functionality and ease of use.

The Croquet team at the University of Minnesota are currently putting together a very interesting project as a teaching tool for Spanish Language Pragmatics, which they have called Croquelandia. As you can see, it allows learners to explore a space and interact with other students (and native Spanish speakers) in Spanish. The conversational options that are selected (in this case with a non-player character) determine how the conversation proceeds.

(Click image to watch YouTube video.)

Very nifty.

These are games (or virtual worlds if you prefer) where any number of people can explore and interact in (and with) a virtual environment online, breaking down previous barriers of time and space as well as what is possible in the real world. The possibilities for teaching and learning are still being explored but appear to be constrained only by the imagination of the teacher.

Constance Steinkuehler spent nearly two years undertaking what might be considered an ethnographic study of the people who play these MMOGs – in this case one called Lineage. (Interestingly, Lineage 2 is currently the most populated MMOG in the world with over 14 million subscribers).

Her research into how players of these games learn and share their knowledge is a fascinating overview and offers a number of useful tips to educators thinking about making use of these spaces. Her observations (featuring many transcripts of in-game chat sessions) about the way experienced players mentor newbys are particular interesting.

This is my potted take on her report, which you can read in full here.

Steinkuehler, Constance A. (2004) “Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games” In Y. B. Kafai, W. A. Sandoval, N. Enyedy, A. S. Nixon, & F. Herrera (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp.521-528). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Central theme and scope:

This study investigates the nature of learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), networked 3D gaming environments that allow players to interact with objects and characters in the game as well as other (real) players.

Steinkuehler posits that players of MMOGs have rich learning experiences as a result of the “situated meanings people construct and the definitive role of communities in that meaning making process”.(p.4) She notes that it is the interactions of the members of the community in these types of games that promote learning far more than any embedded content might and that designers developing educational MMOGs need to give in-game social practice as much (if not more) attention as instructional content.

Intended audience:

This paper, which presents the preliminary findings of nearly two years research is targetted at educators interested in using games as well as developers of games for education.

Description:

Steinkuehler has taken an ethnographic approach to this research, immersing herself in an MMOG called Lineage for 19 months. Lineage is a game set during medieval times and is centred around guilds (a.k.a blood pledges) which vie for control of castles in a virtual kingdom.

She devised four key questions to structure her research, these being:

• What are the social and material practices of MMOGaming?
• What forms of participation mark community membership in such settings?
• What means for learning are embedded not in the game as designed but rather in the community practice of those who inhabit it?
• What import does participation in this community have for the situated (on and off screen) identities of its members? (p.2)

Her investigations involved participating overtly in the daily life of the game while taking “field” notes and screen capture video, noting conversations and asking questions. She interviewed other players informally in-game, through semi-structured topic specific phone interviews as well as in structured formats.

In addition to these primary resources, she also gathered data from community sources including player-authored user manuals, fan discussion boards, chatrooms and fan generated fiction.

Steinkuehler found that players learn primarily in collaboration with other, more experienced players. “During collaboration, the focus is on the activity, with information (e.g., manuals, guidebooks, websites) playing only a secondary and supporting role.”(p.7) Feedback comes from the game system (e.g., error-produced death) as well as other players and pushing yourself beyond the edge of your current competency is highly valued by the community.