Delivering training in Second Life using audio and voice

In my recent blog, I talked about a training session to our DUCKLING TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) students in Second Life (SL). We provided another SL training session to TESOL students on Monday 09 November 2009. The trainer leading this session was my colleague Terese Bird (SL username: Aallyah Kruyschek).  Two distance students from Canada and Japan joined the training in-world.

This time, Aallyah decided to use audio and voice to deliver the training, whereas in the first session, we had mainly used text. We had guided students to set up the audio and voice preferences on their computers, but we hadn’t had the chance to communicate with them through audio and voice in that session.

One of the students, Bracken, had already got the audio and voice system set up properly on his computer, so he didn’t have any problems to hear us and speak to us at all. Another student Sayuri could hear us but could not talk back on audio, so she typed to interact with Aallyah at the beginning.  Aallyah gave her some tips on how to set up audio and voice preference on her computer, and a few minutes later, Sayuri managed to get it to work!

When compared with text-based communication, I think voice worked really well for this session because:

• Participants could exchange information faster and more easily
• Participants  could make  timely and seamless conversations
•  The trainer could obtain immediate responses or feedback from students, and be assured that they were on track. For example, I could hear students constantly saying, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting’ or  ‘Ok’ and  ‘Yeah, I found it’

There are challenges or restrictions of using voice in SL and some of these are:

• The audio settings are calibrated differently from one participant’s computer to another, so some may communicate loud and clear, while others would appear really quiet or muted.
• In SL, the voice can get across within a certain distance between avatars , so when avatars are at a distance from each other, you might not hear him or her clearly
• Trying to have a conversation while flying is difficult unless you can keep close together , or hover more or less at the same height
• Voice worked out really well for small groups of participants, but with a larger group (say 5-6 upwards) , you might easily lose control when all the avatars try and speak at the same time.

Our training of TESOL students is now complete. A total of 6 students participated in our in-world training sessions. Our next step is for these students to visit languagelab.com and observe language teaching classes there. When they have completed their observations, they will tell us about what they have observed and learnt.

Ming Nie              11 November 2009

Finnish academics visiting Beyond Distance

Ten Finnish academics from Laurea University of Applied Sciences are visiting Beyond Distance this week. Their overall purpose is to learn about our research in e-learning and learning technologies, our projects and our approaches to learning design. A two-day Carpe Diem workshop has been organised as part of their visit.

Our visitors come from a range of disciplines including health care, business and management, tourism, safety and security management, languages and of course, learning technology. They have engaged with our work very enthusiastically, and they have gelled very well as a group – most of them didn’t know each other prior to their trip to Leicester.

Although I was expecting this, I am still surprised by how competent and knowledgeable our Finnish colleagues are in the field of learning technology. For example, all of them were familiar with Second Life, knew what wikis were and how they can be used (in fact, many of them have been using wikis with their learners for some time), and none of them was put off by the ‘complexities’ associated with using learning technology. All fluent users of their VLE (Optima) and very relaxed about Web 2.0… this compares very favourably to my experiences with academics elsewhere, including my colleagues at Leicester.

We’re half-way through the week and we’ve all learned a lot from each other. A fantastic opportunity for mutual development and future collaborative work.

Dr A Armellini
11 November 2009

Edutainment – making it work

The idea of educating through entertainment is appealing, but it’s tricky to get the balance just right. As Terese has noted, Sesame Street got it right in the USA. The BBC got it right with The Archers in the UK. And it has worked in South Africa for Soul City – a multimedia health programme that I was privileged to work on in the nineties.

Soul City was the brainchild of a young doctor, Garth Japhet, who  had seen babies dying unnecessarily of dehydration, abused women who were too ashamed to tell the doctor the real reasons for their injuries, and patients who had contracted HIV through ignorance. Believing that if information could be put across in an emotionally engaging way, people would be moved to change their behaviour, Japhet and his colleagues set up Soul City as a non-governmental organisation. At the heart of their programme was a television soap opera, with each episode containing a well-crafted health message skillfully embedded within a highly dramatic script. The TV show is backed up by newspaper inserts in national newspapers as well as radio shows in nine languages, and pamphlets and posters distributed via clinics around the country.

Today Soul City has over 35 million viewers in eight countries, and the organisation has gathered an impressive body of evidence through ongoing evaluations to show that the programme has caused behaviour change on a significant scale. Its founder, Japhet, recently won the USA-based Everett M. Rogers Award for Achievement in Entertainment Education.

What is it that has made Soul City such a successful example of the edutainment genre? There are at least four factors, I think.

Firstly, the Soul City developers go to great lengths to understand honestly the needs and views of the audience – many of whom will recognise their own stories in the serial. So for example,  they dealt with the domestic violence story in a highly nuanced and sensitive way, showing Matlakala as a sophisticated professional woman (not the stereotype abused working-class woman), and showing how the drama is played out between both families, and not just the couple.

Secondly, Soul City uses a cross-disciplinary team to develop the content. I participated in workshops with social workers, medical doctors, police officers, counsellors and religious leaders, to develop the primary health messages. Educational people were in the minority at these workshops.

Thirdly, the Soul City television show has consistently used the best actors, directors and producers in the country. The show is worth watching in its own right, and the viewer engages with the “messages” primarily on an emotional level. (This is perhaps where the medium is at its most powerful.)

Finally, Soul City and their funders have a commitment to building in evaluation to every stage in every cycle of the programme. The evaluation carried out amongst Soul City’s viewers, listeners and readers is rigorous, and feedback obtained in this way is literally fed back into the programme to enhance further its impact.

So if anyone out there thinks education and entertainment don’t go together, I hope I have persuaded you otherwise!

Gabi Witthaus

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

Sesame Street is 40 years old this week. It was a surprise to me that Sesame Street was “born” in the same week as the internet. While I would not try to make the case that Sesame Street was as much of a world-changing force as the internet (please comment if you think it is), it certainly had impact on learning and teaching thought and practice.

What were the principles of Sesame Street? Noting that television commercials were very good at catching and holding children’s attention, producers of the programme decided to apply some of the same techniques for educational purpose: good music, easy-to-remember phrases, attractive images, and short film segments. While the programme was consequently blamed for contributing to children’s short attention spans, one can hardly fault the eminently practical approach. After all, little songs and rhymes have been a learning and teaching technique ever since anyone can remember. I still say to myself “I before E, except after C, or as sounded like AY as in neighbour or weigh” when spelling tricky words.

Another principle was the promotion of social values such as getting along with people different from yourself. Sesame Street was set in a multi-ethnic, friendly neighbourhood which did not look as affluent as did the settings of many American television shows. While much has been said and written about the political correctness of Sesame Street for good or ill, it was a refreshing challenge to television stereotypes and was therefore, if nothing else, a worthwhile experiment in encouraging children to think about such issues. I recently came across “The educational impact of Rechov Sumsum/Shara’a Simsim: A Sesame Street television series to promote respect and understanding among children living in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza” in the International Journal of Behavioral Development. To quote the abstract, “Exposure to the programme was linked to an increase in children’s use of both prosocial justifications to resolve conflicts and positive attributes to describe members of the other group.”  So the Middle East’s version of Sesame Street, which started airing in 1998, is seen as a positive influence, and while it has undergone various format changes, it is still on television.

But the most important principle of Sesame Street was FUN! Jim Henson’s Muppets were funny and clever and quickly became cultural icons. The little cartoons featuring the letter M were fun, as were the songs about “Chickens in the Trees.” I was already in primary school when Sesame Street made it to the airwaves in my hometown, and did not need it to teach me the alphabet or numbers. But I still remember rushing home after school to see it, and all my classmates seemed to be doing the same. We hadn’t seen anything like it before — it was educational and fun. What a shocking combination!

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

Terese Bird

Beyond Distance Learning Technologist and Assistant ZooKeeper

What’s my learning future?

Here at Beyond Distance we’re currently working hard on our Learning Futures Festival Online and if you haven’t already registered please pop along to our website and sign up: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/festival/registration.

All this talk about learning futures got me thinking about my learning past. Picking up on Terese’s earlier post about ‘Digital Native, Digital Assumptions?’ it seems I fall into the digital native/Net-gen age group.  As I worry I’m getting old this seems very flattering! As a Digital Native or Net-gen I experienced in my learning past a single computer in my classroom from my very first lesson at infant school. By the time I left university virtually everyone had a mobile phone, easy access to the internet and their own computer.

All this does mean that I feel very at ease with new technology be it a new mobile phone or a new web application.  I might not necessarily be an expert straight away but going ahead and trying these things (and sometimes trying to break them just to be awkward) is all part of how I tend to use technology.   For my own learning which tends to be learning new and improving existing multimedia skills I find that I can pick and choose what works best for me.  For instance I tend to use a text based tutorial to learn about CSS (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which is used in web design) rather than a video tutorial. I find it easier to flick between screens, or have a dual screen, rather than have to sit and watch a video and pause it where appropriate.

The learning future for myself and others only seems, at present, to take advantage of further innovation, both in technology and learning.  The future, at present, could seem quite overwhelming, fast-paced and challenging.  For me personally it seems quite exciting and while I’m looking forward to getting there, I’m also enjoying the present and making the most out of it.  They say you shouldn’t look back too much as it can stop you living your life. I think it’s equally important to not forget where you are now and not constantly look to the future in case you miss the things right under your feet.

I realise that this might sound like a contradiction to a Learning Futures Festival Online but I don’t think it is.  Without an understanding of where I am now I can’t begin to understand my future.  I’m hoping you’ll all bring your learning present to our Learning Futures Festival Online and help us all discover the learning future.

Emma Davies
Learning Technologist

We’re tweeting! Follow us: #uolbdra, #otteroer, #lff10

What I’ve heard just this week

Epic recently hosted a debate about eLearning at the Oxford Union. Diana Laurillard was among the speakers for the motion ‘This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow’, whilst those against were led by Marc Rosenberg (I’m not sure which one). The motion was defeated on the day by 90:144, but I’m told the debate continues on the Epic site (where the vote is now in favour), via YouTube and on blogs such as those of Clive Shepherd and Stephen Downes. Let me know if you have time to catch up with this one, please.

Some of us saw and heard Martin Bean, the new VC of the Open University, speak at ALT-C. He will be giving a shortened version in Second Life (live, using an avatar) on December 16th at 3:30pm. The session will be chaired by Claudia L’Amoreaux (aka Claudia Linden), Education Programmes Manager for Linden Lab. The inworld audience will be limited to 50, but the session will be recorded and archived online for those unable to attend in person. If you are a confident avatar driver and would like to be in the inworld audience, you can send your name and avatar name to virtualworlds@open.ac.uk, with the subject line VC EVENT. First come, first served. Don’t all rush…

The latest Virtual World Watch report from John Kirriemuir (funded by Eduserv) is now available at http://tinyurl.com/ykscp77 He focuses this time on how institutions are choosing/have chosen their particular environment. Second Life features strongly, but there are references to other worlds and their capabilities and/or limits. I gather that the Open University is analysing in detail what’s needed to support learning and which worlds can best provide for it. This report is one I shall try to read for myself.

David Hawkridge

Happy Birthday, Internet!

Yesterday, 29 October 2009, marked forty years since the first pieces of data travelled via a computer connection between the University of California in Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. The BBC published an insightful account of the fascinating early years of the internet, which by 1971 was already connecting universities on the East and the West Coast of USA. Looking at the two solitary lines on the map illustrating the early net I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the speed of the change which has thrown us into the super-connected super-fast world of today. And I wonder if in 2050 there might be someone, writing a blog or whatever the communication channel of the day is, reviewing technology from 2010 and thinking “If they only knew what was coming at them…”

Following the links on the BBC website I listened to the oldest computer music recording – Baa Baa Black Sheep - played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester in 1951. Below is a photo of the “Player” followed by a photo of a music player of today. Can you spot the 7 differences?

 

In coverage of the other astonishing talents of the machine, a BBC reporter breathless with excitement revealed that “the electronic brain” could tell you whether 2 to the power of 127 is a prime number in 25 minutes, compared to the 6 months it would take for the human brain to make the calculation.

Every time that I get reminded of the amazing progress that has been achieved since these early days of computer technology, I ask myself – what could possibly come next? Can a music player become even smaller? Or bigger? Or disappear completely and leave the music streaming through the air? Sometimes I discover I sympathise more than I would have liked with Charles H. Duell, the Commissioner of the US Office of Patents who said in 1899 that “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

 Any trip down history lane would be wasted if one comes back without a lesson or two for the future. One of the comments in the BBC material on the early net could turn out to be just that. It is about the initial reaction to the idea for a computer network – “A horrible idea” people thought. Larry Roberts, the MIT scientist who was working on the project said that institutions were opposing the concept because they wanted to keep control of their resources. Now that objection suddenly does not come across as outdated and archaic as the Ba Ba Black Sheep music player, does it? Blackboard, anyone? Are there ground-breaking, rule-bending, mind-blowing innovations at the door step of higher education institutions today that are being shunned because people want to keep control of their resources?  What can we do about it?

Sandra Romenska

30/10/2009

BDRA

TESOL and Second Life

In my recent blog, I talked about an e-tivity designed for DUCKLING TESOL students to visit language teaching classes in Second Life (SL), with 4 stages: Preparation, Training, Visiting and observing language teaching classes in SL, Discussion and reflection.

The e-tivity was launched on Monday 12 October 2009 on Blackboard and the training stage happened on Monday 26^th October.

Phase 1 is now completed. In Phase 1, 12 TESOL students were actively involved in the Blackboard discussion. They introduced themselves and shared resources and links on SL in the first week (12-18 October). In the second week (19-25 Oct), they learned to create a SL account and avatar, and practised basic skills individually by using a SL training guide that we provided. They shared their first experiences in SL, introduced their avatars and bought out technical issues by participating in the discussion on the VLE.

We’re now in Phase 2: Training in SL.  We provided the 1^st SL training session to a group of TESOL students on Monday 26 October. The trainer of this training session was my colleague Paul Rudman (PD Alchemy in SL) and Terese Bird (Aallyah Kruyschek in SL) was the helper. Five distance students located in Canada, South Korea and Singapore joined the training in-world.

Building on our training experience from the MOOSE project, we addressed key skills that are important to TESOL students and for this e-tivity and enables participiants to learn, practise and enhance the skills.

The training session was scheduled for 90 minutes, and the following key skills were covered:

1. Adding people to your friend’s list
2. Using ‘Contacts’ and ‘Local chat’
3. Walking and flying
4. Teleporting
5. Creating landmarks and using inventory
6. Sitting down and standing up
7. Changing environmental settings
8. Using cameral control and changing views
9. Testing audio and voice

The training went really well. One of the participants posted her experience on Blackboard after the training session, ‘I enjoyed the experience and I think we had a great group working together’. Another participant said on Blackboard VLE, ‘it was fun learning how to move and fly’.

We reflected on problems, difficulties and issues that happened in the 1^st training session. One of these is how to help students sort out basic technical settings on their computers, e.g. setting up audio and voice preferences, before coming to the training. Another is how to manage a group of participants with different technical backgrounds particularly avatars getting ‘stuck’ or ‘lost’. We recommend having a trainer focusing on the technical aspect and a helper ‘rescuing’ the participants and looking after emotional is a good model!

Students need more practice in SL to be able to enjoy the whole learning process, and we propose training in two stages:

• Stage 1: Tutor and trainer-centred, focusing on practising key technical skills
• Stage 2: Student-centred, focusing on building confidence, developing identity and a sense of immersion

Stage 2 training can also consist of some asynchronous and synchronous activities, such as asking students either individually or working in a group to find something , e.g. a Media Zoo T-shirt and report the result back to the group.

Our TESOL training activities will continue for another 2-3 weeks. I’ll keep updating the progress in my following blogs.

 

 Ming Nie              28 Oct 2009

On assessment and alignment

Last week I sat the final exam of the Open University’s Certificate in Management. The version I did (B615) was a 1-year, 60-credit course, divided into 4 modules. The course has been a major component of my CPD and a most enjoyable experience. As is the case with most exams, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed the course, you’re glad when it’s over. The results will be out in December.

An interesting aspect of the course was precisely its assessment. We had online discussions, peer feedback and electronic submissions of assignments throughout (5 assignments in total)… yet the final summative assessment was a 3-hour, individual, sit-down, closed-book, handwritten exam. I hadn’t done an exam like that for over 20 years.

Is a final exam the most appropriate method of assessing students on this course? If so, is this type of exam the most suitable option? It seems that this is a prime example of misalignment between the final assessment and everything else that all students are required to do throughout the programme. Allowing the use of word-processors would have helped – not least those of us whose handwriting has deteriorated over the years by doing exactly what the previous stages of this course asks of students, i.e. using computers for all their coursework.

I look forward to receiving my result. In the meantime, I’ll continue to reflect on fit-for-purpose curriculum design and assessment choices.

Dr A Armellini
27 October 2009

CopyRIGHT, CopyLITE or CopyFREE

Creative Commons (CC) licenses have been hailed by the Open Educational Resource (OER) community as an answer to the challenges posed by copyright. As an alternative to the “permission culture” of traditional “all rights reserved” law, CC licences have turned copyRIGHT into “CopyLITE” by providing creators of works the opportunity to relinquish some rights of their work for use and reuse by the wider society. In spite of the advantages CC licences bring to the Open Education movement, the multiplicity of licences available (six in total), and the conditions associated with them (four in total), means that the CC licence is not as straightforward as users would like it to be.

At a recent JISC institutional strand meeting on OER, it emerged that existing CC licences are not adequate for application to clinical materials, due to the high proportion of complex images from various sources that need clearance, and calls were made for more sophisticated CC licences to respond to the perceived gap. If such calls are heeded, CC licences will become more complex, and the list of licences will continue to grow in future. However, this complexity is likely to increase the existing confusion around licences and rights. Is there a need for a complete shift in thinking away from the “some rights reserved” philosophy which underpins CC licences?

Some have suggested opting out of the Berne Convention, arguing that CC licences are only watered-down versions of traditional copyright laws. I suggest an alternative solution: instead of copyright laws being automatically in force upon the creation of a work – a new global convention, CopyFREE – where the default position is that there is no need for any form of licence. Under copyFREE, the onus would be on creators of works to make a case for their work to be protected from copying. The copyFREE argument would be similar to the “presumed consent” position put forward by the British Medical Association for organ donation, where persons are deemed to have given their consent to organ donation unless they have registered to opt out.

We need to acknowledge that traditional copyright laws emerged at a time in our collective development history when there were no mash-ups, digital natives or generation Y. We need a 21st century copyright treaty which is more responsive to the needs of a society where openness is a defining feature. Will CopyFREE lead to more creativity, innovation and knowledge sharing for public good as opposed to private profit? Let the debate start.

Samuel Nikoi (26 October 2009)