Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute argued the case for two end states – 3D video conferencing or computer generated virtual worlds on the one hand and virtual reality environments on the other. (Or something to that effect – refer to one of his many publications for the definitive version.) John Kirriemuir of Virtual World Watch summarised his latest snapshot survey of Virtual World activity in HE & FE. Daniel Livingstone brought us up to date with Sloodle and then went on to predict how technologies might converge in the future.

Martin Oliver of London Knowledge Lab (LKL) challenged the use of the term ‘affordance’ in virtual world research. Diane Carr also of LKL gave us the deaf person’s perspective on communications in Second Life – voice was not a welcome addition for this community.

Others wrote about the event at the time – see Daniel Livingstone and Heather Williamson (JISC). Most of the presentations are available on the site above.

Several weeks on I am reflecting a bit further ….

A room full of enthusiasts tends to be quite optimistic about the future of virtual worlds, even if the organisers Eduserv have come to the end of their funding stream for new developments, but for me ‘the elephant in the room’ is ongoing lack of uptake by the mainstream.

In the school of Health & Bioscience at UEL we are using SL in a very specific way for simulation and problem based learning in healthcare settings. Elsewhere in UEL, very few are using it. The only other educational use I am aware of is a limited pilot in the school of Psychology offering tutorials and the possibility of a virtual conference later in the year.

In a post in January 2010 Stephen Downes, in reference to another post by Alja Sulčič, described SL as ‘not dead but niche’. I tend to concur, whilst acknowledging that the same could be said about quite a few technologies e.g. Twitter. On the other hand, I also feel that if those institutions already active in SL can find ways to share their developments and resources beyond their own institutions in the form of OERs or their VW equivalent (e.g. Leicester have recently made a deposit in Open Jorum ), there is a possibility of wider use. A welcome aspect of any open offerings would be more end user tools, such as UEL’s embryonic web-based case editor, that enables academics to manipulate Second Life objects without any technical knowhow. Only a small minority will ever rise to the challenge of building letalone scripting in SL. Many, in fact, still struggle with the most basic aspects of more common place technologies such as the VLE.

Where next? My crystal ball points towards increased activity in simulation for health education and other subjects and for problem based learning generally but without a more open approach and user friendly development interface this type of growth will be limited. And one other thing – Second Life’s dominance of Virtual Worlds may recede as OpenSim and the like come of age.

See post on the HaB blog.

I think we need  to let it bed down, gradually introduce more students, talk to more academics inside and outside the institution and most importantly evaluate the learner experience. Plans for a formal evaluation of the physiotherapy virtual patient are a step in the right direction. Let’s hope we get the necessary funding for this.

At the recent JISC online conference Second Life and VWs got an extensive airing attracting the full gamut of opinion. I am puzzled as to why things seem to get so polarised when VWs are discussed. There’s a lot of uninformed opinion in there of course but amongst some opponents it goes deeper. People seem less content to keep an open mind than they might with other technologies.

Most of the academics and students I’m working with seem oblivious to the mood out there contenting themselves with exploring the potential of Second Life in their context. And for now, that’s good enough for me – while they’re interested so am I.

The afternoon was much more relevant to the educationally inclined with presentations from a wide range of people and organisations (possibly too many), new faces for me including Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes who gave a very stimulating (and worrying)  view of our networked, constantly changing future and School of everything co-founder Dougald Hine who not surprisingly threw out a few challenges to the qualification bound culture of HE.  Others included the ubiquitous James Clay of Gloucestershire College, Nick Shelton of Bristol, Peter Robinson of Oxford university on their experience of  iTunes U , Lindsay Jordan (Bath/University of the Arts) on the need for a social dimension to any learning experience and Shirley Williams of Reading on the thisisme digial identity project that some of us first heard about at the Plymouth conference earlier this year.

The final session was an extremely polarised debate on Second Life which served little purpose other than to suggest a better way of doing this in future would be to find a different panel. Two SL consultants on the pro side, and one very negatively inclined academic and someone from RSC playing devil’s advocate on the other didn’t really cut it. One highlight though was the sucessful streaming of the whole day’s proceedings in Second Life.

Others have blogged in more detail about the event already so I’ll be lazy and link you to a couple, both of which were written as the event proceeded – quite an impressive form of blogging if you can do it:

LSE http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/?s=fote09

Goldsmith’s http://celtrecord.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/jots-from-the-future-of-technology-in-education-2009-p-m/

Presentations will be available in a week or so from FOTE09

All previous  posts were imported from an earlier attempt to create a blog for HaB on posterous. Posts themselves came across OK but not the tags.  See them in original form here http://habitat.posterous.com/

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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