Virtual Worlds In Higher Education

Talk

• The reputation of Second Life

• Examples of its use

• The learning affordances of Second Life

• The value of SL

• How to represent the value of SL

• Our Experience of VR and Second Life at the University of Hertfordshire

What is The Value of It

• Conferencing

• Visualisation

• Simulation

• Infotainment

Conferencing

• Second Life enables synchronous voice chat between participants in the world

• Compared to Skype/Elluminate– A greater sense of belonging to a collective– A more direct analogue of various real world meeting

scenarios (break out groups etc)– A less direct way of expressing emotion or instinctive

reaction– A less capable and less foregrounded availability of

tools such as whiteboards• A way to run what feels like a class over

extreme distance

Visualisation

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is8YX32GAyQ (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – start video from 1 minute in)

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=O2jY4UkPbAc

• (Tony O’Driscoll talk – look from 4m 10 seconds in)

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc

• (Educational Uses of Second Life)

Gunther Kress et all “Multimodal Rhetorics in the Science Classroom”• “Linguistically it is enough to say ‘the cell has a cell

membrane’. To draw a cell membrane involves considerations of thickness of line, depth and medium. To construct a three-dimensional model of a cell membrane involves deciding what it looks like, what material can best represent it, where it is placed in relation to the cell wall and so on. Our analysis suggests that the decisions required to represent a cell as a visual, three-dimensional entity extended the students’ learning well beyond that required by a purely writing-based approach in three key ways…”

Data Visualisation…

• Spatial relationships (the 3d mode required a denser understanding of the relationships between elements). Specifically they write “the visual demands a commitment that the verbal does not”.

• Having choices to make about things like color and texture in the 3d artefact required the students to engage with the functionality of cells in order to evaluate the appropriateness of visual techniques that would represent those functionalities

• It made the students engage with the notion of “scientificness” – e.g verisimilitude in the visual representation

Visualisation Questions

• http://www.intellicast.com/National/Radar/Current.aspx

• http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/currentweatherusnational/index_large.html

• http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meteora/225/163/28

Second Life is Teaching Accomodation!

• All teaching accomodation (seating arrangements, equipment) structure the kinds and moods of interactions that take place

• Second Life offers us the ability to create very novel and unthought-of-before teaching accomodations.

Simulation

http://slurl.com/secondlife/waterhead/130/37

• (Simulation of checking heart pulses of patients)

Virtual HallucinationsVirtual HallucinationsJames Cook, MD MS: UC DavisJames Cook, MD MS: UC Davis

•http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sedig/27/44/22/?img=http%3A//nwn.blogs.com/nwn/images/vr_hallucinations.jpg

Different Modes

• Schizophrenia (video) http://onemansblog.com/2007/06/13/what-its-really-like-to-be-schizophrenic/

• Schizophrenia (text) http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/Thought_Disorders/schizoaffective/symptoms_3.asp#Positive_

• Schizophrenia (SL) http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sedig/27/44/22/?img=http%3A//nwn.blogs.com/nwn/images/vr_hallucinations.jpg

Infotainment

• Planetaria/Various “Museums” and installations/Events

• International Space Flight Museum– Spaceport Alpha (SLurl) and

Spaceport Bravo (SLurl).

UH VR Prehistory

• SmirkVR

• Virtual Newsroom

UH in Second Life

• Official UH SL Project– 2 year project to establish a UH SL presence

Explorations

• Orb – Virtual Reality Creative Writing Magazine– (English Subject Centre + Internal UH Project)– Promo Video– Video of launch

Orb: Virtual Literary FestivalOrb: Virtual Literary Festival

Viewing StagesViewing Stages

Robbie Dingo

• Rob Wright– A set of extraordinary personal compositions

and tools in SL see Starry Starry Night