Global Learn Day : Education In A Multiuser Environment

In my eyes, Global Learn Day (X) was a success. For reasons of bandwidth and issues related to the real world, I couldn't sit through as much of it as I wished. I only got a few hours of listening time, and the two hours which Rita, Gabriel and myself spoke from Latin America and the Caribbean. There were some great people I wish I had gotten a chance to hear from, but I will have to wait for some links to the archives to show up.

Education in Virtual Worlds

I popped in yesterday just as Gavin Dudeney and Nickey Hockly spoke about Multi-User Virtual Environments, Teaching and Training. They have something set up in SecondLife; from my notes it's [t:EduNation] (which I will get online and find once the Lindens open SL again). They're apparently doing real classes within SecondLife and it was interesting to listen to since they are doing it instead of speculating.

The talk was good, but I found the discussions most interesting - the text at TappedIn.org was full of questions about Second Life and, probably most interestingly, a discussion of virtual worlds. John Hibbs was in there as well, questioning how one could measure how effective using the virtual world is for education, and I think that this was the best question out there. How does one measure the success in educational strategies that use a virtual world? Perhaps what Gavin and Nickey are doing is finding out just that.

Of course, when one considers the measurements used in real world education, one can't help but realize that these measurements of how successful an education system is are inherently flawed as well. Certainly, a person can do well in school - but in and of itself that does not mean anything but they did well in school. It does not guarantee success after education (as a few million MCSEs can probably tell you), and it does not guarantee consistent results over time. There are so many factors involved, it's stunning - from the student and the student's environment to the curriculum to the instructor to the education environment... to be scientific, isolating these variables is needed and even that is a daunting task. When I look at how successful an education system is, I look at what people are doing 10 years later. And even that is flawed.

In my mind, education in a virtual world makes sense especially for distance education(distance learning). I think it allows a curriculum to more easily become globally standardized through new institutions which are not mired in the geopolitical issues of present academic institutions. Even so, it only works if you can access the virtual world - which a stunning 80% of the planet is unable to do since they don't even have internet access. No matter what we discuss on the internet, the voice of the 80% who are not online is largely ignored. If we measure our success only based upon the success we see and not the failure, we repeat the mistakes of NASA and it's pre-Space Shuttle Challenger concept of success - if it didn't blow up, the odds of it blowing up decrease. That obviously didn't work, as Richard Feynman wrote in Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle of the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

That there is potential cannot be measured. And yet so much of the education system is based on stacks of statistics; so much of the education system in any part of the world seems to be based circuitously on how well students perform on examinations that to improve 'performance' some places have lowered the passing grade to pad the success.

In the end, I don't know and I haven't heard a convincing argument that anyone really does know. We can't really measure cognitive dissonance as one example... so what do education systems do? They try to do better, which is a sincere thing in the vast majority of education systems - one would hope. And yet we cannot measure that they are. In a world dependent on Moore's Law, the gap between education and learning increases with every evolution of Moore's Law. Technology changes faster than almost any curriculum. The old systems cannot keep pace, the new systems must.

But how much of the older systems are a liability? How much is this like comparing Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics? Perhaps if we know the momentum we cannot know the velocity, and vice versa. And maybe education in virtual worlds are the same thing. But then, with so many smart people working on the problem, maybe they are onto that already - or have already disproven it.

When Is a Virtual World Part of a Real World?

A lot of the questions that arose leaned heavily toward what sort of people are already in the virtual world. In the case of SecondLife, it's possible to only allow certain people into the 'classroom' using land parcel permissions. A lot of concern was related to harassment, but then - how different is that from a university classroom? And for the youngsters, there is Teen Second Life. Then there were questions of addiction to a virtual world, where I quipped on TappedIn.org: 'If people are against virtual worlds, are they addicted to the real world?' The intent was to shift perspective. To me, a virtual world is as real as the world it exists within; there are no imaginary people in a virtual world but representations of real people. The virtual environment exists within the framework that the real world permits.

So just how virtual is virtual? How real is real? Are we avatars dreaming of becoming humans or humans dreaming of becoming avatars? This is something that has been discussed more than once by the Ethics Group within Second Life itself.

Like any good and worthwhile thing to discuss, the more that we look at the issues of and with virtual worlds in education, the more questions arise. Maybe we just need to figure out which questions are necessary and which come from antiquated systems. Maybe we need to get back to Learning instead of Education.

I plan a follow up to this once I do get to visit EduNation within SecondLife.