And what is a VLE anyway? A virtual learning environment, you say? Well, whaddya know, I don’t think that’s what our VLEs are – they’re dead, haven’t you heard? I’m almost as persona non grata these days for still using Second Life over OpenSim as for Blackboard over Moodle, but you have to have servers and developers to do your own OS stuff and I have neither, so I don’t have a choice, ok? However, there are still people using SL as well a OpenSim, so it’s not quite two dead horses I’m backing yet 
Although despite a raft of sessions on virtual worlds (a veritable plethora on Wednesday), I didn’t really sense among the community that learning in virtual worlds has taken off as we expected it to 2 years ago. I think this is a real shame, and despite being totally committed to the potential that I see for my students in our programmes, I confess I haven’t seen many great examples of learning resources/activities in SL coming out of the sector (some, yes, blogged about elsewhere here in the Kitchen). Of course, you could all be hiding it in OpenSim, but then you wouldn’t be partaking in a general gloom. (There are plenty of day events going on, and lots of work coming out of established projects – Imperial, Caledonian etc in HE, and lots of other funded projects, so it’s probably not as bad as it feels, but I definitely got a shadow to the buzz.)
Have we just not quite yet reached the tipping point for great resources/activities in SL/OpenSim? Are we on the way? I might be tempted to venture that we’ve lost the plot and are paying for it, despite the good examples of potential shown at the conference.
When I got into learning technology, it was to provide digital materials for students to work with to enhance their experience. Doing my MA dissertation back in, er, 1994, I felt we weren’t too comfortable with reading everything on screen yet, but there were real possibilities for the conservation and preservation of manuscripts. Marilyn Deegan was my supervisor (Oxford), and the Dream of the Rood hypertext was cutting edge learning technology then. When I first taught the Poem of the Cid in a module called Making of Medieval Spain, the only sense of it being a manuscript was a 2 inch square grey grainy picture on the fly leaf of the Penguin Classic edition (in English) they had. The year Madrid started digitising folios saw such a change. For seminars, we banished the books, printed some pages of the digital manuscript in colour, and struggled with the Old Spanish of the original. Despite their fears, every single student stepped further into the lives of doñas Elvira & Sol married off at age 11 and the dusty landscape of the battle grounds, engaging with the story in a completely different way. I will never forget that.
Technology has the capacity to enhance our students’ learning experience profoundly. Have VLEs/MLEs/LMSs done this? No, probably not. They have enabled students to organise their learning and create a framework in which they can engage. But a virtual learning environment? The potential that I once dreamt of -or couldn’t begin to dream of because I couldn’t see so far forward- is the potential that I see in virtual worlds now. Yes, to explore identity. Yes, to form communities for distance learners. Yes, to provide options for streaming events. But also [more] yes to being able to put yourself inside a scenario where the environment allows you to learn. Gives you the scope to practise and re-practise skills you need to learn, where they are amplified from being available on a flash-based trainer to an environment that you can walk about in and lose yourself in. Where the role you can play isn’t scripted or programmed, but a genuine interaction with other people. A sense of place. A sense of presence.
It may well be that along with Diana Laurillard, a goodly percentage of learners won’t [ever?] understand immersive worlds. (But then a goodly percentage don’t really understand lectures either!) From our gaming and animation students creating materials staff can work with, to design students building kitchens you can actually open drawers in and check their practicality, to the fraud investigation officers capturing their seizure routine discussions for analysis, the learning opportunities which we’ve been developing tell me that the future I could sense in 1994 has every bit of that potential.
Are we eploiting that potential? No, not yet. A lot of what I see is taking us down the route towards a ‘the virtual world is dead’, and I don’t want to do that. Why?
There’s still uncertainty about platforms. Second Life is still the market leader but has its associated costs and lockins. OpenSim is interesting, and though I’ve nowhere to run it I’d quite like someone to show me how to export stuff that I create so that I can share it with both sets of users. Other worlds have been and gone. Should we wait for the kind of things I saw a demo of yesterday – 3D game-type environment with photo-realistic quality where you don’t arrive before [ie wait for it to rez] the ambulance. Our games students use these – should we be more encouraging in this area than in developing for SL-type worlds? What control over the learning interactions do staff have then, over and above the training environment, in these cases? Should we develop them alongside each other? I still think there’s a place for developing spaces where no interactions are pre-scripted, and I think the brain is powerful enough to get a lot of immersion from less detailed designs than you think (and hence my paper at ALT-C).
How do we move forwards? For the gamers, get involved with the Games students and staff more (this may not be simple!) For the SL-type environments, share. Please. The few good builds seem mostly to be done by externally-paid consultants/developers (not too scale- or share-able) or internal developers with internal or external funding and a view to potential enterprise opportunities. There has been a large amount of public funding – such as JISC projects – over the last couple of years, and one of the things that normally prevents me from applying for JISC money is the open-source nature of them, so it will be interesting to see just how much of the material produced becomes available to the rest of us. Some things the community should be sharing is ‘stuff’ – the orientation tents from the EMERGE project, for example, and things like sets of scripts which eg make post-it or photo boards that we can all use.
I’d like to see a resource – blog perhaps? – similar to those you see by clothes stores, furniture stores or fashion groups where we can share write ups and images as well as links (though landmark packs inworld also useful). This would be a real help for people starting out developing their own spaces, to see both cheap and classy stuff. Actually there’s an idea I can do, even if I can’t do some of the other things I’d like to see shared. Bearing in mind my external presentations recently have focussed on visual design, this is an obvious for me (though, true, losing hours shopping can also occasionally be fun… 
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I mentioned scripts briefly above, and I think a repository of usable – preferably commented – scripts should be being built up from people who can, and from funded projects. I’ve never really been comfortable with projects funded to do something within one institution, organisation or group without a majority of ‘product’ being available, usable and beneficial to the wider community. So these would likely include both scripts and how to’s, to do things like track student data, record students touching objects or dragging items from their inventory into an object’s proximity in a particular order. Also to be able to generate our own chat bots, to be guardians or supervisors or clients or patients or witnesses or workers or distractors in all sorts of scenarios. I’ve seen a couple of really good ones now, but can’t create my own. These are not, for learning technology people, miracle skills, but finding where to learn them and the time to do it and then pull them all together to be in a position to respond quickly to staff and student need would be much faster if there were a repository available and the willingness – or requirement – to share.
Second Life and OpenSim have the potential to be one of the tools in our toolkit that can deliver a really valuable learning experience in a virtual learning environment. I foresee the same difficulty that we heard in other strands at ALT-C: how do we – or should we – mainstream it? Actually in most cases this was exactly what I *didn’t* hear at ALT-C. Many papers (including my own, I’m not off the hook) were based on fairly small size groups of data, and my previous posts also carry this implicit or explicit frustration. How we shift from projects to embedding the good practice more widely seems to be eluding me. Eluding all of us.
Tweets from the Australasia Blackboard summit keynote this morning say “build it and they will come does not work, we must focus on building people who can build it” and “wiring places for tech is easy, wiring peoples is hard. Handing out toolboxes doesn’t make people into mechanics” (@johnfontaine). This is where we have spent time at Teesside building up a team of great people to provide 1-1 support for a lot of our staff. In my presentation at #BbWorld09 in Washington DC earlier this summer, I said what we were going to do differently to improve our practice was nothing, just keep chipping away. I suppose chipping away at all implementations is the only way to go, beyond the occasional rushes of dawning realisation and take-ups. I don’t have quick-fix answers, but I do believe that the community of practice (communities) that we belong to are key. Both the practice bit and the community bit. I’m sorry to have been away from ALT-C for so long, concentrating on our local community and possibly neglecting the wider community and what I/we may have to offer it. I’ll be working hard this year to rectify that. Watch out!
