MUVE-ing in web 2.0

Kay Souter reports on the trialling of an online campus for student learning activities with some interesting results in terms of student engagement.

Twenty-first century students find it increasingly hard to squeeze everything in. They scatter to jobs after class. Some have family responsibilities, some live at a distance from campus, and in the time crunch, it's very often hard to find time for socialising. But the hours in the bar or café after class with friends, and often with lecturers, aren't just icing on the cake of the privileged learner. There is ample evidence that social presence is necessary for psychological change, including learning. Learning is social, interactive: people learn most readily from and with other people, even if the sense of presence is an internal one.

In the case of my own institution, La Trobe University, our students are located on six widely separated campuses. They want to study in their home regions, for a range of economic and social reasons, but they do not feel they have signed up for distance delivery as such. For all sorts of reasons, it can be difficult to provide all students with the social context and easy access to staff and other students which they crave.

Catering for inclusivity

I have begun to rely more and more on blended learning delivery, combining face-to-face and online delivery, to make up the social shortfall. There are well-established ways of doing this that make social interaction, and thus persistence in subjects and course and deeper learning, more likely. When I first undertook this way of teaching in a large multi-campus first year subject, my students were delighted, finding that asynchronous online discussion, graffiti boards learning activities and so on really allowed them to begin to build a sense of community. However, the usual online learning tools are a bit clunky, and although they can be made to work fairly well in interpersonal ways, there is a limit to how sophisticated their contributions can be. Chat rooms were much fancied by my classes, but they didn't work well—they were stilted and pointless, and classes gave up on them in short order.

Web 2.0, the so-called second generation of internet activity, promises to take this sort of communication to another level. There is much debate about what exactly Web 2.0 might mean (or even whether it means anything at all), but the basic quality is interactivity: the net-surfer writing back, uploading as well as downloading information. With Web 2.0, there's a great deal more interest for users: interactivity combined with multimedia and a general informality. Web 2.0 applications include such things as social-networking sites, wikis, and blogs, and multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) such as Second Life. Users are likely to include the so-called 'digital natives', the generation who have grown up with electronic gadgets and are intrinsically comfortable with multimedia applications and depend on user-generated content. YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and Flickr are examples of websites of this sort.

New social order

It's sometimes claimed that young people don't want lecturers in their SMSs or Facebooks or whatever, but this has not been my experience. It's certainly true that students would probably not be pleased to get a lecture dropped into their mobile phones, just as I would have objected to a formal lecture in the bar on a Friday. But that doesn't mean that all high tech or online communication is unwelcome. In any case, the asynchronous means of online learning are now well tested and extremely successful. As we know from email—and from reading books—the sense of personal interaction can be powerful and immediate, even when you may not have met the person or the message may have been sent some time earlier. For some years educators have used discussion boards to engage classes, structure discussions, encourage interaction and so on.

At the moment, the most obvious platform for real-time academic interaction that is visually rich is Second Life, a MUVE or virtual world developed by Linden Lab in 2003. It provides a downloadable program, free to use at the more basic levels of interaction, which enables adult users to interact with each other via 'avatars', a graphical representation of the user which can be made to look like the user (or not), and can interact with other avatars in pretty much all the ways that are possible in real life—embodiment aside, of course. Second world 'residents', as Linden Lab calls them, shop, fight, talk, have (virtual) sex and so on (there is a teen version which adults can't access unless they are Linden Lab employees). There are some in-world rules about harassment and residents who break them can be banned. But within these limits, users can do whatever they like: there are no objectives, much like real life, in fact.

A social experiment

I decided to investigate the usefulness of Second Life as an addition to our arsenal of blended learning. I had talked with my students in class time on several occasions about the proposal, and got some very interesting feedback from them, long before our virtual island was ready. The first thing was that many of them were very interested in the idea and pleased to be invited to be part of the project. Even more than this, they were interested to hear about the thinking behind the pilot. It was clear that they valued the thinking about educational needs that went into the project, and the student evaluations of the class were extremely positive even before the Second Life event, with many being pleased by the effort that had been put into subject design. Many students joined Second Life on their own initiative and began to explore various campuses, and no doubt other things as well, though they didn't describe them to me. Several of them took my avatar's surname, McMahon, so that I felt we took on quite a clannish aspect long before we ever met up in Second Life.

When this project was designed, our team imagined that we would be able to build the island fairly quickly, and to a certain extent we did. We built—and are still building—an island with a distinct resemblance to La Trobe University's bush campus, a large conference venue, a campfire, a bar and a café. We have a 'sandpit' for people to practise their building skills in. We will also have gallery space and further areas for small group work. There were also plenty of small and unexpected technical problems. In short, ordinary complications intervened, and by the time we could set it up, the in-world event had to be scheduled too late in the semester for students to be able to use the event as part of their learning in the ordinary way. Some of them came anyway, however.

Sharing the research

In our initial class we showed some film clips, some PowerPoints and talked. It was clear to me that the talk was the most interesting aspect of the meeting.

I suppose my take-home message (not that it really needs to be learnt again) was that new technologies enhance learning much as old technologies do. In terms of the familiar principles of good practice in undergraduate education, the case of Second Life activities did this by developing reciprocity and cooperation among students, encouraging contact between students and faculty, encouraging active learning, and respecting diverse talents and ways of learning. For time-poor students it provided a game-like 'fix' of social presence and interactivity. In terms of social learning, Second Life essentially offers a superior chat room, in which you can have a great deal of fun—and apparently more so than in a conventional chat room (though this requires careful testing, which will be our next project). It essentially offers another string to the bow of the contemporary teacher, and a very strong 'being there' aspect to virtual interaction. Second Life certainly provides transactional closeness and excellent space for small group activities, and encourages staff–student collaboration and interaction. It is relatively cheap and easy to provide, certainly compared to travel costs or video-conferencing. It is a very good way indeed of linking up campuses and universities. We have used it for a meeting or two when video-conferencing has been hard to arrange.

Lessons to be learnt

A MUVE, such as Second Life, allows teachers to do pretty much anything one might do in real life, but the pilot and my associated experiences indicate that Second Life is no magic bullet. Some students love it, some are okay with it, some loathe it, in about equal proportions in my experience. Many students appreciate the 'extra mile' effect, when it is offered as a fun 'belt and braces extra' in terms of contributing to the growth of community and the furthering of social presence.

Resources can be made available in-world and it can be used as a venue for small group interaction, consultation and discussion, but on the whole Second Life doesn't fare so well if attempts are made to integrate it into conventional formal pedagogies. I think the platform will work best if allowed to be its game-like self, and function as an adjunct to more formal teaching and a way of building online social networks. A MUVE is innately informal: many videos of classes in Second Life indicate all sorts of avatar naughtiness (forwarding slides, running about the classroom, 'flashing', messaging each other, etc.). Although there are limits to what can be done in the MUVE, I have no doubt that these add some of the speed, fun, a transactional closeness and warmth beloved of social networkers and digital natives.

Flossy McMahon is Kay Souter's avatar. She resembles her a little, but has some magic powers, can fly and is quite a bit thinner and cuter!

Kay Souter is associate professor in English and associate dean (Academic) at La Trobe University.

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