Pleiades

In our last post we talked about how the extreme flexibility of virtual worlds can sometimes lead you down a path where you are working really hard to solve a problem that might be easier to solve using a completely different tool. It’s important to conceive your lesson plans in a way that takes advantage of the best features of the technology.

With that in mind, here are some things that virtual worlds do really well:

1. Give a sense of space. This is the number one promise of virtual reality – that you can explore a 3d environment. In education this could mean exploring an ancient ruin, comparing the scales of different stars, or flying through the structure of a protein.
2. Bring people together remotely. No surprises here, this is the promise of the Internet as a whole. Unless you are teaching a distance learning course, this feature may not seem very useful. But consider arranging an exchange with students in another school somewhere across the globe. How about having an expert come in remotely and interact with the class? The Exploratorium in San Francisco sends teams to the best spot on the planet to observe an astronomical event and then uses Second Life to broadcast live solar eclipses to people all over the world.
3. Allow multi-channel communication. In virtual worlds, you’ve got a whole host of streams of communication available at once. This allows a highly granular flow of communication. For example, students can send in questions over private chat without disrupting the larger flow of the lecture. It is very easy to convene and flow between groups, simply by setting up small group chats.
4. Offer easy light interactivity. Although the scripting languages used in virtual worlds are robust and powerful, they can grow very complicated. But for simpler needs, it can be very easy to script interactions, allowing for lessons and demonstrations that respond to the actions of students. This can allow them to investigate things at their own pace, watch key events over again and generally engage with the materials in an exciting way.
5. Provide easy resets. If you’ve ever spent several periods setting up some kind of demonstration and lesson, only to have to do it all over again for your second period class, you’ll greatly appreciate this. Like any computer file, you can save your virtual environment at a specific point or set up scripts that allow you to recreate certain conditions. This means that students can come in, mess around with the environment to their heart’s content and if there is a problem, it’s easy to start over, and it’s easy to reset for the next class.
6. Take us to other worlds. Dream big! A virtual world allows you to create places that are impossible in the real world. Whether it’s back in time to historically recreated environments, across space to a place you can’t safely or affordably visit, or to a realm of fiction, be it from a book or your own students’ imaginations. Create a movie studio, visit a volcano, soar through the solar system, explore 1920s Harlem, map out Hamlet’s Denmark.

They key term when it comes to virtual worlds is the second word, “world”. Virtual worlds allow you to collapse and transform geography. Communicating over remote distances, teleporting, and flying, these are the basic moves of the virtual world. People from opposite sides of the planet can be in the same place, and the place they are in can be very interesting.

When you are considering a lesson plan that makes use of Second Life or OpenSim, ask yourself “does my lesson mostly revolve about space, geography or communication? If so, you are probably on the right track.

The most common questions we get when we work with educators interested in using virtual worlds to teach a lesson all start out the same way: “Can we use the software to do…”?

The answer we give is always the same: “You can.”

But then we have to quickly follow up with some clarification. Because the problem is that they’re asking the wrong question.

Technologies like OpenSim and Second Life are designed to be incredibly flexible. Any virtual world worth using will offer a robust scripting language and with good scripting, the possibilities of what you might create become nearly limitless, given enough time and ingenuity.

Educators, however, don’t have limitless time, especially educators who are just trying to get up and running, or learning to use virtual worlds for the first time. So the real question to ask is “Does what I want to do suit the medium?”

There are some things that virtual worlds do very well, and others that can be done but that go against the grain of the technology. For instance, you can surf the web from within the world. That’s pretty cool, but you are almost certainly better off using a regular web browser day-to-day.

It can be easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of what you can do in a virtual world to the point of forgetting to wonder if it’s what you should do. When planning a new project it’s always worth stopping and asking, “Would I be better off just handing out pencils and paper for this lesson?”