I Read the News Today...

In the past week, there have been several articles in the mass media about Second Life. The interesting thing about the following pieces is that they take a more negative/cautious stance on this virtual world - the first two in particular.

Second Life's Second Wind: Has Second Life moved away from the hype and into a gloom stage?

Why is It Called Second Life When There's Nothing Alive There?: "Wandering around Second Life today is like visiting Blackpool in February; all sad empty shops, deserted car parks and the stench of loneliness..."

Is There a Second Life for Teaching?: Two sentences in this piece sum up part of my dilemma with educators appropriating technologies designed for non-educational purposes in hopes of making the learning process more palatable to students.

"Salmon believes that Second Life constitutes a good example of 'edutainment' - the idea that students are more likely to learn if they are first amused."

"A recent Jisc/Mori report indicated that Second Life remained the least popular technological pursuit among students. As many as 76% have never, or only rarely, stepped inside a virtual world, and some students polled thought that environments such as Second Life were 'sad'."

And finally...Studies in Second Life: "Duncan Innis stands in front of the class wearing a suit and a semi-up hairdo longer than the real professor’s real-life hair. It’s 11:35 a.m. and class is in session. Of all the students, Deerhunter immediately makes an impression. Maybe it was because he raised his hand before anyone else in class to discuss the media empire of Cosmopolitan."

The instructor stands in front of the class, and the students raise "their hands" to speak. How is this different from the physical classroom. This article concludes by noting that the educators interviewed for this piece recognize that SL will not replace the physical classroom. Nonetheless, they believe it (or another three-dimensional virtual world like it) will become a part of the educational curriculum, at least in Canada.

Volunteer Teachers

A new university is scheduled to begin offering courses in February. While an announcement of this type may not seem terribly newsworthy on the surface, one thing sets this university apart from many others: the faculty members will be volunteers. Founders of P2P (peer-to-peer) University, including Joel Thierstein (executive director of Connexions at Rice University), believe that the time is right for the initiative, and point to current successful models such as Wikipedia and the MIT OpenCourseWare project. Working professionals and retirees are the target market for the P2P University courses. These individuals will not received credit for the courses they take through this institution; rather the hope is that credit will be obtain via other institutions such as Western Governors University.

The big question is: Who are these volunteers who will teach the courses? At present, the founders have 10 professors who are prominent in their respective fields (no names are being released yet). Those at P2P hope to continue along this trajectory and attract more celebrity professors to the program. Even with star profs participating in this "design research experiment," a major concern is student retention.

Open Teaching

In August 2008, David Perry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, announced that anyone could take his class for free. People from outside the course could access lecture materials, listen to the class sessions, and participate in the online discussions. The only drawback was that no credit would be given unless you enrolled in the course (i.e., paid the course fees). According to Perry, “The knowledge is free, the degree will cost you money.” Experimenting with technology is not new to Perry. In February 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that this professor was using Twitter in his "Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication" course.

Today's issue of The Chronicle outlines three new courses to add to the open teaching experiment. They include:

1. "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" taught by Stephen Downes and George Siemens.
2. "Open, Connected, Social" taught by Alec Couros, information and communication technology coordinator for the School of Education at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan
3. An open-education course taught last fall by David Wiley, then a professor at Utah State University and now at Brigham Young University

Jeffery R. Young is the author of this article, and posts his thoughts on the open teaching experiment here.