Transcript: RezEd Podcast, Episode 14- Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins on the impact of virtual platforms on learning
DK: Welcome to the fourteenth RezEd podcast produced by Media Snackers with Global Kids. Coming up is a podcast interview with Sarah Robbins talking about education in Second Life and other virtual settings. To kick off this podcast we are going to go over to Tampa with Amira and Rick from Global Kids and some friends.
Group: (LIVE FROM TAMPA)
Amira: Hi RezEd. This is Amira.
Rik: And this is Rik.
Amira: And we are here at Second Life Education Community Convention in Tampa for your news and events this week. We'll just give you the quick scheppel real quick. First off, RezEd in print was released. The preview at SLEDcc and Virtual World Expo last week. If you were there you have a copy in your hand. I have a special ethics and works piece and the full version will be available online for download September 29th at RezEd.org. It's a seasonal report. It summarizes the cutting edge activities and discussions of educators in the RezEd community. And it includes a special piece from the Harvard University Good Play Project on Ethics. As well as a lot of discussion about what is going on in Second Life, as well as Quest Atlantis, and other virtual worlds.
Rik: In other exciting news about things that are being released at SLEDcc is the full release of the Second Life Curriculum that is available free for download on RezEd.org. This curriculum was launched officially at SLEDcc, as well as virtual worlds in LA I believe. It contains up over a 160 lessons plans for teaching the basics of Second Life whether in the classroom, a library, or at home. It's available at no cost and is designed to be adaptable by practiioners for a variety of uses from teaching science to literature. To global studies.
Amira: And the last news piece that we have to share with you today is that the Social Research Foundation has launched the first ever Opinions Panel in Second Life. So this is just looking at how in January 2006 there were 100,000 members in Second Life. And now there is about 11million registered users. And so this poll is going to be coming out and figuring out whose owning land, what's going on with the money with the economy. And it's the first only research panel that is happening. Information on this is on RezEd.org. And if you have news that you want to feature on the site, feel free to email it over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
************
Sarah: My name is Sarah Robbins. In Second Life I am known as "Intellagirl Tolly." I'm actually Intellagirl all over the Internet. I've been teaching in Second Life for about three in a half, almost four years now. Wow. Seems like a long time. I'm a PhD Candidate at Ball State University which is in Indiana. I'm also a consultant with lots of other higher eds and companies about education and coperate training and virtual worlds. I am the editor of the Linden Lab organized SLED blog. Which is the Second Life Education blog for that community. And I've been doing that for about eight months now. I'm also the co-author of Second Life for Dummies. Wow. So all that good stuff.
DK: Well sounds great. Thank you for being with us today Sarah. We really appreciate it. Now give us a little bit of history around communities of practice in and around Second Life, and virtual worlds in general. Sounds like you were involved right from right from the start.
Sarah: Yeh. It's been a pretty crazy ride the last few years. I actually strangly enough got interested in virtual worlds about six years ago when I was pregnant with triplets and I was on bed rest. I was stuck in bed for almost six months. And all I had was a laptop. So I started playing MMORPGs and got really interested in virtual environments and how hanging out in starwars galaxies made me feel like I wasn't stuck at home. I actually felt like I had been out of the house. So I started doing a bit of research after my kids where born when I went back to grad school and got really intersted. But I was teaching a course for Ball State that's just second semester freshman composition which most people are familiar with. And when I started teaching it in Second Life we really started to have fun. And things really took off. And I just noticed there was a huge difference in the face to face classroom, in the traditional learning management systems that we were using, and then this virtual world. And about the time that I started doing that there were a couple dozen educators probably in Second Life that I knew of anyway at that point. But it still was a pretty small community. And it was crazy enough that within a few months there were major news organizations covering it because what we were doing was pretty nuts to the outside world. But of course now there's some forty-five hundred, forty-seven hundred educators just on the Second Life Education mailing list. Never mind how many thousands are in Second Life itself. So as a community of educators its just grown exponentially. One of the things that amazes me most about Second Life is the way that community of practice has developed.
DK: Interesting. Can you tell me really how that community practice manifested itself?
Sarah: It started with a few people who blogged and then there was the mailing list was started by pathfinder Linden. And there were twenty or thirty people there and I think probably what really instigated a lot of the community formation was at that time, and it might still exist I haven't checked in awhile…Linden Labs had this Second Life Education space on one of the main continents. It was a small space but there was a sandbox there and this was before most of us had convinced the University to buy an island. So the sandbox became this communal space for a lot of educators and it was small. You know, maybe a 800 meter space. It was really small. But like Jeremy Kemp and Jeremiah Huntsinger, and I, and Brian Carter and then Beth Rivergoth, and just like kind of the people who started, we kind of all hung out there. And that's how we got to know each other and Daniel Livingstone (in audible) in that sandbox and that was kind of the origins of it all. And then there were other technologies that sort of took off and facilitated that community. There was that mailing list for sure but lots of blogs popped up and then there were some spaces in Second Life that were bigger and more community. And more and more people sort of hopping in. And then of course there started being some major tracs at some of the education conferences dedicated to Second Life or virtual worlds, and certainly the SLEDcc conferences contributed a lot to the formation of that community.
DK: And tell us about Sled then? Which is the SL education blog and kind of how you got involved in that, and what does it do?
Sarah: Well the Sled blog was organized by Linden Lab. Claudia Linden approached me and asked me if I would be interested in running this space where…it was kind of dual purpose in the beginning. First of all the Sled mailing list had become quite large and there were lots of people who were new to Second Life education who wanted to know to see some examples. They wanted to know how it worked but they were overwhelmed by that mailing list. Because its literally hundreds of messages a day. And it was overwhelming. So one of the initial ideas was to start a blog that would be a resource for people who were fairly new to Second Life education. And so she asked me if I would basically orgainze it. Not be the sole contributor but to organize it. And so we started that well it was just before Christmas. So its been about seven months now. Almost eight months. And we have about a dozen contributors. And we publish stories from everywhere from new campus openings to cinema pieces that are put out by education projects. And we're pretty openend to more contributors because we try to get people who are doing lots of things. We also get contributors who are fairly busy. We welcome new contributors but…I love what RezEd does. It creates this community and there's lots of discussion and lots of infinity groups based within RezEd. And sort of the way the Sled blog works is to provide kind of a showcase and a feature for those kinds of projects. And so we try to write profiles of events that are going on and we send correspondences to conferences and ask them to write up sessions and provide notes for people who couldn't attend. And things like that.
DK: So in the wider discussion here, how has virtual kinds of platforms impacted on learning do you think?
Sarah: I think on one level it's provided a community for educators that wasn't there before. Just in the first few months that I was in Second Life I was already collaborating with astrophysicists and with elementary school teachers, and Ivy league professors. People whom I never would have any contact with otherwise. And we're sharing ideas. And we're co-teaching classes. And writing research papers together. And that kind of stuff just did not happen before Second Life was around. So there's certainly that…so it changes the way educators do their job. But I think it also has pushed pedigy forward quite a bit because you'll hear a lot about people preaching about don't be the sage on the stage, be the guide on the side. And this whole idea of a lecture model, especially in higher education, is really dead. It's really ineffective with Gen Y millenium students. Because they're used to being participants. And I think Second Life has given us a space to sort of forced us to learn to teach that way because you just can't lecture in Second Life effectively. You really have to do hands on learning. So all of a sudden you've got thousands of educators from all kinds of different Universities, and K12 campuses, and even Corporate trainers getting together and saying, "I need to learn how to engage my students as an audience in a different way and to put more power in their hands." And the Second Life environment forces you to sort of adapt to that kind of pedigogy.
DK: So give us some case studies in which kind of illustrates the potential of these virtual worlds if you would?
Sarah: And so one example that I like is Beth Ritterguth is…she teaches at a community college up in the New England area, and forgive me for not knowing the name of the school. But she's teaching literature right. And so, and I've done this too. You teach Dante's Inferno year after year and the students read it. And they struggle with the language. And they don't get it. And they're like, "Ok so some boring old white guy wrote this book. Whatever. Let us out. It's a poem. Why is it so long and everything?" And so what she did was have her students reading it but they were also building the inferno in Second Life. So here are all those students who…you know when you read you get mental images in your head about what you think a setting looks like. What you think a character looks like. And you often don't get to compare that with somebody elses experience reading the same piece. But here are these students building the scenary and the characters on a set of this poem. And together. And all of a sudden they're talking about deeper issues about, "Well what do you think he meant by that? What's this symbol for?" And, "Where is this in the alogory?" And other students then get to come along later and experience the space that's been created by these students. So that kind of hands on instructive learning experience is what Second Life is so good at. But also you see great examples of role playing exercises and simulation exercises that just simply aren't possible in the real world. We either can't afford to create them, or their too risky, or too dangerous on a campus. I can't do a fire fighting simulation with students on campus without investing a considerable amount of money. But in Second Life it's really easy to do. And you can involve more people. I don't know if you've seen it yet but Ken Hudson up in Toronto, one of the projects he was working on with his University at Loral was a boarder crossing simulation. So they got students in classes who were learning to be boarder crossing officers. Safety officers. And putting them in the booths with the real officers at the boarder is kind of dangerous and risky, and they really are not allowed to do it. But they had…so they had trouble acclimating these students to what that situation to what it really was going to be like. So they built a boarder crosing in Second Life and some of the students play the boarder crossing officers, and the other ones drive cars through it, and try to hide things. So they learn from both sides what that situation is like. It's just fascinating.
DK: So what are the challenges that exist using these virtual worlds? Not just in Second Life but kind of broader virtual worlds and settings. What challenges do you see that you come across?
Sarah: Well certainly hardware is a huge issue. Just access. And I'm hoping that in the next couple of years that will come down. You know we are seeing more virtual spaces that are browser based that don't involve big software downloads. And don't involve fancy video cards, or things like Hello Kitty Online, and more other social virtual worlds. So hopefully that will be overcome. There's certainly a steep learning curve. It's not as easy as learning an instant messenging program. But it has so much more capability. It has so much more possibility. It's really like…like learning Second Life for example is like learning a suite of tools. You know you don't have to learn them all at once. And I think that's part of the obstacles that we run into as educators is we want to teach our subject material. We don't want to teach Second Life. Or we don't want to teach software. We want to teach English, or math, or whatever. So hopefully tthese spaces will become simpler to learn and easier to use.
DK: And tell us about the trends that you've seen over the last well six years. You've been a lot of virtual worlds. What been the major kind of shifts that either excited you or maybe worried you?
Sarah: Well certainly the demographic has changed. When I started exploring virtual worlds it was…the sterotype was any way was it was the eighteen, nineteen, anti-social guy living in his parents basement who didn't have a date, and hung out in virtual worlds. And we know Second Life the average user is well over thirty years old. I mean this is not War of Warcraft demographic. It's much different. And then of course we've got this new millennial generation coming up and even beyond them where girls are experiencing virtual worlds before boys. And we've got this new move towards social virtual worlds that don't have game mechanics in them. It's not that you have to fight a Ork as soon as you login. You can just make a friend or walk around. Or change your clothes. So that kind of shift from a virtual world as necessasarily as an escape to a communication tool, really makes me excited. Because I think there's tons of possibilities there and its really going to break some of the negative sterotypes about you know, "If you hang out in the virtual world you must not have a real life." "I can't have Second Life because I have too much of a first life." Whatever. You watch a lot of TV I bet though. So those kinds of things I see as exciting. The only thing that I think I'm worried about is we're still seeing the kind of uncritical adoption of this kind of technology. And I don't think educators are particularly guilty of this. But corporations certainly are where its bright and shiney, and new. And it's getting some press coverage so they think it’s the right thing to do and so they jump on, and they don't do their research. They don't do the proper ground work in order to do it well and so they end up creating something that really flops. And then all this negative process is created about for example, "You can't make money in Second Life." Well nobody said you could. Really. You thought you could. You didn't do your research and so you came in and built this huge presence and you didn't make any return on your investment. Well that's not Second Life's fault. It's your fault because you didn't it right. So I'm hoping that we'll see more critical adoption. And educators certainly have a big role to play in that. Because I think we set some of the best examples of how to use these spaces for constructive purposes.
DK: I'm going to end the interview here with a future question. What do you see happening with virtual worlds in education going forth from here?
Sarah: I think that especially in higher education because students are becoming a bit more migratory. They don't necessarily start and finish their degree at the same University, or at the same place. A lot of students are starting as distance learners and then moving to campus, or vice versa. Virtual worlds especially as kind of campus centers, as community spaces for students are going to be very powerful. They are going to provide a sense of co-presence that distance learners don't always get in the chat room, or some sort of threaded discussion board. But outside of that, I think what we as educators are facing is this generation of students that are coming up don't think anything about being in a virtual world. It's not a big deal. You know the web can in Club Penquin generation are going to say, "Virtual World, well why not?" Like why don't we have one. It's not like why don't we have one it's, but why don't we have one. So it's going to be much more common place which means we have to step it up a bit and be ready to do really good teaching in these spaces. And not just treat them as novalties.
DK: Sarah Robbins thank you for giving up your time to speak with RezEd. I really appreciate it.
Sarah: Thank you.
*********
DK: And lets go back to Amira and Rik whose still intemper with the events.
Amira: First off for your events, looking ahead to November 10th and 11th theres going to be a Virtual Worlds Education Conference. This actually is happening within Second Life inworld only but hosted by ECU. East Carolina University. We forgot to say Hi to ECU in the house here—Woooooooo! The conference is going to be a forty-eight hour period in order for participants from all over to be able to come in and registration is free. Full information, especially call for proposals, is on the Rezed.org.
Rik: Coming up later in November from November 20th to the 21st is the Researching Learning In Virtual Environments Conference. Better known as ReLIVE08. That's happening in, hosted by the Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. There will be a keynote by Edward Castranovo who some of you may have heard of, and a panel debate chaired by Sara De Freotas, Director of Research at the Series Games Institute. There will be pit presentations, workshops, the whole shabang. It's an enormous opportunity for you to network with other practitioners and researchers in the field. For more information go to www.opened.ac.uk/relive08. If I messed that up just go to RezEd.org and find out that information.
Amira: And lastly, Eye4You Alliance is happening now every Friday. NPR Science Friday's 11:00 to 1:00 Second Life time. Be there. It's great. If you have other events going on let us know. Send them over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
Group: Back to you DK.
*******
DK: For the links referenced in this podcast, as well as the full transcripts, will be available on the show notes at RezEd.org.
Group: (LIVE FROM TAMPA)
Amira: Hi RezEd. This is Amira.
Rik: And this is Rik.
Amira: And we are here at Second Life Education Community Convention in Tampa for your news and events this week. We'll just give you the quick scheppel real quick. First off, RezEd in print was released. The preview at SLEDcc and Virtual World Expo last week. If you were there you have a copy in your hand. I have a special ethics and works piece and the full version will be available online for download September 29th at RezEd.org. It's a seasonal report. It summarizes the cutting edge activities and discussions of educators in the RezEd community. And it includes a special piece from the Harvard University Good Play Project on Ethics. As well as a lot of discussion about what is going on in Second Life, as well as Quest Atlantis, and other virtual worlds.
Rik: In other exciting news about things that are being released at SLEDcc is the full release of the Second Life Curriculum that is available free for download on RezEd.org. This curriculum was launched officially at SLEDcc, as well as virtual worlds in LA I believe. It contains up over a 160 lessons plans for teaching the basics of Second Life whether in the classroom, a library, or at home. It's available at no cost and is designed to be adaptable by practiioners for a variety of uses from teaching science to literature. To global studies.
Amira: And the last news piece that we have to share with you today is that the Social Research Foundation has launched the first ever Opinions Panel in Second Life. So this is just looking at how in January 2006 there were 100,000 members in Second Life. And now there is about 11million registered users. And so this poll is going to be coming out and figuring out whose owning land, what's going on with the money with the economy. And it's the first only research panel that is happening. Information on this is on RezEd.org. And if you have news that you want to feature on the site, feel free to email it over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
************
Sarah: My name is Sarah Robbins. In Second Life I am known as "Intellagirl Tolly." I'm actually Intellagirl all over the Internet. I've been teaching in Second Life for about three in a half, almost four years now. Wow. Seems like a long time. I'm a PhD Candidate at Ball State University which is in Indiana. I'm also a consultant with lots of other higher eds and companies about education and coperate training and virtual worlds. I am the editor of the Linden Lab organized SLED blog. Which is the Second Life Education blog for that community. And I've been doing that for about eight months now. I'm also the co-author of Second Life for Dummies. Wow. So all that good stuff.
DK: Well sounds great. Thank you for being with us today Sarah. We really appreciate it. Now give us a little bit of history around communities of practice in and around Second Life, and virtual worlds in general. Sounds like you were involved right from right from the start.
Sarah: Yeh. It's been a pretty crazy ride the last few years. I actually strangly enough got interested in virtual worlds about six years ago when I was pregnant with triplets and I was on bed rest. I was stuck in bed for almost six months. And all I had was a laptop. So I started playing MMORPGs and got really interested in virtual environments and how hanging out in starwars galaxies made me feel like I wasn't stuck at home. I actually felt like I had been out of the house. So I started doing a bit of research after my kids where born when I went back to grad school and got really intersted. But I was teaching a course for Ball State that's just second semester freshman composition which most people are familiar with. And when I started teaching it in Second Life we really started to have fun. And things really took off. And I just noticed there was a huge difference in the face to face classroom, in the traditional learning management systems that we were using, and then this virtual world. And about the time that I started doing that there were a couple dozen educators probably in Second Life that I knew of anyway at that point. But it still was a pretty small community. And it was crazy enough that within a few months there were major news organizations covering it because what we were doing was pretty nuts to the outside world. But of course now there's some forty-five hundred, forty-seven hundred educators just on the Second Life Education mailing list. Never mind how many thousands are in Second Life itself. So as a community of educators its just grown exponentially. One of the things that amazes me most about Second Life is the way that community of practice has developed.
DK: Interesting. Can you tell me really how that community practice manifested itself?
Sarah: It started with a few people who blogged and then there was the mailing list was started by pathfinder Linden. And there were twenty or thirty people there and I think probably what really instigated a lot of the community formation was at that time, and it might still exist I haven't checked in awhile…Linden Labs had this Second Life Education space on one of the main continents. It was a small space but there was a sandbox there and this was before most of us had convinced the University to buy an island. So the sandbox became this communal space for a lot of educators and it was small. You know, maybe a 800 meter space. It was really small. But like Jeremy Kemp and Jeremiah Huntsinger, and I, and Brian Carter and then Beth Rivergoth, and just like kind of the people who started, we kind of all hung out there. And that's how we got to know each other and Daniel Livingstone (in audible) in that sandbox and that was kind of the origins of it all. And then there were other technologies that sort of took off and facilitated that community. There was that mailing list for sure but lots of blogs popped up and then there were some spaces in Second Life that were bigger and more community. And more and more people sort of hopping in. And then of course there started being some major tracs at some of the education conferences dedicated to Second Life or virtual worlds, and certainly the SLEDcc conferences contributed a lot to the formation of that community.
DK: And tell us about Sled then? Which is the SL education blog and kind of how you got involved in that, and what does it do?
Sarah: Well the Sled blog was organized by Linden Lab. Claudia Linden approached me and asked me if I would be interested in running this space where…it was kind of dual purpose in the beginning. First of all the Sled mailing list had become quite large and there were lots of people who were new to Second Life education who wanted to know to see some examples. They wanted to know how it worked but they were overwhelmed by that mailing list. Because its literally hundreds of messages a day. And it was overwhelming. So one of the initial ideas was to start a blog that would be a resource for people who were fairly new to Second Life education. And so she asked me if I would basically orgainze it. Not be the sole contributor but to organize it. And so we started that well it was just before Christmas. So its been about seven months now. Almost eight months. And we have about a dozen contributors. And we publish stories from everywhere from new campus openings to cinema pieces that are put out by education projects. And we're pretty openend to more contributors because we try to get people who are doing lots of things. We also get contributors who are fairly busy. We welcome new contributors but…I love what RezEd does. It creates this community and there's lots of discussion and lots of infinity groups based within RezEd. And sort of the way the Sled blog works is to provide kind of a showcase and a feature for those kinds of projects. And so we try to write profiles of events that are going on and we send correspondences to conferences and ask them to write up sessions and provide notes for people who couldn't attend. And things like that.
DK: So in the wider discussion here, how has virtual kinds of platforms impacted on learning do you think?
Sarah: I think on one level it's provided a community for educators that wasn't there before. Just in the first few months that I was in Second Life I was already collaborating with astrophysicists and with elementary school teachers, and Ivy league professors. People whom I never would have any contact with otherwise. And we're sharing ideas. And we're co-teaching classes. And writing research papers together. And that kind of stuff just did not happen before Second Life was around. So there's certainly that…so it changes the way educators do their job. But I think it also has pushed pedigy forward quite a bit because you'll hear a lot about people preaching about don't be the sage on the stage, be the guide on the side. And this whole idea of a lecture model, especially in higher education, is really dead. It's really ineffective with Gen Y millenium students. Because they're used to being participants. And I think Second Life has given us a space to sort of forced us to learn to teach that way because you just can't lecture in Second Life effectively. You really have to do hands on learning. So all of a sudden you've got thousands of educators from all kinds of different Universities, and K12 campuses, and even Corporate trainers getting together and saying, "I need to learn how to engage my students as an audience in a different way and to put more power in their hands." And the Second Life environment forces you to sort of adapt to that kind of pedigogy.
DK: So give us some case studies in which kind of illustrates the potential of these virtual worlds if you would?
Sarah: And so one example that I like is Beth Ritterguth is…she teaches at a community college up in the New England area, and forgive me for not knowing the name of the school. But she's teaching literature right. And so, and I've done this too. You teach Dante's Inferno year after year and the students read it. And they struggle with the language. And they don't get it. And they're like, "Ok so some boring old white guy wrote this book. Whatever. Let us out. It's a poem. Why is it so long and everything?" And so what she did was have her students reading it but they were also building the inferno in Second Life. So here are all those students who…you know when you read you get mental images in your head about what you think a setting looks like. What you think a character looks like. And you often don't get to compare that with somebody elses experience reading the same piece. But here are these students building the scenary and the characters on a set of this poem. And together. And all of a sudden they're talking about deeper issues about, "Well what do you think he meant by that? What's this symbol for?" And, "Where is this in the alogory?" And other students then get to come along later and experience the space that's been created by these students. So that kind of hands on instructive learning experience is what Second Life is so good at. But also you see great examples of role playing exercises and simulation exercises that just simply aren't possible in the real world. We either can't afford to create them, or their too risky, or too dangerous on a campus. I can't do a fire fighting simulation with students on campus without investing a considerable amount of money. But in Second Life it's really easy to do. And you can involve more people. I don't know if you've seen it yet but Ken Hudson up in Toronto, one of the projects he was working on with his University at Loral was a boarder crossing simulation. So they got students in classes who were learning to be boarder crossing officers. Safety officers. And putting them in the booths with the real officers at the boarder is kind of dangerous and risky, and they really are not allowed to do it. But they had…so they had trouble acclimating these students to what that situation to what it really was going to be like. So they built a boarder crosing in Second Life and some of the students play the boarder crossing officers, and the other ones drive cars through it, and try to hide things. So they learn from both sides what that situation is like. It's just fascinating.
DK: So what are the challenges that exist using these virtual worlds? Not just in Second Life but kind of broader virtual worlds and settings. What challenges do you see that you come across?
Sarah: Well certainly hardware is a huge issue. Just access. And I'm hoping that in the next couple of years that will come down. You know we are seeing more virtual spaces that are browser based that don't involve big software downloads. And don't involve fancy video cards, or things like Hello Kitty Online, and more other social virtual worlds. So hopefully that will be overcome. There's certainly a steep learning curve. It's not as easy as learning an instant messenging program. But it has so much more capability. It has so much more possibility. It's really like…like learning Second Life for example is like learning a suite of tools. You know you don't have to learn them all at once. And I think that's part of the obstacles that we run into as educators is we want to teach our subject material. We don't want to teach Second Life. Or we don't want to teach software. We want to teach English, or math, or whatever. So hopefully tthese spaces will become simpler to learn and easier to use.
DK: And tell us about the trends that you've seen over the last well six years. You've been a lot of virtual worlds. What been the major kind of shifts that either excited you or maybe worried you?
Sarah: Well certainly the demographic has changed. When I started exploring virtual worlds it was…the sterotype was any way was it was the eighteen, nineteen, anti-social guy living in his parents basement who didn't have a date, and hung out in virtual worlds. And we know Second Life the average user is well over thirty years old. I mean this is not War of Warcraft demographic. It's much different. And then of course we've got this new millennial generation coming up and even beyond them where girls are experiencing virtual worlds before boys. And we've got this new move towards social virtual worlds that don't have game mechanics in them. It's not that you have to fight a Ork as soon as you login. You can just make a friend or walk around. Or change your clothes. So that kind of shift from a virtual world as necessasarily as an escape to a communication tool, really makes me excited. Because I think there's tons of possibilities there and its really going to break some of the negative sterotypes about you know, "If you hang out in the virtual world you must not have a real life." "I can't have Second Life because I have too much of a first life." Whatever. You watch a lot of TV I bet though. So those kinds of things I see as exciting. The only thing that I think I'm worried about is we're still seeing the kind of uncritical adoption of this kind of technology. And I don't think educators are particularly guilty of this. But corporations certainly are where its bright and shiney, and new. And it's getting some press coverage so they think it’s the right thing to do and so they jump on, and they don't do their research. They don't do the proper ground work in order to do it well and so they end up creating something that really flops. And then all this negative process is created about for example, "You can't make money in Second Life." Well nobody said you could. Really. You thought you could. You didn't do your research and so you came in and built this huge presence and you didn't make any return on your investment. Well that's not Second Life's fault. It's your fault because you didn't it right. So I'm hoping that we'll see more critical adoption. And educators certainly have a big role to play in that. Because I think we set some of the best examples of how to use these spaces for constructive purposes.
DK: I'm going to end the interview here with a future question. What do you see happening with virtual worlds in education going forth from here?
Sarah: I think that especially in higher education because students are becoming a bit more migratory. They don't necessarily start and finish their degree at the same University, or at the same place. A lot of students are starting as distance learners and then moving to campus, or vice versa. Virtual worlds especially as kind of campus centers, as community spaces for students are going to be very powerful. They are going to provide a sense of co-presence that distance learners don't always get in the chat room, or some sort of threaded discussion board. But outside of that, I think what we as educators are facing is this generation of students that are coming up don't think anything about being in a virtual world. It's not a big deal. You know the web can in Club Penquin generation are going to say, "Virtual World, well why not?" Like why don't we have one. It's not like why don't we have one it's, but why don't we have one. So it's going to be much more common place which means we have to step it up a bit and be ready to do really good teaching in these spaces. And not just treat them as novalties.
DK: Sarah Robbins thank you for giving up your time to speak with RezEd. I really appreciate it.
Sarah: Thank you.
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DK: And lets go back to Amira and Rik whose still intemper with the events.
Amira: First off for your events, looking ahead to November 10th and 11th theres going to be a Virtual Worlds Education Conference. This actually is happening within Second Life inworld only but hosted by ECU. East Carolina University. We forgot to say Hi to ECU in the house here—Woooooooo! The conference is going to be a forty-eight hour period in order for participants from all over to be able to come in and registration is free. Full information, especially call for proposals, is on the Rezed.org.
Rik: Coming up later in November from November 20th to the 21st is the Researching Learning In Virtual Environments Conference. Better known as ReLIVE08. That's happening in, hosted by the Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. There will be a keynote by Edward Castranovo who some of you may have heard of, and a panel debate chaired by Sara De Freotas, Director of Research at the Series Games Institute. There will be pit presentations, workshops, the whole shabang. It's an enormous opportunity for you to network with other practitioners and researchers in the field. For more information go to www.opened.ac.uk/relive08. If I messed that up just go to RezEd.org and find out that information.
Amira: And lastly, Eye4You Alliance is happening now every Friday. NPR Science Friday's 11:00 to 1:00 Second Life time. Be there. It's great. If you have other events going on let us know. Send them over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
Group: Back to you DK.
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DK: For the links referenced in this podcast, as well as the full transcripts, will be available on the show notes at RezEd.org.
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