Category Archives: pedagogy

MUVE The Way Ahead ?

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Back from leave I’ve been reflecting on Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE) and their adoption as ‘mainstream’ educational technology, this was prompted in a large part by the book chapter for “Living Virtually” I have just completed with US academic Sarah Robbins , feedback on my personal activities and preparation for the forthcoming CETIS/Eduserve event at the IOE (link to the event)

I’m quite a fan of the Gartner Hype curve in considering the application of new technology..

(Link to Gartner Hype curve)

As far as MUVE are concerned (educational)interest seems to be primarily focussed around the use of Second Life arguably this is because Second Life does provide a fairly low entry point into examining the educational potential of MUVE it has a very established and active community of practice as in the Second Life Educators community (Sled) with support both accessible and available. It is my belief that despite some interesting projects that we (As in the broad educational community)are firmly entrenched in “The Trough of Disillusionment” having travelled through the “hype of over inflated expectation “the cynics arguing, with some justification ,that Second Life is a solution searching for a problem. This journey is not unique it is journey typical of most new technology. We have yet to reach the “plateau of productivity”

Sarah Robbins concedes that what platform technology emerges at the end of the journey may indeed not be Second Life , there are a number of alternatives emerging most of which require more developed technical skills than Second Life, in addition to Multiverse, Croquet et al I’ve just looked at Opensim, an open source project.

We are just at the beginning of this journey and whilst criticism and discussion are essential I’m concerned that the use of MUVE may be deposited in the “dustbin of good ideas that didn’t work in education” without fully exploring the potential.

(link to Opensim)

As far as JISC CETIS is concerned we are agnostic and we will continue to provide a platform where “educational technology” can be openly discussed, criticised and the event on the 20th September will allow us to do that whilst exposed to the four Eduserve projects

Blackboard and Multi User Environment MUVE

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Recently anounced at the Blackboard Development conference was a small intiative looking at integrating the functions of Blackboard with theose of MUVE.

http://tinyurl.com/co6lq.

There has already been a condsiderable amount of exploratory work undertaken in this area by the the sloodle project

www.sloodle.com
integrating the complimentary features of MUVE and VLE’s (in the sloodle case open source vle Moodle)

On reflection Im wondering if this is something the specifications and standards community should be monitoring closely. There does appear to be a groundswell of practitioners wishing to incorporate the use of MUVE in their teaching activity , weather its ‘flavour of the month’ a ecidence of sustained interest i’m unsure. There is certainly a lot of activity in this space.

(Not) Another “Second Life” Article

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Second Life; its everywhere this weekend I attended “secondfest” a music festival sponsored by the Guardian “in world”. I have to say, common with many others, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the experience (well at least I didn’t get my feet muddy), Im not sure that the technology can cope (yet) with large audiences and something we should seriously note if we are to apply multi user virtual environments (MUVE) in education.
I was interested to learn that Andy Powell of Eduserve (aka Art Fossit) will be talking about Learning Acitivity Managment Sysatem (LAMS) for choreographing learning activity at this weeks LAMS conference http://lams2007.lamsfoundation.org/. This begs the question could the IMS learning Design Specification be of use/ interest to educatios practicing in Second Life and other MUVE, it also begs the question would avatar interoperability be a useful (or not)aim. Issues I will reflect on (or at least ask Moon Eggplant to)