SecondLife and Information Island

I have so much mulling about in my brain that's its hard to know where to begin. I should probably start with the groovy SecondLife (3-D virtual world) demo I saw at a recent gathering of the Portland Area Information Literacy group.

Michael Brown (Portland State University) and Donna Cohen (Information Management Consultant) led the group through a tour of SecondLife, particularly focusing on an area called Information Island. Information Island is an "archipelago" of dozens of "islands" (aka interest areas). Some of the resources they pointed us to for learning more about SecondLife were:

• A tour of the Library in Second Life on YouTube
  
• Second Life's Education Site
  
• Second Life Education Wiki
  
• An Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Online Resources.
  

I can see a lot of applications for SecondLife and InfoIsland in the K-12 realm - can you just imagine a teacher guiding students through a unit where they all have their avatars work together to build an Egyptian pyramid or the Great Wall of China? In this way, I can see this environment greatly enhancing the learning process. Similar projects, such as University of Virginia's virtual recreation of ancient Rome, officially titled Rome Reborn 1.0, show the possibilities when technology embraces the rich content in the humanities.

So, clearly virtual worlds have a strong educational benefit (not to mention total coolness factor!), but what about how virtual worlds could be applied to non-K-12 or liberal arts environments? Aside from being able to serve as a more multi-dimensional "webinar" (i.e. where everyone's avatars gather in a central place for a lecture and through SecondLife have a more interactive experience) what purpose could such an environment serve for an academic health sciences library? One of the islands in the "Info Island" archipelago, Health Info Island, may have some answers. Health Info Island, states as one of its goals to "Experiment and develop new ways of interaction between users and libraries" and to do more outreach in consumer health. It will be interesting to see how such a virtual environment could be used as a reference and learning tool for health information as this "Info Island" develops.

Technology is not always the key to learning

I am constantly gathering and filtering through books on issues of interest to me. One book I have just started perusing again (I ILL'd it before I remembered I had a copy at home already! Time to start using LibraryThing...) that appears to have some interesting things to say about the teaching and learning process, particularly as it applies to distance education is Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education, by Simonson, Smaldino, Albright and Zvacek.

In their first chapter they analyze Richard Clark's assessment on the limited role of technology, describing how his article claimed "...that instructional media were excellent for storing educational messages and for delivering them almost anywhere", but that media itself could not be responsible for any "learning effect", in other words, those aspects in the instructional process that together aid the process of learning. The authors go on to say, "Learning was not enhanced because instruction was media-based. Rather, the content of the instruction, the method used to promote learning, and the involvement of the learner in the instructional experience were what, in part, influenced learning."

I don't consider myself a Luddite, but I think that sometimes enthusiasm for the "latest and greatest" technology is incorrectly considered a panacea, all-in-one solution for all that ails the learning process (or anything else in the world for that matter). Why humans tend to do this (ascribe total solution to some new thing) is the topic for another post!

Another analogy that comes to my mind are the movies that Hollywood churns out that, while full of the latest special effects, are devoid of any real storyline or character development. The foundations and the structure have to exist first before the layers of "technological solutions" are introduced. Just introducing a distance component to an existing successful academic program will not necessarily enhance the students' experience of learning unless careful consideration is given to the learning process on its own (aka "instructional design"!).