Virtual Learning Environments

So – been suspiciously absent on the blog of late – although I have been lurking and reading posts. What can I say, work, school, work, school, Second Life, Word of Warcraft, school, work.

All kidding aside, as I have been working on getting the class WoW field trip together – thank you to those who have had time to respond BTW – I enlisted the aid of my 75 year old father. Figured he could be in game a little more than me, because I am trying to catch up on assignments and blog responses. And he is fun to hang out with in WoW. Also thought just seeing this old guy play WoW might help those of you who are newer feel less intimidated. But this thing happened today that made me think and ponder…

My dad is great with WoW, pretty good at basic email and basic web, google, wikipedia stuff – but totally SUCKS at other stuff (like Skype). The first thing that came up was this self-examination moment where I asked myself, “how can I be SO patient with my other students, but NOT with my dad!” Definitely need to work on that… But then I started thinking, “how can he be SO media savvy in some areas, and NOT be able to understand me when I say ‘let’s go to your applications folder and drag an alias/shortcut of Skype into your dock.’”

As a descriptive, I came up with this phrase “Swiss-cheese media literacy.” Solid cheese in spots, big gaping holes in other spots. The more I thought about this, the more I realized how true this phenomenon is for most of us, including myself.

I am great with blogging, suck at twitter, great with email, suck at Facebook – I check my Facebook account regularly, once every month without fail, great with voice chat – skype, google+, whatever – hate video chat – do you really need to see me in pajamas with my hair sticking up?

Helping get my dad set up on Skype made me look at my own relationship to media differently, as well as that of my students, professors, classmates. We all have “Swiss-cheese media literacy.” We all just have different holes.

This realization made me think about online virtual learning environments differently too. If I have a class of 15 students, I cannot assume that they will all interact with each online media available in the same way. One size does not fit all.

To tie this into our readings on LMS and Google+ and our final projects: we cannot assume that one tool, one software solution, will serve every student’s needs or fit every situation – even if it is a cool new tool like Google+.

Success! Just taught dad skype and video chat – wow. What a trip! And he still loves me and I wasn’t too mean… Now we are going to play WoW….

1) Are there any other ways to promote our youth online or through the media that could gain them recognition?   My question about posterous or tumblr is: should we add that to our current blog that we have (www.global-potential.org/blog). Is there anything you would suggest us to do with the current state of our blog to make it more engaging? Finally, we have stopped using Second Life for a really long time, would you recommend we reengage with this at all?

Here are a few snapshots of our site:

Metaplace Snap shot

Metaplace Snap shot

An LMS is just what it says. Learning Management System. It is a computerized system to manage learning. As the readings described they are created as a means to better organize and automate E-learning. Instead of just having everything on a disc as a glorified digital manual to go through along with an instructor, LMSs provide instructors and students the ability to access material from great distances. As the texts this week said, its evolution has revolutionized distanced learning, at the same time they have tried to shape the way we learn away from out natural learning styles. I agree with the readings that we all learn more casually now. We relay on google and wikis far more than text books or structured classes. We even learn through daily interactions with people and our environments. The latter is the main drawback for LMSs. LMSs are tools to use in order to an educator to educate a student. But LMSs make educators assume that all or at least most people can learn as well through self-paced but still automated lessons. But when it comes to an educational purpose or job training it is still important to have an instructor to go over material, answer questions, or make material interesting enough to learn. Google and Wiki’s work well because the user can find what they are interested in learning, we learn from our interactions because what we have learned has made an imprint, it was interesting enough to remember. If an LMS is used to automate education too much, then it becomes dull and nothing is learned. For example, look back to one of the first posts on this blog about virtual learning, there was an entry about Traffic school and how dull and monotonous it all was. I mentioned my experience, and although I learned enough to pass my test and I really can’t recall any of the information… and I still can’t drive 55. I’ve had the same experience at every job I’ve had. LMS’s are used for training and although I learn how to do my job through the automated lessons, I don’t retain everything in the long run, only the daily tasks. One thing mentioned in the articles was LMS’s used to train sales people the information they need to sale products, but in my experience (I was a sales manager for a dying retail company, won’t say which one) sales people learn more from interactions with the product and the costumers than they do through automated lessons. Personally, I remember more from uninteresting material because of the lecturers who covered it rather than the words I read about it.

Hey group – just wanted to send out a note that we will be meeting in Second Life on Monday instead of Metaplace so we can discuss our presentation – see everyone in Funk Soup Island – Theater. I can teleport people if they feel lost – my name is strobe svenska – everyone that met last Monday in Second Life I added as a friend so it should be easy to find me. Cheers! Stephanie

I played around with Moodle it seemed very organized and carefully designed.

Some of my observations are: it seems that Moodle is best designed for higher level learners; Moodle seems easy to use; and Moodle offers useful features instructors would most likely implement, i.e. not “feature creep.” (We are having a discussion about this in another class I am in…)

One question I wondered as I navigated through Moodle was what is the difference between Moodle and, say, Wiki? They seem to offer similar features and both seem to be fairly easy to use.

Moodle, as I said, seems to be better suited for higher level learners – college, ideally, but I could see high school using this, particularly virtual schools. And Wiki seems to be usable in whatever way the creator envisions. Wiki is something I think I could use with my 5th grade class for projects, whereas Moodle would take the place of the classroom so I probably wouldn’t use it for projects.

I found the this to be interesting from Learning Management Systems: The Wrong Place to Start Learning:

“Any learning environment should:

• Have a place for learner expression (blog/portfolio)
• Have a place for content interaction (LMS’ have this)
• Have a place to connect with other learners (discussion forum – LMS’ have this)
• Have a place to connect the thoughts of other learners in a personal, meaningful way – i.e. using RSS and then brought back into the “learner expression tool”
• Have a place to dialogue with the instructor (email, VoIP, etc. – webct has some of this)
• Have a place to dialogue with gurus (apprentice) – the heart of online communities is the mess of varying skills and expertise. Gurus are people currently in industry or established practitioners of the organizing theme of the community. LMS limit the interaction to learner and instructor.
• Have a place for learning artifacts of those who’ve gone before – i.e. content management capabilities accessible and managed by the learner. Tools like Furl, del.icio.us are examples of personal knowledge management (PKM) tools.
• Be modularized so additional functionality and tools can be added based on what learners want or need…a bricolage of course tools – based on open standards – allow for incorporation of new approaches as needed.”

I also wondered whether the Moodle allows for a collaborative learning environment as the Wiki tends to do or if it is more instructional based. From Moodle: An open source learning management system: Like most LMSes, it make extensive use of the Internet, with features such as discussion forums, chats, journals, automated testing and grading tools, and student tracking. Because it’s open source, it’s also broadly extensible by its large user community. Again, sounds very similar.

I have been doing a little exploring on Moodle and the one thing that I find so great about it is how easy it is to navigate through. One of the hardest and most tedious parts of a VLE are having to navigate through all the information that is constantly being added to it without running into any glitches or annoyances. I am thinking mostly of Blackboard when I say that, but I’m sure it’s true for other VLE’s. Moodle seems to have the structure down just right. It’s not cluttered with any advertising or anything, giving it a personal feel, while at the same time keeping it open and simple to use. The drop-down tabs at the top of the page are helpful in finding the next place you want to go.

I liked the readings this week because they talked not only about benefits to learning management systems, but also the disadvantages. While online classes are great for managing time and building strong communication skills with classmates and teachers, they can also put a strain on learning. As George Siemens says in his article, there is an underlying assumption that if students are exposed to the content, then learning will take place (1). I have to agree with that completely based on experience. When I took Media Economics this past semester, I was confused pretty much throughout the whole class. I had no prior experience with economics, and being thrown into it was nerve-wracking, especially since it was my first online course. Without hearing lectures of any sort from the professor, I felt that I was way behind everyone else. We were required to read about current media economic crises, but given that I wasn’t very familiar with the terminology and the subject itself, I don’t think I got as much out of that class as I would have if I had been in a classroom, interacting with other students and falling on the same page as the teacher. On top of the stress of the subject matter, Blackboard was often frustrating to use. I suppose using a program like Moodle would have made the learning process more comfortable.

I think that learning management systems are important for educational methods used today, seeing as they are being incorporated into more and more classrooms. It’s important to keep in mind which ones we choose to use, though, and how to use them. The ease of communicating through the web has many benefits, but choosing the structure of a LMS will have a lot to do with the knowledge gained.

What I really enjoyed about this week’s readings was the information about WoW. My boyfriend is an avid gamer, WoW is his thing and I have thus far been ignorant of what goes on in WoW minus the goth sounding music and weird voices coming from his computer. (I can hear the music now.) I know I am supposed to relate these readings to bigger and more important things, but I have simply found a new respect for the time he spends gaming, especially if it may improve his leadership skills. I asked him about buffing, kill assists, groups, raids, and guilds. He let me know that ‘knots’ are sometimes called PUGs (pick up groups) and aren’t really all that great. New communication!

I found the comments (from “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft”) on a ‘freer atmosphere’ with online interactions to be very true. Even in online classes, gender roles are less important and those not likely to express themselves in a traditional environment are likely to be less inhibited online.

Which brings me to Second Life. Perhaps I have to spend more time in this environment but my experiences so far have been quite…well, uncomfortable. At first I was in the training world which was fine but confusing. Then I figured out how to fly to other worlds, but where to go? So I decided on Drexel Island, as mentioned in ‘Second Life Science.’ It was dark and no one was there, which was perfect because I needed a private place to change around my avatar. I browsed around there for a few minutes but it felt like trespassing. The sun came up and I decided to leave. I moved to another world, a lake world, and got threatened to be kicked off because I was on private property – what’s that all about? (Just a part of the world, not the whole thing.) So for me, it may be some time before I can navigate Second Life as easily as Facebook. (I’m going to get oriented with Anja.)

On the other hand, I have felt that Metaplace has been as easy to navigate as Facebook. Perhaps it is because on Metaplace and Facebook I have a central point from which to start, a home base. I also have a social base, unlike second life.

The transformation of the internet is a very important aspect of the web in general because the purpose and the capacity of the web is changing and evolving as time goes by. I am sure in the near future we will be laughing at ourselves for trying to type or chat etc on the computer because those tools and devices will be out dated soon. The technology is so fast and progressive that not just the web was transformed from Web 0.1 to Web 0.2 and than to 0.3 but the infrastructure of the computer itself has become a different tool entirely. It was a calculator and a type writer at first and now it is almost our virtual home in which we can do almost anything with the right amount of investment and configuration.
The reliability of the information on the web is another crucial matter. It is sometimes very hard to find the exact bit of information that should not be too hard to find on the almost vast and “limitless” resources of data but here comes the problem again. The search engines do not always offer the specific info. the users are looking for. It seems like that is going to be left in the past soon in the future according to the readings but there will always be some sort of a flaw or a missing part in the algorithms. I am not trying to convey a negative or conservative perspective on the matter but that is how it has always been so far because everybody uses the net and the web for different purposes so it is sometimes quite difficult to satisfy everyone.

My personal view of the internet and the Web 0.3 structure is a bit skeptical because of my earlier experiences and the current situation. I believe that the web will be used and is being used for tracing, finding, investigating different kinds of terror and crime as well therefore the new Web 0.3 will make it possible for the users to be controlled or observed which also is a great marketing opportunity for corporate companies and it is a wonderful tool for the states to monitor the individuals and their activities as they present it as a “user friendly” and customized web. It is kind of like the “Big Brother Watching You”

I found the articles this week very interesting. The use of gaming to strengthen and improve real world leadership and collaboration qualities. The topic was thought provoking and afterwards, I began to think of game “playing” a little bit differently. 

Although I have never been involved with warcraft or the Star Wars Universe or any other major online gaming community, I have participated in some games where you challenge other players and fend for yourself- one being a game modeled after the new James Bond film. Although there is now collaboration between different individuals from different place around the world – just you fighting for yourself – the game does imply the “risk taking” aspect of what our readings touched on. 

Interestingly enough, I found this material to be the most influential aspect of online gaming. Leadership, collaboration and team building all kind of run together, but the actual risk taking is something the individual player needs to accomplish on his or her own. With that said,  I find this something that comes after all the other aspects of collaboration in an online environment. Risk taking would probably be the most difficult aspect of the gaming community that would transfer from the game to the actual physical world. This is especially true since in the real world, if the  outcome of the risk is costly, it isn’t: game over – please play again, the consequences are much more drastic.