Second Life

Second Life exhibition: Déja vu?

Next week CLT are supporting the LSE’s first Exhibition in Second Life. The Déja vu? exhibition is being organised by the students & teachers of the French Language & Society course (LN330) as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the LSE Language Centre.

The exhibition will be held on Thursday 25th February from 4pm onwards on the LSE CLT island Castor’s Retreat. It will feature work by Michel Herreria, a Bordeaux-based French visual artist with whom the French language team have been collaborating since 2003.

Attending the Exhibition

Déja vu? is open to everyone. If you would like to attend you will need to create an avatar and arrange access to the Second Life in advance of the exhibition. Full instructions & support

If you already have an avatar & access to second life you can visit the exhibition here:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Castors%20Retreat/198/68/25

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world. It is created and inhabited by avatars, 3-D representations which can walk, talk, fly and interact with each other. Second Life replicates many activities of the real world, there are shops (and a currency!), museums, conference centres and much more. The vast majority of UK Higher Education institutions now have a presence in Second Life, for some this is purely a marketing exercise but for many it is a location for teaching & learning.

Second Life allows students to immerse themselves into a character, via their avatar and is an ideal platform for simulations and role-playing activities. It also provides an opportunity to explore virtual locations around the world including museums, art galleries, historic buildings & events. As with next week’s exhibition it can be used to host events that involve participants from outside the LSE community.

February 22nd, 2010|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life

Jane and I participated in a one day in-house symposium at the University of York this week. The audience were made up of both academic and support staff interested in learning from other universities about lecture capture, audio and video content production and Second Life. We were asked to talk about audio and video content production and so showcased some of the video & audio that’s produced here. We focused on lecture capture momentarily as although it is the most prolific output of media at the LSE, with 909 lectures having been captured in just one term this year, two other universities: Birmingham and Newcastle had already given extensive presentations on this subject. Instead, we wanted to highlight the idea of audio and video as a part of teaching, not just as a means to capture the teaching that’s already going on. We played examples of interviews & discussions, role playing scenes, groupwork, screencasts, video and audio podcasts as well as highlighting some of the Wimba tools and audio feedback. We also talked about the issue of scaling up to meet increased interest in media, professionally produced video vs the DIY approach and touched on the copyright issues involved.

It was an interesting day with good discussions both formally and over coffee/lunch and it was really nice to meet people in similar roles. The most lively debate came from the lecture capture sessions. It seems that across the board, the majority of students really value lecture capture (no real surprises) and staff are cautious about the educational benefits and fears about attendance. There were certainly many parallels between the student and staff surveys at both Birmingham Medical School and Newcastle university and the LSE. Rob Jones’ findings from Birmingham were particularly interesting because they compared the relationship between usage stats and grades. The findings look promising where the mean rose from 51% to 55% and the failure rate dropped to 2/69. The quality of answers also improved with students indicating a greater breadth of knowledge and looking at a wider set of resources.

The Second Life talks in the afternoon reminded me that Second Life is good for simulation and specifically designed educational activities but that perhaps we should be looking at other virtual worlds for better communication, movement, role play etc. Sheila Webber from Sheffield and Steve Warburton from King’s College agreed that Second life is probably not sophisticated enough for a young gaming audience; the average age of SL users is apparently 33. Steve flagged up MetaPlace, OpenSim (open source) and Blue Mars as potential Virtual World’s to explore, so perhaps another pilot project is due. Read Jane’s Social Software, Libraries and E-learning blog for more information on the lecture capture and Second Life presentations.

July 10th, 2009|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off|

Using Virtual Worlds for Teaching

The CLT are currently working with LSE Spanish teachers to create an extracurricular Spanish Club which will be held in the virtual world Second Life (SL) on an island called Castor’s Retreat. The club will provide online activities such as role plays for students studying Spanish at the LSE.

Last week I attended a Virtual Worlds event at Strathclyde University: Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning where I discovered that all but one UK university have a prescence in SL! I particularly enjoyed the session by David White from TALL who spoke about two SL pilots – one for Philosophy and one for Art & Design – that he has been involved in as part of the Open Habitat project. David reported that the activities that had gone well were those where the environment was part of the discussion (eg discussing Digital identity) or where the process rather than the product were important (collaborative building tasks). He suggested that the ‘shared experience’ was the key affordance of a virtual world platform. He also highlighted the need for ground rules for communication because, as with standard text chat, communicating in SL is not straight-forward!

If you’d like to know more about the use of SL at the LSE don’t hesitate to contact us below or via clt-support@lse.ac.uk We’d be happy to show you around Castor’s Retreat and explore possible uses for teaching.

January 20th, 2009|Conferences|2 Comments|

Languages Show-and-Tell

Today I attended a Language Centre show-and-tell organised by Hervé Didiot-Cook and attended by teachers from the LSE as well as our good friends from Columbia University Language Resource Center – Bill & Stéphane.

Challenges/Risks of Second Life

Tamy Zupan, the LSE’s SL evangelist (!) talked us thru’ some of the challenges we are going to face as we look at introducing Second Life. These include an interface with a steep learning curve, negative attitudes from staff and students, a lack of narrative (as it’s a virtual world not a game), unclear moral & ethical boundaries and some cultural challenges and of course the pedagogy: how to take advantage of the potential that it offers for for language teaching and how to assess this. CLT will be supporting the Spanish teachers in a pilot which, for now, will very much be an opt-in for students who are keen to explore the use of SL in their Spanish studies.

July 7th, 2008|Conferences, Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|