In the world of touch and smell I’m Ian Truelove, a Principal Lecturer based in the School of Contemporary Art & Graphic Design at Leeds Metropolitan University. In the abstracted world of Second Life, I’m an artist, designer and virtual tutor going by the name of Cubist Scarborough. Here, I share something of my experience of Open Habitat.

I’d sensed for quite some time that MUVEs such as Second Life Second Life had the potential to revolutionise the way in which teaching and learning takes place in HE, especially in subject disciplines which readily benefit from the opportunity to simulate a real-world task without the accompanying hazards and risks. The Open Habitat project offered me a welcome opportunity to explore in a structured and reflective way the potential I sensed, building on my prior experience and allowing me to experiment in dialogue with others. I had three main goals when joining the project:

To legitimise the use of Second Life as a tool for learning and teaching within my subject discipline of art and design and beyond.

To promote an approach to learning and teaching which I feel Second Life is particularly suited to and which I have experienced as effective across my teaching.

To meet and critically engage with other people in the field so that my practice could be enhanced and I could gain a sense of audience.

I had been an early adopter of Second Life in my teaching practice, and was eager to share my experience as well as to benefit from that of others. In particular, I was keen to explore the idea that virtual worlds might provide a suitable studio environment in which students could produce artwork. Art and design students spend long hours in a studio. Traditionally this has been where they have experimented and created, broken and recrafted, imitated and pioneered, and developed their own individuality and uniqueness. It has also been a place where learners have assumed the role of apprentices, studying under masters who have passed down their knowledge and expertise that they had themselves gained from those before them. It is a tried and tested model, although one that has been challenged with the advent of new technologies.

My work with Second Life has opened many doors and offered new alternatives, not least in providing an additional environment which can function as a studio yet with fewer restrictions. Materials don’t break, ‘mistakes’ can be rectified, prims (building blocks in Second Life) can be made to behave in entirely abnormal ways, all offering new possibilities for the development of creativity. At a deeper level, the rich supply of resources available to students in Second Life together with the levelling effect the environment has on those in-world—the common difference in status between teacher and learner can be all but eradicated—allows, or maybe even requires a new pedagogic modus operandi to come into play. It is one which I very much welcomed and which I have reflected on throughout the project in blogposts. One post reads:

The Atelier is a studio where an artist works with a small number of students to progressively train them to become professional realist painters … This system places great emphasis on an instructivist approach, and has much in common with approaches such as intelligent tutoring systems. It is a bottom up approach, with students completing progressively complex tasks in order to master their technique. However, where it rings true with me is in the way that the master painter/tutor tailors the programme of study to each individual student. This seems to link with the constructivist goal of maintaining the zone of proximal development. I also like the fact that the independence of the painter/ tutor from any institution or central governing body, means that he or she has complete autonomy in their teaching methods, unrestricted by the requirements of external validation.

DAVE: IAN HAS CHANGED THE APPEARANCE OF THIS FIGURE. WE WILL SEND IT TO YOU WHEN WE HAVE THE FINISHED VERSION.

Three levels of interaction in an online learning environment (Misanchuk and Anderson, 2001)

Second Life provided my students with a virtual studio in which learning could take place differently. I saw it as a counterbalance to Higher Education’s restrictive obsession with modularisation, and an approach which focused on both the ongoing development of pertinent skills and the acquisition of new knowledge. This, together with a developing understanding of ways in which social learning takes place online, using the threefold framework of communication, cooperation and collaboration (see Figure 1, Misanchuk and Anderson, 2001) guided my learning designs.

Examples of this were the building exercises I set my students. The first, in which they had to build a bridge in teams, revealed, somewhat to my surprise, how difficult it was for students to collaborate in this way. Reflection after the event indicated that I had asked them to jump before they could walk, to work in collaboration before they were able to communicate effectively. The second and third were activities in which they had to build a seat from a word-association exercise, and build a tree. The word association task was more successful principally because it levelled the communication skills of the newly inducted students: even the most nervous participants were able to type the first thing that came into their head, supporting subsequent cooperation on the seat building part of the task. The tree-building day succeeded because it most closely replicated the essence of the art school studio. Both students and tutors shared the same goal of building one of a range of specified trees, and worked alongside each other in a communal workspace. Through constructive dialogue, participants cooperated to support individual creative endeavour.

In a short project such as Open Habitat it is not surprising that students did not gain the skills of collaboration as outlined in the Figure below. To a point, this might also be on account of the fact that they are art and design students at an early stage of their education, and tend to favour personal creativity over social creativity (Mayer, 1999). Interdependence and social negotiation to consensus compromises their creativity, their unique contribution to the work of art that is forming in their hands. As they progress through the course, they learn to embrace the power of collaboration, but at the point in their studies that we engaged with them, their ability to work directly with others was limited. This suggests an opportunity to explore another dimension of learning using MUVEs.

The project has been a very positive one for all involved. I am enthusiastic about moving forward with using Second Life in my teaching and have been able to embed it successfully in my programmes. Its value lies not only in the opportunities it opens for students, but also in providing us as teachers with a reflective mirror. In addition to the opportunities the virtual world has provided, Second Life has allowed me to look at real life in a different way and question and critique our practice in a social and educational environment.

IAN TRUELOVE

References

Misanchuk, M and and Anderson, T, ‘Building community in an online learning environment: communication, cooperation and collaboration’, 2001; retrieved from: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed01/19.pdf, January 2009.

Mayer, R. E. (1999). Fifty years of Creativity Research. In R.J. Sternberg (ed.)Handbook of Creativity, pp. 449-460. London: Cambridge University Press.