13. “Discovery of Another World'-Gallery: An Easy Way for Teachers to the Virtual Worlds

ABSTRAKTI ONLINE EDUCA BERLIINI 2012, Minna Kytölä, Petri Lounaskorpi

Nine years old Sec­ond Life is the world’s largest in­ven­tory of vir­tual learn­ing ob­jects. There are more than 12 000 iden­ti­fied “learn­ing places” in the vir­tual world. This causes the abun­dance of a short­age for teach­ers, who are look­ing for ma­te­ri­als they need from this wide world.

The pre­sen­ta­tion will give a new pat­tern for im­ple­ment­ing the vir­tual worlds to daily school­work. The scope is teach­ers in ser­vice train­ing and the new meth­ods to deal with the over com­ing in­for­ma­tion and the huge num­ber of new learn­ing ob­jects.

OVI -han­kkeen to­teut­tama Löytöretkipuisto löy­tyy myös Ope­tushal­li­tuk­sen Sec­ond Life -saarelta

The gallery pre­sented is free and in­ter­na­tional so all the par­tic­i­pants can take the gallery in use at once.

The re­search re­sults of the project are also en­cour­ag­ing and give the ex­perts and teach­ers new in­for­ma­tion of the teach­ers’ in-ser­vice train­ings prob­lems and prac­tices.

In our project, we have more and more fre­quently con­fronted with teach­ers who are de­spair with time and have lack of courage. Very rare teacher has time and en­cour­age to ex­plore in Sec­ond Life to learn the ba­sics (like how to move, com­mu­ni­cate and tele­port) or to find in­ter­est­ing places and con­tacts on their own. That’s why the huge ocean of po­ten­tial the Sec­ond Life of­fers, is not used by the teach­ers. Yet more and more teach­ers are in­ter­ested in to use vir­tual worlds in teach­ing, as the gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­na­tives spend much of their time there.The teach­ers have cre­ated world­wide net­works which share for ex­am­ple links to les­son plans and ways of ed­u­ca­tional use of Sec­ond Life. Also, Google will eas­ily find long lists of good places down, but who work­ing teacher has the time to ex­plore each link, visit the place or sim­u­la­tion and study, where in the learn­ing ma­te­rial is cur­ricu­lum suit­able?

As a so­lu­tion we have built the “Dis­cov­ery of An­other World” -gallery on our High School Is­land (Lukiosaari), which helps and ad­vises teach­ers to work in Sec­ond Life. The key prin­ci­ple is to give “How-to”- like in­for­ma­tion to teach­ers and lower the step start­ing to use vir­tual worlds in their own teach­ing.  Gallery con­sists three main parts. First, it con­tains the ba­sic in­struc­tions for use, move and live in Sec­ond Life as well as prints screens and short bursts of video clips. The in­struc­tions op­er­ate self-study ba­sis, and are sim­ple and clear.

The sec­ond sec­tion are sub­ject spe­cific learn­ing paths to Sec­ond Life’s ed­u­ca­tional of­fer­ings. Paths shown on video ex­pla­na­tions and also con­tain clear ex­am­ples and tips on the sub­ject for the cur­ricu­lum im­ple­men­ta­tion. The teacher can find out more info about the spe­cific learn­ing places shown on the video from the link sub­ject based board. Each link will also be pre­sented with col­league’s teach­ing car­ried out ex­pe­ri­ences and the ex­am­ples of the im­ple­men­ta­tion in­struc­tions.

The third sec­tion is called “Camp­fire –area”, where one can or­ga­nize meet­ings and train­ing ses­sions. The Camp­fire has also an in­ter­ac­tive guide ser­vice, where you can leave ques­tions, or if the guide is there present the ques­tions to him in real time.  In this cosy camp­fire lo­ca­tion we ar­range train­ing ses­sions for teach­ers in our area.

The “Dis­cov­ery of An­other World” –gallery is de­vel­oped now also for the in­ter­na­tional use by us­ing video clips and icon –based in­struc­tions. This will con­nect the gallery to sev­eral in­ter­na­tional school projects and give the teach­ers and stu­dents pos­si­bil­ity to learn the skills of the Sec­ond life easy and meet and work vir­tu­ally to­gether.

Link to the Gallery: http://slurl.com/sec­ondlife/Lukiosaari/231/218/24

Löytöretkillä toisessa maail­massa, vol 1Lauri Pirkkalainen & Petri Lounasko­rpi (toim.),5/2013, 16.5.2013