NMC Campus Observer

Reflections on ELI Day 1

JS Saltwater (aka Joe Clark) : Mar 28, 2007 07:18am

Raleigh is just coming alive with azaleas and dogwoods surrounding the Friday Institute (whose airy structure would be right at home in SL) where the ELI spring focus session is being held. I managed to meet up with CDB/Alan early on and briefly discuss logistics, and he helped me locate a tech support guy when we discovered that the guest wireless at UNC wasn’t open to SL. There was a nice mix of people at my table: from Duke, NC State, Purdue, U Maryland, and Michigan State.

EDUCAUSE VP Diana Oblinger kicked off the session and handed it over Richard Van Eck of UND, who gave a thought-provoking keynote that addressed game theory, gen-G kids and the cognitive and developmental affordances of gaming, and how the skills acquired by gamers synch with 21st century skillset requirements for the workforce. Turns out (Rick told us), gamers are good workplace citizens, and there’s something (new to me) called the Flynn Effect that happens with info tech-using cultures whereby IQ scores improve — so I guess I’ll sub to WoW after all. The future of learning — learning 2.0 as he referred to it - will entail more sharing, coauthorship (I’ll call this the Constructivists’ Triumph). Most interesting was Rick’s summary on the connection between immersive gaming and learning isues like interactivity, engagement, problem-based learning, situated cognition, cognitive disequilibrium, and narrative.

The SL side of the session was going great; CDB handled the few small audio glitches and there were several dozen avis in attendance. Alas, by laptop battery chose this morning to tank, so I winked out a few minutes into the presentation and the lack of power outlets in our meeting space ( a minor gripe) kept me offline until later in the afternoon during Intellagirl’s session. There were no reports of griefings or accidental nudity, either in SL or RL.

Narrative was a recurrent theme. Jim Thomas’s presentation on “adaptive interactive narratives” described some interesting challenges to making virtually immersive stories both realistically open-ended yet directed towards a particular goal. You gotta love a presenter who hails from something called the “Liquid Narrative Group.”

After a break we had “parlor sessions” - a sort of progressive-supper approach where groups of 20 or so people spent 15 minutes each with five presenters (poor sods had to deliver their 15-minute spiels 5 times back to back!). It felt a little hurried but was actually a good smorgasbord. The Purdue team’s presentation on haptic feedback and learning addressed the enhancements to retention and comprehension that emerge from virtual touch and force-feedback. Not only can you “feel” things that aren’t actually there (like the weight of a virtual cube) but you can apply it to things that you’d never be able to experience as directly, like molecular bonds, say, or even the “resistance” of social or cognitive structures. And the haptic-feedback input device was awfully cool (pix later). Then Mike Kelly showed us some 3-D mapping applications of Geowall, discussing the ideas of “route knowledge” vs. “survey knowledge” and how - again, either directly or metaphorically - this enhances learning (think about wandering around in a 3-D mental map of a rhetorical frame analysis, for example!). Sarah/Intellagirl’s subject matter was a little more familiar to me personally and if you’re reading this blog you’re likely familiar with her experiences, too — but that didn’t mean I was bored. She gave an excellent capsule summary of the potential applications of SL; I also loved her notion of avatar design choices representing “rhetorical choice in action”. And narrative came up once again during Jeffrey Sarbaum’s session on an interactive ECON201 simulation at UNC Greensboro.

A short wrap up led again by Diana Oblinger yielded some interesting audience insights and illustrated the fact that we are, as educators, all over the map on this stuff: some are hesitant about overdoing the technology (especially in the Wild Wild West of social-networking environments like SL), but others are adopting it left and right. Two main takeaways: 1) most of the tech we saw today, while far out, is available now, and a lot of it is free; 2) as Rick Van Eck pointed out, this tech has already entered society and is becoming part of students’ lives, so we ignore it at our peril.

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See all stories by JS Saltwater (aka Joe Clark)