Second Life is not a learning environment… but why not?

Second Life is not a learning environment. As blogs, wikis, mashups and other Web 2.0 tools, it was not developed with educational purposes in mind. Because of that, it does not have traditional assessment and other tools we find in learning environments from Blackboard to Moodle.

Should we take this for granted? Let’s analyze this statement carefully.

First of all, what does an environment mean?

In a literal sense, an environment means physical surroundings. In a larger sense, it includes the social and cultural aspects of the surroundings. This is how Roger Hiemstra, in Creating environments for effective adult learning, defines learning environments, focusing on the adult learner:

“A learning environment is all of the physical surroundings, psychological or emotional conditions, and social or cultural influences affecting the growth and development of an adult engaged in an educational enterprise.”

That is to say, an environment includes, lato sensu, physical, psychological, emotional, social and cultural elements.

We could then ask: how come we call Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle etc. “learning environments”? These softwares no doubt try to recreate part of the social and emotional aspects of a real life environment, and we could even say that they allow and support relationships that are not easily established face to face. However, on the other hand, they simply give up the physical characteristics of a learning environment. Looking backwards now, it seems incredible how we could naively have used the word “environment”, for so long, for a “space” like this:

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Kant argues, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that time and space are a priori conditions for any knowledge. Space could be empty, but out of space (and time) no experience was ever possible. But Kant is not bibliography for distance learning, and what virtual learning environments like Blackboard did was to take from the learning experience its spatial references. Not only this, but also subtract body itself from the learning experience. A Cartesian move, that stresses the rational ignoring the physical. Body that for many authors, like Hubert Dreyfus (On the Internet), Michael Heim (The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality) and Albert Borgmann (Holding on to reality: the nature of information at the turn of the millennium) are essential to any experience, specially for learning.

Michael Moore, in an article published in 1989 in the American Journal of Distance Education, “Three types of interaction”, defines distance learning in relation to the interaction student/professor, student/student and student/content. Terry Anderson later published “Modes of interaction in distance education: recent developments and research questions”, in Handook of Distance Education, adding 3 types of interaction: professor/professor, professor/content and the interesting content/content (that happens, for example, in pages structured to read RSS that keep updating without human intervention).

We can say that an important kind of interaction is missing here: the interaction of students, professors and even content with the support staff. But what is most interesting is that no mention is made to the interaction of students, professors and content with the environment. It is incredible how this essential variable was left behind, and this can maybe explained because the available learning environments had exactly subtracted physical traits from the learning experience, that is to say, they were not environments in the most literal sense of this word.

So we have been using for years a strange metaphor, because it kept the more connotative senses of the expression but bypassed completely its literal sense – and we probably forgot this original link.

But 3D virtual worlds have brought back to the learning experience at least part of this physicality that was taken from us with traditional learning “environments”. As Stephanie Booth says, in Culture shock in Second Life: “[…] even though Second Life is an entirely on-the-computer thing, it clearly activates the pathways in our brains that we use to deal with physical space and beings.” In Second Life, there is a sense of localization that justifies the idea of immersion, so associated with these 3D virtual worlds, and that allows simulation in a way impossible to reach only with text or 2D.

For Johnson and Levin, in Virtual Worlds: Inherently Immersive, Highly Social Learning Spaces: “One of the essential and fundamental aspects of a virtual world that remains to be fully explored is the fact that a person who places his or her avatar in a virtual space is extending him or herself into that space.” A sense of physical space is brought back to the learning experience. When an avatar gets too close to you, for example, it bothers. When you push an avatar, you say sorry.

In this sense, Second Life is much closer to a learning environment than flat tools like Blackboard or Moodle. So why do we say that it is not a learning environment, and continue to call Blackboard an environment?

One of the common complaints is assessment: Second Life does not have the needed tools to control and evaluate students work. Is that true? What are we talking about here? What tools do we need?

If we take constructivism as the basis for our teaching and learning process, the idea that learning should develop by doing something, that students should remix and produce (and not simply absorb) content and knowledge, than there is nothing missing in Second Life. It is totally possible to evaluate students’ productions like objects, scripts, presentations, exhibits etc. But even if we think that learning should be evaluated and measured in a more traditional sense, it is possible to use objects with questions and answers in Second Life, to track when avatars visit a land, touch an object etc. You do not need to go outside Second Life to be sure that your student learned. After all, learning is not a question of how many times a student clicks on a page – there is a funny story about a student that was not that compromised with a course, but Blackboard indicated she was the one who accessed more the content of the course, and when this was checked in details, it was found out that she had a phone connection that disconnected continuously, so she had to reconnect and click the Blackboard pages over and over again. What is exactly that we want to evaluate that is not allowed by Second Life, but would be by Blackboard? What do we want to “measure”? Our fear as professors?

Even the Corporate universe does not have a better excuse to justify its need for a traditional learning environment. And, if you really do not feel comfortable and need the safety of formality, you can use Sloodle or any single page on the web to impose to your students traditional evaluations, without a need for a closed and old learning environment.

And we should not forget the very interesting concept of personal learning environment (PLE). Closed virtual worlds, like Blackboard or even Moodle, are isolated islands. But the idea of PLE stresses the participation of the student in the building of his own learning environment, which is continuous and should not come from a single source. If the student is seen today not only as a consumer, but also as a producer of knowledge, it does not make sense to impose a rigid frame to his production. And the idea of PLE also respects another important idea: different learning styles. PLEs have the potential to unite different forms of learning, like informal learning, work-based learning, problem based learning etc. and even the formal and traditional kinds of learning, which is not always the case for the traditional learning environments. PLEs and more open environments like Second Life allow the student to build the spaces he wants for the intersection of these different types of learning, which never end.

Institutions and professors lost track of the way students learn, even why there is not a single way for learning anymore. This was said about the Net, this is even truer about Second Life: you have to explore the environments, each in its own way, and so, in a pedagogical sense, each one builds its own way to and through knowledge.

Institutions and professors, initially, tried to control web-based learning through sterile systems like LMSs. LMSs are management systems, not environments, that is to say, they serve the institution needs to control, not the student needs for learning. LMSs 2.0, like Nuvvo, indicate the need for more open, flexible, simple, free and web-based tools. Web 2.0 tools and 3D virtual worlds, even if not pedagogy-driven, might help us bypass this sterility of the learning management systems. A natural reaction of the institutions is to ban these new technologies because, after all, what will be left to them in the teaching and learning process, if students start to develop and control their own online learning environments?

As Johnson and Levin say: “Virtual world platforms have evolved over the past several years into highly flexible, configurable blank canvases for teachers to design new sorts of learning. These experiences, if designed by someone who is truly understanding and appreciative of the form, can be compellingly immersive and very engaging.” Institutions and professors who master these virtual worlds have the opportunity to design new, criative and unpredictable ways to learning. Like Esperance – Thursday’s Fictions Grove:

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Web 2.0 tools and 3D virtual worlds might soon transform traditional learning environments in commodities, like browsers. Soon we won’t need them anymore. We are probably watching the Death of the traditional Learning Environments.

Second Life is not a learning environment, but much more than that: it is actually a virtual environment, not only in the sense that it is virtual (not real), but also in the sense that it is potential, a macro-environment made of infinite micro-learning-environments, like universities, museums, exhibits, objects, scripts, images, sound, text etc. It can certainly be successfully combined with other tools, but not because it is incomplete, but because mashing up works very well in this new scenario for education.

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