Professor Andres Kleene (not his real name) is a Quebecois originally from Montreal, he teaches game development courses and manages the DePaul University sim for the School of Computing and Digital Media. Today I managed to find him at the sim and had a bit of a sit-down chat with him.
Kain Scalia: How did you first become involved with Second Life?
Andre Kleene: Honestly I don't quite recall, I think I saw some CNN article (back in 2006) and decided to check out. Then, I got fascinated by the scripting/building aspect and felt that there could be a lot of possibilities for educational use.
Kain Scalia: How do you use the sim for educational purposes?
Andre Kleene: well, that's a moving target, many many threads to such a conversation...In terms of actually teaching, I've taught a collaborative course with two other instructors: form Texas's UIW and France Univeriste de Lylle. We each had a section of the course to teach. Our students collaborated in SL (student from 3 universities: france, texas and one in mexico...none of ours..long story,) the course itself was a liberal arts class for introduction to computers. (it was) fairly general but teaching it was quite an interesting experience.
Kain Scalia: What challenges did the new medium present, as far as being able to interact with the students?
Andre Kleene: well, for reference, I've been teaching distance education in one form or another since '97, so I know my way around the problem it poses, but teaching in SL still took me by surprise. The combination of learning curve and the inability to see what student are focusing on at the moment is a bit of a problem. The student were undergrads and very much newbies… none of them had experience with online communities. It became quickly clear that they didn't' perceive me (or the other professors) as a professor or a resource of information, but rather as a character in a video game...so it was very hard to establish a rapport to begin with.
It took about two weeks for that to clear up, but even then..some of them still never lost it entirely...especially those who weren't' that much into 3D worlds
Kain Scalia: So it is pretty much hit or miss, depending on the students' experiences? I imagine those that were into virtual worlds found it rewarding.
Andre Kleene: Yes to the first part, as to the second? Well… Second Life is not World Of Warcraft. It was hard to make [the students] believe in the value of creativity in here, not to mention it's hard to build/scrip. The absence of a goal in here made a few of them feel lost. This was an intro course to general computers stuff, but all this stems from the main problem with SL: it takes a good number of hours to learn how to exist in here and that is a major hindrance on a quarter or even semester system. To expect students to get all that when they only log in for a class..well...that's just silly.
In fact, from the start, I wasn't trying to attract OUR students to this sim, quite the opposite!
Kain Scalia: Right, you were interested in drawing students interested in learning from a distance through a DePaul program!
Andre Kleene: Right. This sim is paid for by the college of computing and digital media. We've been doing online education for many many years and we have a great web based system to record and distribute class material, video of lectures, etc. This sim is a PR stunt to attract second life users to our distance learning degrees. If they are already competent in SL, then they'll do that much better with various online effort we could start in here.
Kain Scalia: I imagine that you've had good results with it, as far as attracting new students.
Andre Kleene: We've had some success... I"m not saying that it's a major draw, but in terms of cost effectiveness, it's not so bad (Given that I'm crazy enough to spend all this time fussing over the sim!)
Kain Scalia: What's tuition like for a distance course in a semester?
Andre Kleene: There’s no difference for live or Distance Learning classes: I don't have the exact number but it's roughly 2000$ US a class for a grad course. We're on the quarter system: 10 week plus 1 week for finals. Our DL section are always paired with a live section- you get to view the same lecture as the live students and the same homework. Students can even join their teams, in certain classes. Video is recorded and streamed 15-30 minutes right after class : you get the class video, the instruction computer capture and the white-board capture. We offer the stream at various data rate as well as fully downloaded or CD-ROM. Some classes even have podcasts.
Kain Scalia: So i imagine it has bee a mostly rewarding experience?
Andre Kleene: Well it's not been a negative one..we've had a number of students asking for information and to my knowledge a few signed up too ( we don't keep very good tracking of who came from here.) We've had many requests that turned out to be good for other colleges in DePaul. More importantly, I think my gamble paid off. Most University sims I see in here are rather dead, no matter how fancy they are built, they never seem to attract traffic. They rarely get to have many students, if at all. I built this sim the other way around: I made sure that is was primarily interesting for the average SL user, something they could enjoy. This isn't' a website, it's a dynamiucx social environment, so I managed over time to get some great communities in here. The Cup of Goodness and the Silly goose, for example. I found a number of people willing to help out too!
The west side of the mountain is a village for tinies. For a time, they were a group of them here a lot, so I gave them an area for shops. it's been pretty quiet lately though..tinies are very centered on Raglan, as you must know.
Kain Scalia: That was the circular tree house village I passed earlier on the train car!
Andre Kleene: The eastern sim is mostly a giant sandbox -not as much built, but allows for various experiments. That's where that course I mentioned earlier was taught. There is talk of reviving it next spring though. Vic Machalak. the professor from texas, got his own sim now, so he's been busy with that. we will be doing many thing differently if we do it again.
Kain Scalia: Do you have other events going on?
Andre Kleene: Actually, last night I met a guy who's interfacing Google Waves platform and in-world connectivity to produce application in-world. It looks very interesting..I need to follow up with him. I'm primarily a coder and I"m interesting in providing better in-wolrd tools for education. What's here now is too primitive to my tastes- more to the point: it requires too much fiddling for non experts to play with.
Kain Scalia: If you could improve the Second Life experience for education purposes, what would be the first thing you would improve upon?
Andre Kleene: I'd be very happy with a real in-world browser, from there, I could work out the rest. The real stumbling block is the learning curve: back in the last 80's people had to learn about how to use a web browser and search engine didn't exist. Now my kid goes by herself on pbskids.org and knows that google or wikipedia can answer a lot of things. Until the average internet user is fluent with3D worlds, we won't really be able to use 3D world for education.
Think about it this way: A professor in English literature studies doesn't think twice about posting a lecture on the web or giving web references, that's because he/she knows that those are accepted technologies: people are comfortable with that.
Until 3D worlds are as natural to people as opening a PowerPoint presentation, we won't have the liberty to really explore this tool. We're still trailblazers, I'm afraid
Kain Scalia: What possibilities do you see for a tool like Second Life, once those hurdles are overcome?
Andre Kleene: I have a colleague here, who is VERY much into educational technologies. When I initially pitched to my colleagues that a sim would be a good idea for us,I was sure he would jump at the opportunity. He didn’t- he’d always ask “Ok, but what is the advantage? what can SL do better then something else?”
The truth is, SL is NOT better than anything: There are many groupware application to produce shared documents, there are are many video conferencing applications, lots of web based collaboration tools, skype for chat and voice, etc. Second Life brings 3D immersion at a price of a steep learning curve.
The question boils down to this: What does 3D immersion, live social interaction and serendipitous exploration bring to the table?
The answer is : I'm not sure. In terms of helping educational experiences in general... I"m not sure. I can come up with very narrow field of application, like social /ethnographical studies of the population. But I feel it in my bones that 3D worlds are a great idea for education, but I have yet to find something that I couldn't do better outside SL.
Kain Scalia: Well, I'm sure something can be said about the enjoyment aspect (when the curve is surmounted), it adds a certain spark to it all.
Andre Kleene: oh yes, I agree, but that implies like it enough in here to hang around. That's a different problem. People can teach/learn using PowerPoint without like it or even knowing how to create good stuff with it. People can learn using the web without liking to read long bits of text on the web in general, but you can't use SL without really learning about how to use it first. Coming along takes a while, learning the communication conventions in here takes more time.
You may already have helped newbies take their first steps, but those newbies WNATED to be in here. Try to show thing in SL to a newbie that is only here because they are required to...not good. A common first exercise students get when they use Second Life for a class is the explore other university sim and learn about them,
So I very often get student coming here asking the same questions. Last time, I was in this form, i.e., not human, and one of them said I looked too scary and wasn't comfortable continuing the conversation. Lord known what they'll think is they run into the Gorean folks... The point is, this is a tough environment to grasp at first, you and I have learn to ignore a LOT. the newbies don't' ignore...the get deer-in-head-light looks, and you can't teach them while they are in that state.
A student couldn't handle private messaging and chat, during the talk with him before you got here, my screen froze and I took a little too long to reply: he was a bout to leave thinking I was ignoring him, and I bet you that if he had received a phone call, he would not have said so before goign afk: so I wouldn't have known what he was doing. All this takes time to learn.
Andre Kleene: Just getting them into SL in the first place is a problem though. Hardly any of my colleagues re gamers or would consider spending time playing a game even for an alleged school related purpose. There's another DePaul professor that does theater in here.
I have great people here, but it took a long time to get the community going- and truth be told, it's never done...the communities in SL waax and wane... it always has to be rebuilt.
Kain Scalia: I love the little Wonderland doors!
Andre Kleene: Random's personal addition to the sim. I’ve lost count how many he peppered around!
Andre Kleene: Our dean is very much in favor of this experiment, so at least I don't have too much pressure for funding *knocks on wood* The creative possibilities in here are amazing!
If you wish to visit the DePaul University sim, click here.
