I recently participated in the Semano Semano events that were organised at Arcada in Helsinki, but took place on the island of Rosario in Second Life. I documented the event in some detail in another post here. The forty hours of activity were the culmination of a one period course run as part of the multimedia degree at Arcada, and the teaching took the form of a mixture of blended learning techniques.

There is also some additional student-made video documentation of the events, in the form of a short video made inside Second Life during the festival with commentary added afterwards. Other videos were also made, including one for the banned Rosarian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, which was Al Dek Manto by L’angelot.

This essay is primarily intended as a description of the pedagogical aims of the course and their practical outcomes.

The aims of the course

The course was intended to introduce students to the skills necessary to plan and host a successful large-scale event in Second Life. It was the first time that the course had been run, and it was openly acknowledged that both the content and the teaching methods would be, to a certain extent, an experimental risk.

The stages that the students were expected to pass through included:

• discovering the likely needs and expectations participants might bring to an event in Second Life;
• conceiving activities capable of meeting and, if possible, exceeding these expectations;
• devising the materials necessary to run these activities;
• researching and implementing a publicity strategy capable of attracting participants;
• extending existing production skills to create realistic budgets, staffing and schedules;
• implementing all of the above to create a successful event that encouraged residents in Second Life to return to Rosario.

Some of the students had previously participated in courses or exercises that made use of the Rosario/Marinetta narrative, and some had briefly used Second Life. Some had done neither. None of the students had been members of the core development team, and none of them were experienced long-term users of Second Life.

The course was led by Jutta Törnqvist and me.

The context

The course was officially called Virtual Industries, and it was originally intended to offer this in quite a different way, which would have involved students creating business plans and working to establish a viable business in Second Life. However, Arcada received the necessary grants and permissions to organise a large-scale, intense, and educationally and technically interesting, cross-media production in parallel with the Eurovision Song Contest. We therefore altered the content of the course, at the last minute, in order to make certain that the work in Second Life was included in the cross-media planning.

It became the digital interactive media offering to the DINA Host City production.

The change in the practical project had profound implications for the course, which caused us to spend sometime thinking about our approach. Our original plans allowed for failure. We were prepared for the businesses to fail to develop, or fail to attract customers, and we were prepared to use those failures as pedagogical material for future courses.

From our perspective, when we originally designed the course, it did not actually matter whether the businesses succeeded or not. What mattered were the business plans, and the attempts to implement them – and whether the students could learn from them or not. For us, the ability to learn from a failed enterprise, and to articulate why the enterprise had failed, was at least as useful as creating a successful business.

However, the decision to use the course as a way of contributíng to DINA Host City changed all that. Since Host City would be broadcasting for a minimum of sixteen hours a day for one week, the producers required that we guaranteed to produce a certain amount of input, and that the events in Second Life were guaranteed to happen at certain times. The cost of participation was a commitment on our part to meet deadlines and agreed standards of quality.

A necessary pedagogical experiment

We had always intended that we would adopt a blended learning approach to lead the course, and our intention to be relaxed about success, and to draw educational lessons from success and failure, made the process of implementing blended learning relatively simple. We would place more emphasis on the process of creating a business with less concern about the eventual outcome, with the result that deadlines would be flexible, and could be extended were necessary to fit in with students’ other commitments, or with unexpected difficulties in researching, exploring and interviewing in Second Life.

This was now impossible. We therefore decided on a preliminary experiment, before finalising our approach.

The class contained four Irish exchange students who had never seen Second Life before, and knew nothing about our Marinetta Ombro project at all. I met them once in person for a discussion, in which I explained what we had been doing, what we wanted to do, and how we thought we could manage to do it. I briefly showed them Second Life on my laptop to underline a few points, but I made no attempt at practical training whatsoever.

Towards the end of the session I sat them at computers in the media lab and talking them through the process of setting up a free account. Once they were inside Second Life itself I explained that it was designed as a consumer product, although it was still in the development stages and therefore a bit clunky in parts. They should therefore approach the screen as though they were sitting at a friend’s house with a PlayStation game they had never seen before.

I asked them to email me their Second Life names, wished them luck and left them to it.

Jutta contacted them by email the next day and offered to meet them in Second Life. She spent a couple of hours a day for two weeks inside Second Life guiding them. She gave them money and took them shopping, so that they could see the range of things people have created. She took them to sandboxes and taught them how to build. She took them round Rosario and pointed out what had been done and what still needed doing. She introduced them to staff and students, and to other people that we know only through Second Life (using only people’s Second Life names, so there was no way to relate the people in-world to the people in Arcada’s lunch restaurant).

In the meanwhile I had given the Finnish students some exploratory assignments, designed to find out and rate residents’ expectations about different kinds of events, and to explore whether there were any obvious gaps in the market, assuming that we could even find a market to compare things with. These assignments were self-study and intended as initial familiarisation exercises.

After the two week period we brought everybody together, and Jutta and the Irish students met for the first time.

The approach that resulted

It became clear at the meeting that the Irish students were now all very capable inside Second Life. They were competent at using the interface; they were capable builders; and they had critical opinions about the environment and its current uses. Although they and the Finnish students had spent the time undertaking different tasks there was no sense, when they met, that one group was operating at a different, or more advanced, level than the other.

We therefore judged the initial experiment a success. It had served to convince us that the way to guarantee that we met our deadlines was to have less face to face meetings rather than more. The question was therefore: how to ensure that the group keeps itself informed of all the members’ current situations? We needed to be sure that people were not allowed to drift, or to get lost. We needed to make certain that difficulties were picked up as soon as possible, and that our time was concentrated where it was needed most.

Our view was that the learning that would take place would happen through exploration and group working. Our role would be as group leaders not as teachers. For this to work the group work would have to be genuine, and we would have to be genuine members of the group – inside the process working to make it succeed because the outcome was as important to us as the students, not outside monitoring the progress of the process to ensure that the students were “learning”.

Because of this, we were clear that communication had to be peer to peer. Neither Jutta nor I wanted to receive emails from individual students to which we were expected to respond individually. We therefore proposed that the group would use Skype for direct contact, and that there would be no “office hours”. If someone was online they were to be deemed contactable.

For task lists, links, background material, references, reflection and progress reports, we would use the online word processor Zoho Writer. Everybody would share everything that they wrote with everyone else in the group. Where the documents took the form of personal reports or diaries everyone else would get read access. Where they were task lists, background material, formats, measurements and standards, and so on, everybody would be given full read/write access.

It was agreed that all predictable problems and issues, including group disagreements, would be shared between the full group. Only profoundly personal issues, such as illness or family matters, could form the subject of individual emails to Jutta or I.

It was then agreed that everybody would commit themselves to making one or two weekly updates, showing what they had been doing. Where appropriate these should be posted as news items in La Jurnalo, Rosario’s online newspaper. (This is in keeping with our long standing practice of placing everything onstage.)

Learning through exploration

After the initial assignments, and the meeting to discuss the approach we would take, the course began with people proposing ways in which a festival could be produced in the time available.

A number of proposals were posted at Zoho and responded to. One of the students took it upon himself to collate what was happening into a set of to-do lists which rapidly superceded the initial one that I had prepared.

One thing that began to emerge was that much of the work was being done late at night. For at least some of the students Second Life seemed intuitively categorised under the label fun, and they approached their tasks as they might approach The Sims or some other creative game they were excited about. Finding out how to make something work, or finding out where we could buy something there wasn’t time to make was approached in the same spirit as beating an end-of-level Boss.

Although this was not supposed to be related to the course, most of the students spent increasing time finding or making more and more exotic outfits and methods of transport. This turned back into the project when the suggestion arose that we make stalls for all of the countries entering the Eurovision Song Contest and then create boxes of free clothes and flags for each stall.

In the end about twenty three were made, and out of this process came the realisation that there was not a Rosarian stall. This caused a student to go off, unannounced, and create elaborate male and female Rosarian national costumes, which led in turn to the creation and filming of the Rosarian national dance.

These group improvisations were made possible by the immersive (and “unofficial”) nature of the Second Life environment, and by the fact that we were not trying to use it as a ugh! “virtual school”.

During this process the limitations of Zoho Writer became apparent. There were simply too many similarly named documents being written to keep track of things. We therefore opened a Zoho Wiki, and transferred the current material across. Everyone had read/write access to every page on the wiki, and could either amend a page or add a comment to it. This greatly simplified the group administration of the peer to peer development process.

It is interesting to note that for many, but not all, purposes, Skype was replaced by Second Life’s (admittedly crude) instant messaging system. Everybody had it set to deliver messages to an email address if they were not in-world, and so when a practical problem occurred some people found it easiest to IM from where they were in Second Life, especially if the solution to the problem would require the recipient to log in.

In the final week, when we had to rehearse and host the ten sessions, the group did all come together and work at the computers in the media lab. Crucially, in my opinion, the group came together to enact in person plans had had been conceived, constructed and rehearsed almost entirely online. When they met to work together the script had, in effect, already been written and all they had to do was act their agreed parts.

In the event, this had two results. Firstly the atmosphere was very adrenalin-fuelled. It felt more as though we were preparing for a concert or a rock show than concluding a multimedia course. Secondly, because of this and because everyone knew what they were supposed to be there for, there was room to improvise creatively. The video for L’angelot was one result of this improvisation, that arose from someone making a joke and someone else saying “well, what’s stopping us doing it?”

The outcomes

I have described the practical outcomes of the project here. In brief, it was very successful at achieving all but one of its detailed goals, and there are simple and persuasive explanations for missing that one. The pedagogical outcomes stretch further than this though.

The course work persuaded Jutta and I that, where the content of a course is based in or around Second Life, then the “world” itself should logically be the key component in the virtual learning environment. Other tools are needed for both instantaneous communcation outside the virtual environment, and for documenting the process. Both of these are available online at no cost at all, and there seems no need for closed, expensive proprietary systems in a context such as this.

The role of face-to-face meetings is often believed to be crucial in a VLE, but our experience suggests that this is not necessarily so. Some of the students who had not known each other at all before the course began hardly met or spoke to each other at all in real life, and did all their work in-world. Some of those who have little time for each other in Helsinki spent long hours teaching and guiding each other in Second Life, and plotting together to develop surprise twists on the ideas the group had planned. They went off and joined other Second Life groups together, and brought their shared experiences back to the project.

The face-to-face meetings that we did have tended to be more like parties or relaxation sessions, where we would discuss around the issues, but scarcely ever in a “business-like” manner. The business had already been taken care of online in one way or another.

In the final week the high-spirited improvisation that led to some of the most interesting, and long lived, results was, I believe, a direct result of the method which we used to get there. People had bonded in Second Life in a way that they had not (and probably never would have) in real life, and the supplementary web-based tools had complemented this process.

The future

Our intention now is to develop this methodology further, and to apply it to courses where the intended outcome is less rooted in the immersive powers of Second Life. We are planning in the autumn, for example, to relocate our concept design and branding courses onto the web, using a variant of the VLE we have been developing here. We have also been working with other departments at Arcada, looking at ways in which they can use Rosario as a petri dish in which to conduct experiments. We are hoping to start by instigating such experiments with the language, nursing and tourism departments.

We are also planning to continue working with the Irish students when they return to Dublin.

Our intention here is to work with the media department there and build a joint course concerned with launching and maintaining a commercial radio station within Second Life. This will expand the current student exchanges into fully-fledged inter-school courses run on the web with periodic face-to-face meetings in one or both of the participating institutions. Some of the media department from ITT Tallaght will, hopefully, be coming to Arcada in September to finalise these plans.

This kind of epedagogy does not merely offer new possibilities for distance learning, it also offers a means for institutions to combine their strengths and offer joint courses that take place in a third space that is relatively neutral and jointly explorable. For this to be effective, though, our understandings of teaching and learning will need to undergo further revision, along the lines currently advanced by such as George Siemens.

I shall try to offer a more theoretical contribution to this debate soon.