The new Eduserve snapshot of Second Life usage in UK higher education is out. It makes interesting reading. Since September, when the last one was published, SL usage has grown a lot. Now three quarters of HE institutions are involved in some way, across a range of teaching activities. Unsurprisingly, academics report spending a lot of their own time developing such activities; funding is thin on the ground. That sounds about right.
Due to the noble efforts of Flexible Learning pal in filling in the questionnaire, my esteemed institution gets quite a few mentions. A rant of mine on this blog has found its way in verbatim. I was moaning that "technology is not going to solve all distance learning problems! I rather doubt that anyone in university management will ever read this, but in the off chance they will, I repeat: technology is not going to solve all distance learning problems! " And now, there is an off chance that university management might read it. Read and ignore it, no doubt.
This report did give me pause for thought about the nature of evidence we will accept before adopting new teaching practices. There has been quite rapid adoption of SL in the last few months for teaching in this country, but this is before much research has been published on the benefits of it. It's partly due to the slow speed of academic publication: all that peer review and quality control takes time. So as a teacher, you might weight up the theoretical benefits which might acrue from using this new tool, talk to a few people who have used it, read a few blogs and get on with trying it before everyone gets old and grey. In my case, I had pretty good reasons for believing it would be effective based on my own previous research in related areas. It turned out that it was effective. Sometimes it is worth innovating without waiting for research evidence. You need to use professional judgement.
A related point is that teaching practice in HE is not largely evidence based anyhow. If it was, students would be subjected to far fewer lectures. There is evidence that students don't learn that well from lectures (McKeachie 2002) but it is often still standard practice. Similarly exams are often taken as a gold standard (try to get any other sort of new fangled assessment past our learning and teaching board and you'll see what I mean!), even though they are fairly good arguments that they cannot assess the whole spectrum of learning we require in HE.
Let's have a look at a specific criticism of SL which is mentioned in the eduserve report. It is a quote from someone who doesn't think much of SL.
"The criteria for me must be derived from some construction of what higher education is
about; so, in brief, how does Second Life contribute to the acquisition of metacognitive
skills? And, if it does, does it also simultaneously undermine that process, through a
combination of reduction of attention span and rational constructive capacity, and a
disregard for truth in an environment in which the imagination, pretence, and wishful
thinking tend to become the predominant norms?"
There's a lot festering in those two sentences. I think the first question is poorly framed. Why would SL by itself contribute to the development of metacognitive skills? It's a learning environment, like a classroom, or a resource like a book (depending on how you use it). You wouldn't expect a classroom or a book to promote metacognition. It's the activities you set up in it which make the difference. For example, at a technical level the in-world real time compilation of scripts supports students in the development of the meta-cognitive skill of debugging code.
The second sentence is loaded, and based on a stack of assumptions. It implies that SL reduces the attention span. This is probably based on the popular belief that video games reduce attention span, and the author perhaps mistakenly thinks SL is a game. There isn't good evidence to suggest that all video games reduce attention span, and SL isn't a game anyway. It also implies that SL reduces rational constructive capacity. Whatever that is. However, students who are building their own content in SL are clearly constructing things. They're not constructing arguments, but they are constructing interactive artefacts which model their understanding of how the scripting language works. Let's move to the next bit: meta-cognitive skills can be reduced by a disregard for the truth if students are in an imaginative environment? What? The long history of educational role-play to promote reflection, cognitive empathy and reasoning about one's own beliefs is misguided, is it?
Second Life has its faults as an educational environment, as I have documented at tedious length on this blog. There's simply no need to make up fake problems with it using a poorly strung together argument peppered with educational buzzwords.
At last! My background check has cleared so I can now log onto my Second Life teen island and survey my royal domain. I am Queen of all! Queen in a pink spotty dress, it would seem. No one else will disturb my solitude. No one else can log in. Yet. 
