A Bad Pair

Locative Media and the Virtual Tour of Auschwitz

One of the places I've promised myself I will visit is the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. They have a virtual tour, which I highly recommend, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has exhibits which tell the story of the camp.

From what I understand, a visit to Auschwitz is an amazingly moving experience. But imagine how powerful the addition of a locative media presentation would be, with video commentaries by survivors and liberators (it's largely too late to shoot such video now, although there is probably extant footage that could be used) placed at various places throughout the camp. There may even be funding dollars available if someone wanted to write the grant proposal.

Second Life

Second Life is a virtual 3D world used for socializing, creating, selling, educating... whatever you can think of.

• visitors navigate the site through the use of a surrogate, or avatar, which represents them in Second Life's virtual space. Avatars can walk, fly (teleport), or move about in simulated motorized transport
• Second Life was launched June 23, 2003
• 15 million people have signed up for the service; the number of simultaneous users is around 68,000. (read interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon)
• Second Life uses an internal currency called the Linden Dollar, which is convertible to real-life currency
  
• land is initially sold by Linden Labs, but residents can buy, sell, and rent land from each other. There is also a thriving business community on Second Life.

A promotional piece put out by Second Life that describes the educational possibilities of the site: Educational uses of second life

A real-life example of Second Life being used for training: Border Guard Training

An example of using Second Life for K thru 12: Global Kids Science

A video primer about commerce in Second Life: Doing Business in Second Life

My favorite YouTube video about Second Life: Thriller


Additional Resources:

Web:
Second Life Bookmarks on Delicious
Second Life Educational Wiki

Video:
What is Second Life? (has low production values, but is probably the best representation of what the user experience is really like)
Hong Kong PolyU (a site largely for teaching hospitality industry skills)
Second Life lawsuit (about a law suit six Second Life merchants are bringing against another vendor for selling virtual product knock-offs)
The L Word Promo (television interacts with Second Life. Also see CSI)
Virtual Sex in Second Life (a network news piece, but shows a side of Second Life that would also be available to young learners using the site)

Is this a great post, or what?

I've been thinking about how varied the posts are in the ITEC courses I'm taking and am wondering about ways to make them (mine included) a little more substantial.

One possibility is to have us rate one another's forum posts and blog entries, and for the instructor to then use those ratings to assign participation grades.

Joanna Dunlap* encourages online instructors to have learners "establish criteria for determining value and then apply the criteria to their assessment of peers' contributions and the creation of their own contributions." She offers the example of the 'karma point' approach used by the Slashdot.org community, in which each learner is given a certain number of karma points to assign to the discussion contributions of other learners. A learner's score for class participation is determined by the total karma points they receive. The criteria for karma points are:

• 0 points: although an interesting idea was contributed to the discourse, it is not original enough or somehow unclear
• 1 point: a succinct, interesting, original, and well-documented argument or idea, a useful link or pertinent fact is contributed
• 2 points: the contribution is creative and original, and compellingly argues a very clear point. Contribution is supported with evidence.
• 3 points: An exceptional contribution to the discourse, one that really opens eyes and encourages a lively discussion/debate. Exemplary in all respects.

Ways to Improve Chances of Receiving Karma Points:

• Choose provocative subject lines to make postings stand out.
• present our own perspectives
• write clearly
• construct an argument. Provide evidence, present a rationale that supports the position, and reference the opinion of others, linking to supplementary evidence when appropriate
• open up the debate by remembering that the best response is one that gets people thinking and makes them want to reply.
• learn from others who have posted before us by reading through the posts and referring to appropriate posts on their own.

Rules for assigning Karma Points:

• only award points to those who have contributed significantly to the discussion.
• karma points should be awarded based on the quality of the message, irrespective of the content of the message.

Dunlap offers the following advantages of peer rating (although she gives no supporting evidence):

• learners are more thoughtful and reflective about their responses, support their responses with evidence, and work hard to provide value to the learning community by moving the discussion forward.
• karma points can inspire lively dialogue, as they are assigned to postings even if learners share opposing views.
  

So far so good. But I can see some potential problems Dunlap doesn't raise:

• learners may be unwilling to objectively rate posts that contain content with which they disagree. (this, of course, is a common failing of instructors as well)
  
• people may post, not what they actually feel about a subject under discussion, but what they think will bring the highest peer rating.
• the feedback doesn't help correct behavior. People who consistently receive low ratings, unless these are supplemented by specific evaluative comments, won't know the reasons for their poor scores and consequently won't be able to improve their numbers.

Peer ratings don't have to be used as the sole determinant of participation marks, of course. A softer approach is for the instructor to use them as input in determining the grade (my personal preference) or, softer yet, they can be seen simply as feedback for the student.

What do you think? Should we have peer ratings of forum posts? And, if so, how should these ratings be used in assigning grades for participation?

As a test case, please rate this post: survey.

* Joanna C. Dunlap, Workload Reduction in Online Courses: Getting Some Shuteye (Performance Improvement Journal, 1995)

P.S. I wanted to provide a link where you can see the article online, but as far as I can tell ISPI only offers their articles for a fee. (You can visit their publications website here.) If anyone is interested I can bring a hard copy to class.

Educational Uses for Twitter

Thursday evening Rowena made a presentation about Twitter. I have some sense of how it might be used socially, but have been struggling to find educational uses. So I compiled a list:

1. last-minute class announcements (a couple of weeks ago another class I'm in at SFSU was cancelled on short notice by email and not all students received the message on time)
2. a last-minute way for students to notify the instructor or other students that they won't be at class or are running late
   
3. a way for students to clarify assignments. eg. are we to read chapter 3?
   
4. a way to for students to ask each other about resources. e.g. does anyone know of a research paper on elearning attrition rates? (or text message lingo equivalent)

How many others can you think of?