Educational Affordances of Virtual Worlds

This morning a colleague at another university emailed me about a presentation he is delivering soon regarding trends in education and instructional design. He wanted to include virtual worlds and asked for my "views regarding some of the key instructional affordances such worlds offer, or key instructional principles associated with this trend."

This was my response.

Hi ___________,

Interesting that you asked that. I'm just finishing a chapter this weekend on a very similar topic. Briefly,

I use a personal framework or taxonomy that consists of elemental learning (actual and simulated elements) and synthetic learning outcomes (basically decontextualized procedures, concepts, and knowledge). In other words, actual and simulated elements involve [assessing or learning] the "real" task or a simulation of that task. Synthetic learning outcomes do not.

If you mean by affordance, the quality of an environment or an object that allows an individual to do something, perform an action, etc., virtual worlds clearly support elemental learning outcomes. This is the top of the food chain in our business, isn't it? Why? Because if you are really going to be a surgeon, what you really have to do is real surgery. The next best thing to that is a simulation of real surgery.

What virtual worlds like Second Life do for us is to provides us with three-dimensional environments including audio and in the near future other sensory outputs, that lets us behave closely enough to the way we would in the real world that we can "feel" part of whatever aspects of the physical world that are emulated.

Actual Elements VR examples:

Conferences, business meetings, office hours, sales presentations, philosophy classes, research focus groups, counseling sessions, business receptions, music concerts, practicing foreign languages

Simulated Elements VR examples:

Archeological excavations, cancer surgery, flying airplanes, historical reenactments, body processes, atomic chain reactions

Curiously, I find it easier to generate actual element examples from my recent experiences in Second Life than simulated elements examples.

I have attached three images I captured in Second Life within the last week. I thought you might use them in your talk.

2 actual elements images

A panel discussion of individuals from global companies (e.g., Sun Microsystems, Crédit Agricole) at the VR Best Practices in Education conference last weekend. This type of thing is especially worthwhile in SL because while listening to audio and watching PowerPoints of one speaker, the audience is interacting in text chat with one or more of the other panelists.

A doctoral student at the University of South Alabama (SL name- Aevalle Galicia) at the reception desk at our Online Learning Lab SL Learning Center. From Sunday to Wednesday of this week, our little visitor gadget recorded the SL names of 35 unique visitors to our learning center. (Of course, much of that time there is no one there and avatars of visitors just wander around wondering why certain of our many gadgets aren't working. :-) But, we're working on it.

Simulated elements image

My avatar (SL name- Learner Magic) going through a CTscan machine in a simulation build called "Cancerland" regarding a young woman's experience with thyroid cancer. Having my avatar physically simulate some of the situations she did was a moving experience to me.