It’s human nature perhaps to start taking things for granted, not dig below the surface and really start to understand how we can really use things to our advantage..such is the case for Twitter.  I tweet..lots of  things that interest me and I hope interest others.  I also tweet things I do ..particularly in Second Life but other areas of my life too.   I will probably tweet this blog too.

“Tweeting” is a form of microbloggin which is defined by Grosseck and Holutescu, (retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/2286799/Can-we-use-Twitter-for-educational-activities) as a Web2.0 technology, and a new form of blogging that let the users publish online brief text updates, usually less then 140-200 characters, sometimes images too.

Wikipedia provides the following defnition of microblogging:  is a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video.

As with traditional blogging, microbloggers post about topics ranging from the simple, such as “what I’m doing right now,” to the thematic, such as “sports cars.” Commercial microblogs also exist, to promote websites, services and/or products, and to promote collaboration within an organisation.

I have been tweeting religiously for over a year now and plan to do so for at least another six months or for as long as I believe Twitter serves a purpose for me professionally and personally. Twitter has served as the means through which I have created an online persona and identity and I feel it has served that purpose very well.

As I am going to continue to maintain this blog with a focus on certain tools that i use and I have applied the use of Twitter it seemed the logical choice for this posting.  Given that I decided to do some background research to see how others are applying the use of Twitter as educators and perhaps even contrast or compare that to how I use Twitter for information sharing.

My search brought up the blog of Alan Lew, dated 2007. So I checked on Alan to see if he was still using Twitter and he is, in fact, still communicating via Twitter.

I have summarized Alan’s suggestions for using Twitter:

1.  Communicating with students regarding homework, content, and summarizing meetings and conferences.
2.  Communication via a mobile phone
3.  Digital Reference services

Moving on in my search I next found Carol Cooper-Taylor’s 2008 blog with 50 ideas on using twitter.    I reviewed her blog and summarize her observations here:

Sharing links, be human, respond to others, highlight student activities, communicate with and encourage others in your institution to use Twitter to communicate, tweet in moderation, use twitter for instant meet ups, use twitter for facilitating a “backchannel” discussion in the classroom, and bring great minds together!

Ron Jones, in September of 2008, published the following in SearchEngine Watch magazine:

Using twitter to increase the discussion outside the classroom regarding the subject taught..(issue of the day/week?)
Other:  Instant feedback.

• Track a conference or seminar.
• Follow a professional or famous person.
• Public notepad.
• Writing assignments.
• Grammar.
• Maximizing the teachable moment.

The following researchers; Kerstin Borau Carsten Ullrich, Jinjin Feng, and Ruimin Shen, detail how twitter can be used in language learning to faciliate learning English.    In their article they noted that.. “ twitter was selected because it provides the Chinese students the opportunity to
practice the target language as well as their communicative and cultural competence.”

They identify microblogging as tools (that)  enable users to post short messages that are distributed within their community. Users can post messages from their mobile devices, a Web page, from Instant Messengers and desktop clients. The same channels are used for receiving messages.

They found the following three advantages of using Twitter in their classroom :

• First, Twitter is easily accessibly from almost everywhere, so the students can practice at any time by sending and receiving messages either on the computer or the mobile phone. They can also decide how much time they spend reading and writing these messages. This is an essential feature for busy students.
• Second, Twitter is suitable for any level of English because in writing the messages, the students can chose a topic and grammatical structure fitting their level.
• Third, the use of Twitter as an online learning community can help to integrate students in the community who could not attend classroom.

In my research for this blog I found this wiki on Twitter… Twitter Fan Wiki. Which provides a warehouse for a variety of uses of Twitter and how to use Twitter.

In this  2007 article by Tseng, Song, Java and Finin the term microblogging is defined as  a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web.

In the August 16, 2010 US New and Report article the following uses of Twitter were identified:

1.      Using Twitter to post and answer questions during a lecture.
2.    Build networks in the professional world

3.    Develop marketing plans for businesses as a class project.

4.    Tweeting during commencement graduation and other events

5.    A way of connecting with other students in spite of off campus obligations

6.    A way of faculty connecting with other faculty on best practices in teaching

7.    “Digital faculty lounge” for connecting with other faculty

Together we are are just better, we learn from each other and we can bounce ideas off each other, as pointed out in Laura Walker’s 2009 blog on twitter.   This process allows users to reflect upon and improve their practice in the classroom.    Twitter can, and does for me at least, serve as my newspaper and new alert feed.  I check updates on my Twitter stream daily, this is how I learned of the Gulf Oil Spill and other national events.

Academ Hack’s blog from January 23rd, 2008 identifies the following academic uses for Twitter:

Facilitating classroom chatter that may or may not be subject related,  creating a sense of classroom community, understanding the global community, tracking a word, tracking a conference, following a professional, teaching grammar, rule based writing, maximizing a teachable moment, public notepad and writing assignments.

The online daily mewsmagaizine, Inside Higher Ed, has published 73 articles, blogs, etc., on Twitter, the most recent on August 19,2010, which relates to cell phone use.   This article presents a new initiative in which a university provided the following:

Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cell phones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours
Is this not great or what?  Gwinnett is taking a great leap off the cliff into the future ….hopefully not an initiative ahead of it’s time !!  I am including this here because Microblogging and smart phones go hand in hand!

On July 26, 2010 Business Week published an article on MBA schools and Twitter. With increased use of Twitter and Facebook schools are adding courses on Social Media at a record pace.    Twitter is being used by many companies for marketing, and special offers, one of my favorites to follow is Dell.

As I was doing research for this blog I came across Rachel Rueben’s The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher
Education at the following link: http://files.meetup.com/1491352/social-media-in-higher-education.pdf

In her guide she conveys that higher education is using Twitter as follows:

Of the 42 responders reporting to have an official Twitter account for their college, 50% of them say it is updated by their marketing/communications/public relations office. 50% use it to communicate with current students, and the other half use it to reach out to alumni. The majority update their status 1-4 times/week.

On May 20,2010, Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa, conveyed the following uses of Twitter in an eLearn Feature Article. (the results are based upon a Faculty Focus survey of 1900 academics)

• collaboration (between colleagues, in group meetings)
• communication
  • between teacher and student, student and student, teacher and parents
  • as a conference backchannel
  • for job posting
  • to circulate department news
• tools
  • as a personal learning environment/personal learning network
  • as a virtual office
  • to post assignments
  • for language learning
  • for class participation
  • to track attendance
  • to stay abreast of current issues in a given field

In May of 2010 Pearson released the details of their survey on the use of Social Media in education and the findings are as follows:

• Most faculty respondents (59%) have more than one social network account; nearly 25 percent have accounts on four or more social networks.

More findings can be found on the Pearson website. An article in the May 4,  2010 of Inside Higher Education summarizes the findings of this survey.   In a nutshell though we can speculate that professors and students are not quite the luddites that they appear to be, that there is a purpose for  twitter and other social networking tools in the classroom and in higher education.

The articles notes that:   In the open-ended portions of the survey, a substantial number of professors said they do not currently use social media tools but expect they will in the near future — meaning that by next year, the rate of usage will probably be even higher…. What this means to me is that if the utility of tools such as Twitter provide a convenience in communicating with students, assist them to meet the learning outcomes, and connecting with the faculty it will be implemented!  If Twitter provides a means of effectively conducting administrative tasks such as keeping attendance it will be effectively applied by faculty and used by students.

Open Education Resources, Open Knowledge, Open Textbooks, Open Access, Open Source, Open Courseware,  these are all terms that define the revolution in how we access information, who has access, and what we access.  This revolution was driving by the technology that underpins the Internet and provides ubiquitous access to the world’s knowledge, information and resources.

I have spent that last couple of months discovering reports, websites, and journals that focus on “open” in the area of knowledge, education and information.  It was no surprise to me when the New Media Consortium cited Open Courseware as a short term trend in their 2010 Horizons report.   I have written about openness in previous blogs so I hope this posting does not prove redundant.

The history of providing information and access to information to the people has been well chronicled from the printing press forward.  Providing access to university course materials, academic lectures, learning objects and public domain materials via the web is, in my opinion another key milestone in our history.  The benefit is that giving the gift of knowledge to the world will allow for improvement in our lives, work and the world.  The mind of many is greater than the mind of one as other review, discuss and build upon our knowledge.

Providing access to courses via the MITs, Yale, Princeton, and others provides us all with a better perspective of what is excellent teaching, access to their courses to adopt (with proper credit of course) to improve ours. Access to this courseware has contributed to online institutions such as the University of the People and Peer to Peer University.

The purpose of open”ness” is not to give away the “work” of creating the open resources, but to provide open access to the knowledge base that is foundational to the creation of resources that improve learning, knowledge, and data. The analytical process of reviewing, synthesizing and presenting for discussion the work should not be free and should in some fashion be compensated by individuals and/or institutions.

Some of the reports, papers and research on open courseware I have found include:

• New Media Consortium 2010 Horizon Report
• Open Learn Research Report 2006-2008 William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Giving Knowledge for Free–Centre for Research and Innovation
• Open Educational Resources–Conversations in Cyberspace–Unesco
• International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
• Open Educational Resources in Sub Sahara Africa–Examining Network Driven Models within the context of African Development
• Open Educational Practice and resources –OLCOS Roadmap 2012
• A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement:   Achievement Challenges and New Opportunities February 2007
• Good Intentions Improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials
• Open Access in France. A State of the Art Report. 2010 report
• Report of the Working Group on Open Access and Open Educational Resources

Each of the “open” terms I listed above have varying definitions some of these are as follows:

Open Access is concerned with making digital content available free of charge
without restriction [Public Library of Science, 2006]

OAI is a new paradigm in scholarly publishing. It aims to promote models that ensure free and unrestricted access to scholarly & research journals, (retrieved from http://www.openj-gate.com/Footer/About.aspx)

Another offshoot of the openness movement is Open Knowledge: any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. We detail exactly what openness entails in the Open Knowledge Definition. The main principles are:

1. Free and open access to the material
2. Freedom to redistribute the material
3. Freedom to reuse the material
4. No restriction of the above based on who someone is (e.g. their nationality) or their field of endeavour (e.g. commercial or non-commercial)

Open education resources:  can be defined as free and open digital publications of high quality materials organized as courses that include lectures, related reading materials, snapshots of discussions, assignments, evaluations, etc. Access to these resources radically breaks down the barriers to quality education and allows everyone to access course material that is prepared and evaluated by expert.  (retrieved from http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_open_course.pdf)

Open Source:describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

Southern Europe Open Access to Science Information

Journals:

Directory of Open Access Journals We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of “open access” we take the right of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles” as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

Revues.org is a portal of journals in the humanities and social open to journals wishing to publish online the full text. Revues.org is a complete e-publishing platform and built a space dedicated to the promotion of research, open access publishing tens of thousands of scientific papers.

Open J Gate:  is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 6787 open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

The Open Education Journal is an Open Access online journal which publishes original research articles, reviews and short articles in all areas of education research and on contemporary education issues and learning, including special education.

I will not attempt to enumerate the many institutions which offer opencourseware. There are many sites which do this much better than I could.  For example the blogThe .Edu Toolbox aims to be your one stop tool shop for all the resources you need to create the blueprint and build an impressive foundation in learning.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

The International Institute of Managment IIM;

The IIM Open Courseware (OCW) experiment project provides free access to some of IIM’s most popular educational materials.  The IIM’s OCW:

• Does not require that participants register
• Does not provide access to IIM faculty
• Does not grant degrees or certificates
• Allow free use to all, as long as you provide copyright reference to “International Institute of Management www.iim-edu.org ” with and active hyperlink (for online use)

Of course there are those colleges and universities known for providing opencourseware such as MIT, Yale, Tufts, John Hopkins, as well as companies such as Novell.

Over the last several years the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have invested heavily in Open Educational Resources.  They stated that their intent was to catalyze universal access to and use of high-quality academic content on a global scale.

Lori Goetsh wrote in March 2010 that “open-access” repositories – that is,  (are) sites where scholarship and research are made freely available over the Internet. She went on to state that, “Open access helps achieve the fundamental mission of the academy – to disseminate knowledge…” (Goetsch, 2010, Change Magazine).

Is “openness” a disruptive innovation as put forth by Terry Anderson and Bridgette McConkey in the 2009 article Development of Disruptive Open Access Journals in The Canadian Journal of Higher Education.  Essentially the answer to that is yes.  Providing prevalent access to learning objects, course materials, and an understanding of how courses are designed (making education open and not a closed process).   Opening scholarly journals provides the authors with widespread access to their research allowing for a diverse review of their work, increased collaboration and further opportunities for collaborative research.  All of this allows for further innovations, innovations which will improve how we live, what we know, and how we work together…used appropriately ‘openness” and transparency improves our world, our lives, and the lives of future generations.

Feedback is consistent with the student able to monitor his / her progress.  Feedback may also come from peers and peer review.

Several reports or plans related to higher education, education technology, and online learning have been released in the last several months that indicate changes in how students learn, how they access their learning materials, and how that content is delivered.  In addition to this I will also give an overview of Millenials from the Pew Research Center.

In January 2010 the Sloan Consortium released their report on online education.  This report indicates that online experienced a growth of 17% in the last year.  Students in online classes comprise 25% of all students enrolled in higher education today, or 4.6 million students.    This 29 pages report found on the Sloan Consortium website presented the following information:

The issue of retention in online is also addressed in this report.   The question “Is retention in online harder than in  traditional face to face courses?”  This was administered via a survey of Chief Academic Officers which indicated that most were neutral on the question.  However those who agree outnumber of those who disagree.  Specifics on why this perception exists were not asked or provided.

Another report which was released by the US Department of Education is the:  Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies.  I previously blogged on this report however what this report indicates is that online learning, can,  under certain conditions,  provide better learning experiences to students.

Another study with trends to watch in distance education is theK-12 Online Learning reportfrom the Sloan Consortium. this 37 page report, based upon a survey administered to over 10,000 school districts, with a5/4% return of valid surveys,  published in January 2009 indicates that:

Most significant in regards to this report is the growth in online education which is illustrated by:

Regulators Can Help Advance / Slow Mobile Internet Evolution.

Can Facebook be used to provide content, a place for group communication and interaction for academic courses and programs…well all signs indicate a solid yes to this question.  As I have a Facebook page I decided to review sites that are relevant to certain discipline areas.    The aim of this blog is to identify sites where academics have illustrated how they use Facebook and to point you to those sites that are relevant to certain discipline areas.

I would like to hear comments from you.  Does Facebook have an application in education and if so how?  And if you are using it how are you using it?

What tools does Facebook have in place to manage classes, groups, and networking?

Facebook can deliver content in the form of photos, videos, documents that have been scanned to jpg’s, and notes:

For example a search of Facebook for “Calculus” yields:

The Calculuswebsite which is a fan site for students in Calculus and collaboration in problem solving, etc., in that area.    As recent as yesterday, March 20,2010 as I write this blog I noticed that there is a detailed response to a student’s request for help solving a problem.

Another Calculussite states:  This page is based on Mr. Morris’ Calculus 1 class at Las Positas College; however, those not in the class may find the content useful too.  This site provides flashcards based upon up coming exams that students can use as study aids.

There are professional websites such as the English Teachers Site. This club is designed as a place for English teachers to share resources and discuss teaching strategies with colleagues near and far. Share with your fellow English teachers any lesson plans, activities, must-teach novels, useful websites, videos, or books for any grade level… we’d love to hear about it! So please, post away!…

Or this site: English teachers put more thought into a novelthan the actual author did.

Computer Science Student Group: The importance of CS has never been greater. We’re discovering ways to build just about everything out of small, simple mechanisms glued together with software, so no matter what you do, CS tends to be inside. And the scope of this new CS is amazing: We’re at the center of the action in biology, nanotechnology, particle physics. If society is ever going to slash medical costs, CS will play the key role. I see CS as a sort of universal science. We’re beginning to pervade everything.

Mathematics the Language of the Sciences: group is intended for people who enjoy solving and/or contemplating mathematical, physical, engineering problems, and who enjoy going beyond and study the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics.  If you’re a mathematics, computer science, statistics, actuarial science, engineering major or you just love Mathematics, if you love to inquire about the philosophy of mathematics, or if you have any question in the field of Mathematics, then this is the group for you.

Health Informatics: This group joins interested people in Health Informatics, Medical Informatics, Healthcare IT, HIT – Health Information Technology, HIM – Health Information Management, HIS – Health Information Systems, Hospital Information Systems, CDSS – Clinical Decision Support Systems, EHR – Electronic Health Records, EMR – Electronic Medical Records, PACS – Picture Archiving and Communication Systems, DICOM – Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine, and many other related sciences and topics.

There are sites such as the 100 ways to use Facebook in the Classroom The Facebook Classroom: 25 Facebook Apps That Are Perfect for Online Education, or  this facebook site.

Application are available in Facebook such as the courses application which will allow  you to:

Courses

Display your courses on your profile for college or high school, find classmates, manage your schedule and assignments, create discussions, post notes, and form exclusive study groups. Welcome to Courses on Facebook.   You can use your Facebook course site as a “live syllabus” which will allow you to post assignments, communicate deadlines, deliver content, especially real time news feeds,  and facilitate discussions.

There is also a Files application which allows you to upload documents, photos, videos and pull informatin from your profile.

Is there an application in Pedagogy that Facebook lends itself to?  If so what is that?

Of course there is the relatively new and as yet evolving theory of connectivism:  a learning theory for the digital age,” has been developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes based on their analysis of the limitations of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism to explain the effect technology has had on how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn.^[1] Donald G. Perrin, Executive Editor of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning says the theory “combines relevant elements of many learning theories, social structures, and technology to create a powerful theoretical construct for learning in the digital age.”^{[1]  (  Retrieved from Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism_%28learning_theory%29, Connectivism a learning theory for the digital age http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm, wikiveristy)}

Social Learning theory:  that focuses on the learning that occurs within a social context. It considers that people learn from one another, including such concepts as observational learning, imitation, and modeling.

Social Learning Theory; Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences. The component processes underlying observational learning are: (1) Attention, including modeled events (distinctiveness, affective valence, complexity, prevalence, functional value) and observer characteristics (sensory capacities, arousal level, perceptual set, past reinforcement), (2) Retention, including symbolic coding, cognitive organization, symbolic rehearsal, motor rehearsal), (3) Motor Reproduction, including physical capabilities, self-observation of reproduction, accuracy of feedback, and (4) Motivation, including external, vicarious and self reinforcement.  (retrieved from http://tip.psychology.org/bandura.html, 3/23/2010)

Action Learning: is an educational process whereby the participant studies their own actions and experience in order to improve performance. This concept is close to learning-by-doing and teaching through examples and repetitions.  Action learning is done in conjunction with others, in small groups called action learning sets or two-in, two-out team. It is proposed as particularly suitable for adults, as it enables each person to reflect on and review the action they have taken and the learning points arising. This should then guide future action and improve performance.  (retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_learning, 3/23/2010)

Action Learning: is a process of inquiry, beginning with the experience of not knowing ‘what to do next’, and finding that answers are not available through current expertise. When expertise fails to provide an answer, collaborative inquiry with fellow learners who are undergoing the same questioning experience is always available. To be effective, this partnership in learning needs to be both supportive and at the same time challenging, deeply caring yet questioning. Such partnerships actually create themselves when different people with different ideas engage whole-heartedly with each other to resolve each others’ problems.  (retrieved from What’s Action Learning 3/23/2010)

The use of Facebook and the potential of it is yet to be explored and documented fully as illustrated in this study by Schroeder and Greenbowe  who stated that “at the very least, the data suggest that students will use Facebook as an alternate mode of communication, particularly when deadlines approach. The results of this study may best be viewed as a case study, showing that for this specific group of students, Facebook proved to be a good medium for communication in the sense that students would use it.” (retrieved online http://gator.uhd.edu/~williams/AT/ChemOfFB.htm 3/23/2010)   Harris noted that the “growing influence demonstrates that the utilization of SNS can expand the dialogue outside of the classroom or campus, build better communication channels with students and may be valuable as a supplemental recruitment tool in higher education…” (Retrieved from   http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WMX/is_18_25/ai_n30956801/, 3/23/2010)  Heiberger and Harper illustrate the application of Facebook and benefits to the students as:  Facebook gives them opportunities to learn about and self select into programs and services beneficial to them…. Facebook can help students simplify and prioritize their choices, manage their time wisely, and be aware of the wide variety of options available to them on campus…”  (retrieved from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Chapter%202%20-%20Facebook%20and%20Student%20Engagement.pdf  3/23/2010)

In conclusion it is evident that the use of Facebook may prove to be beneficial to students as a source of information, tutoring and collaboration as illustrated by the Calculus sites provided, it may serve as a discussion networking site for professional development, and even a connection for future employment opportunities as demonstrated by the Computer Science sites.

There are a variety of communication, content and networking tools available through Facebook such as the files and courses application, and are worth exploring.

For sharing videos with a distributed group you may want to check outSynchTube.
synchtube allows you to create rooms to share synchronzied YouTube videos.
This means everyone in the room is viewing the same video at the same time!                       The built in chat allows you to even discuss the best parts, or share other videos.
Watch videos with friends, or even DJ music with the social playlists — it is up to you

Masher looks like another great site to provide a “mash up” of your videos, photos, music or audio recordings.

These tools and many others like them can make your course development easier, allow you to move away from text based content to video and audio, and finally break that umbilical chord to the publisher’s power points.

These tools can also provide for greater student to student interaction, student to faculty interaction, and student to content interaction. (Tello, Louis, 2008; Lawlor, D., 2008;Disalvio, P. 2008) These interactions have also been demonstrated to be essential to student retention in the review of the literature and are also standards reviewed using the Quality Matters Rubric®.

The following is a synthesis of observations of three resources on virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, and how this medium can be applied to education, training, and learning. This is my initial presentation using these resources, it is a “mash-up” if you will, to determine if these is a common theme or thread that can be identified and defined as a best practice(s) in using Second Life for education. The three sources I have identified for this initial paper are: Commentary: Virtual Planning and the Online Studio by Justan B. Hollander, David Thomas from the Journal of Planning Education and Research 2009, Avatars, People and Virtual Worlds, Foundations for Research in the Metaverse, Alanah Davis, John Murphy, Dawn Owens, Depepak Khazanchi and Ilze Zigurs, in the February 2009 Journal of Virtual Worlds Research and finally Thomas Malaby’s book Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life.

A review of the Malaby’s book is helpful. Malaby does a fine job of exposing the inner workings of Linden Labs, the history and the culture of the business. It is in this context the mission, the vision and the overall philosophy of Linden Labs that one can begin to design a strategy for applying the use of Second Life as a learning environment. In determining the appropriate use of Linden Labs in education presenting the mission of Second Life/Linden Labs seems key: “It is our mission to connect us all to an online world that advance the human condition.” Another, what I term “philosophical statement’ identified by Malaby is “The eye observes the world, the hand shapes it. For this reason many cultures embrace the eye-in-hand as a symbol of creation that springs from knowledge as do we. Take it as your invitation to create a Second Life that inspires ever more wonder, ever more imagination.” In the context of two statements it is little wonder that Second Life is finding itself as the virtual world of choice for educators. After all what is the purpose of education but to inspire wonder and create motivation for individuals to seek more knowledge and create more knowledge?

Holland and Thomas sought to pursue answers to the following concerns:

Furthermore the question may be asked in this context: Can learning be designed in virtual worlds to provide a sense of engagement and presence that maybe lacking in a “traditional learning management system?”

The methodology of this research required that students keep journals, observations, end of semester course evaluations, with both closed and open ended questions. The students were also asked to wrote a final essay evaluating their learning experiences using Second Life. Finally the 71 students involved in the program were required to address a last essay question detailing their experiences in Second Life. The findings of this research were based upon the following:

This study sought to address the benefits of using Second Life in these specific areas:

Ultimately the researchers noted that the “biggest strength of Second Life is also its biggest weakness,” this being the unstructured environment this world provides. This lack of structure which may prove to be a barrier to some also proves to provide an environment that facilitates invention and creativity. In providing a 3D environment for learning what sort of advantages does Second Life offer beyond programs such as Sketchup and AutoCad? The authors noted that ..”Such programs pale in that regard in comparison with what Second Life offers: it creates a forum for exploring planning and design as social interactions and processes, rather than as simply knowledge and technique. Second Life goes beyond
visualization to a unique quality: virtualization, introducing the user to a real-time virtual 3-D environment that can be a powerful learning tool.”

In the Davis, et. al., article the researchers sought to identify the following:

This article meshes well with the Holland and Thomas article because to seeks to identify strategies that facilitate team collaboration and work in the metaverse, furthermore their research seeks to identify those technical challenges that may impede the progress in these areas. The researchers identified several dimensions which are critical to facilitating teamwork in the virtual environment these are: presence, communication, technology, rendering, interaction, and team process. Each of these are defined as:

Presence:

In review it is evident that it was not the mission of Linden Labs/Second Life to provide the design or game design to users to address and solve problems. Instead Linden Labs provides the means to allow user to be creative in designing their own space, groups, communicating, and games. The user has to stratgize how to implement these. It goes without saying that in achieving this aim users are challenged, the platform is sometimes not malleable in meeting these demands, however there is evidence of success. Recognition goes to those users who are savvy enough to use the tools available to them to be creative, to be innovative and develop a learning environment that meets the needs of their students. In reflection I now recognize that Second Life will not give you a “cookie cutter” approach to addressing the needs for presence, communication, technology, how to develop teams and team processes..but will provide you with the tools and the expectation that you, as user, will design those aspects to best meet your needs.