Immersive learning environments in parallel universes: Learning through Second Life

Opportunities for more creative and innovative environments for learners continue to develop through distance education. Especially at the post-secondary level, these immersive environments can involve high-end video game technologies to create multi-user virtual worlds that can both replicate and far extend physical classrooms. At San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science, courses offered in and through Second Life develop both competence and comfort in working with library users. Several useful lessons have also been learned. Introduction Educators who teach at a distance strive to ensure students achieve similar outcomes as those who sit in lecture halls; indeed, course syllabi for face-to-face, hybrid and distance delivery typically have the same intended learning outcomes. The implicit goals of going online are to increase flexibility for working adults while maintaining high standards. Ideally, outcomes for these radically divergent modes should be equivalent. Creating this comparable curriculum is simple for some exercises but quite complex for others. Distance educators have known for many years how to replace in-person lectures by mailing work books, hosting telephone conferences, and asking students to submit assignments by mail. More recently, digital content added richness and immediacy to lessons. Text designs were augmented with colorful animations, sound and video. Schools such as the Open University in the UK began shipping CD-ROMs with their textbooks (Jones, Kear, & Reilly, 1998)-and students came to expect immediate response from teachers even in far off states. Timeliness is no longer a function of geography but rather of psychological presence (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 1999) and transactional distance (Moore, 1993) between teacher and student. More importantly, skilled online faculty engage student communities using automated media tools to support discourse and set climates for learning. They upload documents and media files and use threaded message forums to help students reflect on content. Educators are seeking to establish learner-centered, participatory environments in a constructivist pedagogical framework. With newer technologies and newer possibilities for distance learning, these environments are part of the distributed learning communities of the institution. Entrepreneurial programs readily evaluate these promising technologies and adopt tools that show possibilities for enriching the learning process. Virtual Environments Immersive 3D worlds allow teachers to recreate a real or idealized world or to create completely new worlds, providing experiences that can help students in understanding concepts as well as learning to perform specific tasks. Reality is often quite messy, involving complex trade-offs and compromises. A virtual environment can model the complexities and uncertainty of working in the real world. This helps students develop an ability to solve high-level problems, especially problems that are poorly structured. They can carry out authentic tasks as real workers would, explore new terrain, meet people of different cultures, and use a variety of tools to gather information and solve problems. A very simple, yet deceivingly complex example is staffing a reference or information desk in a virtual academic or public library, receiving hundreds of typical real world questions each week. (Volunteers are scheduled on Inforisland.) As a discipline and as a profession, Library and Information Science (LIS) has been tremendously impacted by technology. Many LIS graduates work with younger generations of people who have spent many hours playing digital games (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005). These students are used to deeply engaging, visually dynamic, rapidly paced and highly gratifying pictorial experiences. They are also very comfortable socializing online, getting their news online, and doing research online. …