Finally – it all comes together! Midwives and SL.

So many times over the last few months I have doubted whether I would ever be able to write this post!  At midnight last Saturday I was sure it would never be written but thanks to some awesome teamwork that saw the SLENZ development team put in some very long hours on Sunday, I am here!  I am hoping that this will be the first of many such posts because finally…. finally….. I was able to watch and listen in as the first of the midwifery students used the birth centre we have built for them on Kowhai. 

The phone rang, the midwife headed to the office to answer it and the ensuing conversation between her and the expectant mother unfolded.  Of course there was laughter, of course someone got stuck in a wall for a minute or two, of course someone else crashed, of course lag and slow connection speeds interfered initially BUT……when I first joined the group, the first words I heard were,  “This is so much FUN…..”

And that after all is part of the delight of creating learning experiences in Second Life – it is fun, it is learning without being aware of the learning process.  As Sarah, our midwifery lead educator said in the debrief afterwards to the student role-playing the midwife ” You have just done what I was doing in the real world not two hours ago.  I was sitting in my office here at the birth unit, talking to a woman who was in the early stages of labour.  I was asking her the same questions that you asked your role-playing colleague, I was assessing her needs, providing reassurance, making suggestions.  “ 

 To the student midwives, this is perhaps the closest they will get for a while to the ‘real’ world and for them it seemed real but it also allowed them to make mistakes, ask for reassurance from Sarah and for both of them to learn from her instruction and guidance.  It was exciting for the students, exciting for Sarah who has laboured (pun intended!) for so long in developing these scenarios and exciting for me who had doubted for some weeks that we would ever be able to make it happen.

So a huge THANK YOU to the whole team for making this happen and an even bigger THANK YOU to the students who last night made it all worthwhile.

For information about the birth unit and instructions on how to use it please see the pages that Sarah has provided on wikiEducator.

Project Development Roadmap

Our current thinking on the process of developing our SL learning activities can be found here in the SLENZ  Project Development Roadmap.  This is by no means a finished document! Plenty of thinking, refining and developing to do yet but this is our baseline.  All comments welcome

SLENZ Project Development Roadmap – Background

This section provides a little background to the Development Roadmap. Please see the other postings for details of the three main phases.  If you would like a copy of the whole document please leave me a message and I will get it to you.

The Framework.
We considered that essentially the initial design and development of a project lent itself to three major phases outlined below. Each stage of each project would progress through all of the phases. However, as each stage would be building on the work of the previous one, some of the previous thinking and work would be reused. There will be further phases including testing and evaluation of the completed activity (still to be added).
The Roles
Project Leader, Phase Leader, Learning Designer, Lead Developer,Lead Educator, Tester, Evaluator.

Phase 1. Develop the Conceptual Understanding

Purpose:

This provides high level view of what the the project should achieve and why, the scope, the context, the participants, the method, the budget and the timeframe.  It may also include the measures by which success may be evaluated. In general it answers questions of the nature of – what is the general purpose of the project, who will be involved, why are we doing it etc.  This phase is the basis for all the stages and helps to identify what those stages will be, however it will be re-visited at the start of each new stage to confirm that all contextual information is in place for the stage.

Phase Leader:  Lead Educator

Suggested activities:

The activities for this phase are concerned with capturing the views of a number of external stakeholders (students, staff, institution, external bodies etc.) as well as prompting thought and discussion on what the overall learning experience is intended to achieve and for whom.  Any method may be used to capture this information but the following are current suggestions:

• use blog postings to put forward ideas and to collect comments from others
• An audio recording of a meeting between staff (and students?) talking about their context
• Use voicethread.com for more or less the same thing

The result of these conversations, however they are held, need to be summarised to capture the essential information and it is preferable that this summary takes the form of a document that can be readily shared by all interested parties.  Where a formal proposal has been written, the information within it will also be an important part of the contextual information.

Any more suggestions here?

Required information:

• The rationale behind the proposed learning experience
• The rationale behind using Second Life as all or part of the proposed learning experience

• Identification and description of type (level etc) of students who are the target for the proposed learning experience
• Identification of stakeholders and their thinking on the proposed learning experience
• Identification of the learning outcomes covered by the proposed learning experience and the courses that they sit within
• Description (general) of the learning outcomes
• Identification of the staff who will contribute to the development of resources, including Lead Educator
• Identification of the staff who will be involved with the delivery of the proposed learning experience
• Identification of the training needs of such staff
• Identification of important dates within the proposed development of the learning experience (e.g. date for final delivery, date for final testing, dates for end of stages etc.)
• Identification of probable resource need (e.g. land in SL, time for design of the learning activities, time for the design and construction of the relevant resources etc.)
• Identification of any potential obstacles to the successful delivery of the proposed learning experience
• Identification and initial description of the stages in which the development will be built (if appropriate).

What else is needed?

Final Document:  Context Summary Document

This document is intended to act as a brief record of the work undertaken within this phase.  It should be as succinct as possible.
The items bulleted under ‘required information’ could act as a heading structure for the document. Under each heading would appear the final outcome of the conversations that have taken place.  Some of this content would also have been collected from the formal proposal.

Phase 2. Develop the Learning Narrative

Purpose:

This phase deals with the design of the learning experience and the activities that it contains.  This phase will be repeated for each stage of the project and identify where it is building on work from the previous stage.

Building on the work of the previous phase and using the Context Summary as a base, this phase will identify and describe, in some detail, the actual learning activities that will take place in support of the specified learning outcomes. One major purpose of this is to identify the resources that will be required.

The phase is mostly concerned with identifying what will happen and to some extent how it will happen. The phase will help to identify all the resources that are required to construct the activities required by the learning experience.  This will include resources such as lesson plans, online student material, video etc as well as, in general terms, the items that are required within Second Life, for example: a birthing unit, an interview room etc..

It primarily answers the questions around ‘What will this learning activity require?‘ and collects all relevant information about the content of the activity.  It describes what the students and the educators will do, how they will interact and how the students will be supported.  From this description, a list of necessary resources can be derived.  At this stage the resources may just be identified and listed but not described in significant detail.

Phase Leader: Learning Designer

Suggested activities:

help pls!

Required information:

The phase needs to capture the following information for the stage under consideration :

• a comprehensive list of the resources that will be required by the learning activity.
• a description of the preferred form for those resources (e.g. SL activity, video, lesson plan on a wiki etc..)
• a description of how the resources will be used (i.e. who will interact with them and in what manner)
• a description of how the resources will interact with each other (e.g. this object will provide this information, i.e. the “Bowl of Fruit” will provide information on nutrition during normal labour)
• identification of existing resources that will be used (or re-used) (e.g. the water pool from stage 1 now requires an animation).
• identification of source for non-SL resources (e.g. wiki content to be created by Lead Educator, 2 minutes of machinima on construction of birthing unit required from SL team for the video etc…)

I am sure it needs to include other things – help pls

Final Document:  Learning Design Document

Once again the bulleted list of required information could provide the structure and headings for the final document.

We need to remember (and capture the information about) that at times external resource builders will need to provide content to the SL developers (e.g. content of notecards) and vice versa, e.g. SL snapshots or machinima.

Would this work? I think it works for the technical design but what else would be useful for others? Advice pls

Phase 3. Develop and Implement the Technical Design

Purpose:

This phase deals with the design of all the resources required by the learning activities of the stage both those in and out of SL.  This phase will be repeated for each stage of the project and identify where it is building on work from the previous stage.

The purpose for this phase is to ensure that all resources needed to create the learning experience are identiifed, designed effectively and constructed.  Based on the learning activity or activities identified in the Develop the Learning Narrative phase, and on the list of required resources derived from that, this phase is primarily concerned with the questions around ‘How will we fulfill these requirements?‘ and documents the final answers to those questions. It thus considers the design of all the resources that are required for the final construction both those that will be built in SL and those that won’t.

Phase Leader: Lead Developer

Suggested activities:

• Identify the list of all elements from the Learning Design document that will be constructed in SL
• Identify the components of those elements (initially at high level only)
• Identify where content is required from outside of the SL development team
• Identify elements that already exist and/or which need a) construction b) adaptation c) additions
• Identify technical aspects of the build that need to be investigated (e.g. the need for a server service to stream live video/audio, need for a host for reliable storage of video to display (YouTube or ?) etc..)

Although the responsiblity of the development team, the identification of the necessary resources will need on-going discussion with the Learning Designer and Lead Educator to determine the exact nature of the resources (e.g. which texture to use for external walls)

What else is needed?

Required information:

The following list will be constructed as the technical design and build progresses.

• comprehensive list of all elements
• detail of interaction between human and constructed element
• detail of interaction between elements
• naming standard/convention used
• versions
• back up information (where, when and how to retrieve)
• comprehensive list of all ‘global’ atoms used (e.g. scripts to report on content of elements, textures used across elements and/or projects)

What else is needed?

Final Document(s):

The Technical Design Specification will begin as a working document that initially lists the high level components identified as required in the previous phase (e.g. birthing unit).  Following any conversations to clarify what is needed, the construction work and the on-going documentation of the various elements, sub-elements and atoms begins and is recorded as the construction progresses.

The final version of the working document is the eventual Technical Design Specification document and should act as a comprehenisve record of everything that has been built in SL.  The eventual number of atoms is likely to run into thousands (even without considering versions) each one needs to be identified and identifiable.

The External Resource Design Spec could work in a similar fashion perhaps? How will we do this? Who should be responsible for it?

SLENZ Project Development Roadmap

Much of my time over the last few weeks has been concerned with attempting to bring together disparate needs and views into a workable process for the development of a learning experience which is primarily but not completely delivered in Second Life. The process has been tough at times! but then the task is complex and there is very little previous experience or best practice reports to draw on.

Our literature review highlighted the need for good documentation and well considered design of the learning activity as well as the need for the technical development to be ‘agile’ in its approach. I will be posting the final outcome of our various discussions on here over the next few days (weeks!) and start with the document we are calling the Devleopment Roadmap which sets out the basic processes and documentation as we currently view them. The document is not yet complete by any means and I welcome any and all comments on it!

I am going to post each section as a separate posting to make it easier for you to comment on it! I am always hopeful *grins!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License.

Designing and creating SL ‘builds’

One of the interesting issues that the SLENZ project has highlighted is just how do you go about creating a complex build in SL with several developers in an organised and systematic way.  As good IT developers we are always thinking of what methodologies, techniques etc to use.  Of course, SL builds have their own levels of complexity incorporating code, objects, textures, sounds, animations and interactions and as far as we can tell no one has yet described a good way of managing the development of these. (If anyone has I would love to know!).

Therefore we have had a first go at putting together some initial thoughts on the priniciples, processes and techniques that we might use for an educational build and they can be found here on the SLENZ blog.  Would love to have useful comments back about what we are proposing!

Catching up with SLENZ

I was horrified when I saw yesterday how long it was since I made a posting on this blog!  I can only blame it on having been so busy with the SLENZ project that I haven’t had time to write about it.  John Waugh has been blogging about SLENZ though and many other related things too

It has been an exciting time for the project.  We had a number of excellent proposals for pilot projects to be supported by SLENZ and great difficulty in choosing the two that we would work with.  We were very tempted to go with three pilots but our Project Steering Group, very wisely I am sure, encouraged us finally to go with only two! At least that way we know that we can fund them!  The pilots will be announced tomorrow and I am looking forward to working on them……after all the talk and the preparation, it will be soooo good to finally be building something real!

The literature review is almost complete and is with two external reviewers – we await there feedback with great interest.  It was a real challenge to try to bring together useful literature especially when there is so little as yet published in ‘academically recognised’ publications.  We made the decision that we had to include many non-traditional courses of information, such as blogs, mailing list postings and personal communications.  Even though they are not peer-reviewed as such, they include so many useful thoughts and guides to good practice, that to ignore them would have rendered the literature review fairly worthless in terms of informing the project.  It was particularly noticeable that much of the published research, although only a year or so old, was already out of date in terms of the where the technology is currently at.  It became clear, to me at least, that the lag between the conduct of research and its publication (often a problem in IT generally) is a major issue when attempting to gather valid data on a very rapidly evolving technology.  I wonder if there is a way of creating a ‘peer-review’ equivalent for blogs! It may be exactly what we need.

Speaking of believable blogs and bloggers,  I am always impressed by Steven Warburton’s Liquid Learning blog and try to check it out as frequently as I can.  His current posting, while both amusing and highly pertinent (I immediately recognised the herding cats situation he described!) gives some very useful ideas on how to ensure a successful tour of SL.  Compuslory reading if you are thinking of doing the same!

An opportunity for NZ educators…..

Today saw the issue of a very special request for proposals! Special if you happen to be interested in teaching in Second Life that is, and especially if you are currently teaching in a New Zealand tertiary institution.  The SLENZ project was set up to design, develop, build and pilot learning activities that could add educational value to the experience of NZ tertiary students. In order to do this, the project team needs to work with at lest two groups of NZ tertiary educators, preferably spread across the sector and with access to a reasonable number of students (not too many and not too few!).

Today the SLENZ team issued their call for proposals from educators who would like to work with the development team.  Full details are here .  Realising that there may well be individuals out there with a passion but, as yet, no community, the SLENZ team are happy to help put individuals in touch with each other in the hope of creating a working team.  So if you are interested just get in touch with either Terry Neal (terry.neal@blendedsolutions.co.nz) or with Clare Atkins (clare.atkins@nmit.ac.nz) or of course just leave a comment on this blog and I will get back to you

John Waugh has also posted about this today on the SLENZ blog.