A rant about education in SL

Followed a link to a blog about the use of SL in education. Some of the links on that page do indicate that people are using SL in innovative ways, but a lot of others are simply replicating their classrooms in SL and using the platform as a virtual classroom.

This is SUCH a waste. SL has the potential to offer people an interactive, 3D space in which they can be active and doing, thinking, interacting with the environment. You can set up places which can be explored, puzzles to be solved, where things are learned in an active and not a passive way. If you are just replicating a classroom in SL, you're not taking advantage of the amazing potential of SL for learning.

When people talk about changing education, they generally mean twiddling with the system -- adding in some new technology here, adding some personal project work there. Because nearly every adult has been through the school system, it seems normal and natural to them. I am an intelligent person and it didn't even occur to me to question the received wisdom that children are better off and learn more in schools, until I started to really think about what was going on.

I make no apoligies for lifting the following facts directly from one of Professor Roland Meighan's essays on education (which are a delight and written in an easy style). This one is here. he says:

As a young teacher, I came across this learning league table from National Training Laboratories, Bethel , Main USA. It ranked a number of learning systems on the basis of how much the learners remembered.

		Average retention rate
	Formal teaching	5%
	Reading	10%
	Audio-visual	20%
	Demonstration	30%
	Discussion Group	50%
	Practice by doing	75%
	Teaching others	90%
	Immediate use of learning	90%

If you look at that chart, you will see that formal teaching offers the worst retention rate. Immediate use of learning, the best. That's what SL can do -- it can offer a variety of ways to allow you to set up interactive experiences to practise by doing, to make immediate use of learning, and to discuss what is learned.

When I first came into SL, people knew this for internal SL building and scripting courses too. Classes run by instructors were usually held on a large deck which allowed you to do things for yourself, following the instructions, in places where there were a lot of free prims and low lag. There are some interactive exhibitions, like Jopsy's particle laboratory and the Ivory Tower of Primitives building tutorial, which allow people to learn in an interactive way, without an instructor.

However, nowadays, a lot of the classes follow the classroom form, and can't allow the students at the tutorial to do things themselves due to lag or lack of prims. It will be a great shame if that continues, I'd like to see a return to the former model. Fortunately, every day in every sandbox accross the grid you can see people in informal situations helping each other to learn how to do things, inspiring each other.

If you have an interest in alternatives in education, I highly recommend Frank Smith's Book of Learning and Forgetting and the rest of Roland Meighan's writing on the Next Learning System.

Read More