Learning Innovation Research Group

Professor Maggi Savin-BadenLearning Innovation Research Group,

Coventry University

National Workshop on Learning in Immersive Virtual

Worlds in Higher Education

Learning Innovation Research Group

1) Research - Problem-based Learning - Immersive worlds - Threshold concepts - Writing development - Research methods

2) Development: support, innovation, facilitation - Problem-based Learning - Immersive worlds

The team

1) CURLIEW Coventry University Research into Learning in Immersive Educational Worlds Leverhulme funded project

2) Reusable machinima JISC-funded project

3) PBL scenarios for Second Life Liverpool Medical Deanery

Current SL Projects

(Coventry University Research into Learning in Immersive Educational Worlds)

Learning Innovation Applied Research Group Leverhulme-funded project (£513,000)

To examine staff and students’ conceptions of and decisions about the way in which they teach and learn at the socio-political boundaries of reality.1. Students’ experiences of learning in immersive worlds.2. Pedagogical design. 3. Learner identity.

CURLIEW

Reusable Machinima1. Child nursing2. Issues in the workplace3. Ethnicity and diversity4. Health and social care management

What is going on here today?1) PIVOTE strand2) Theatre and Performance3) Language learning in SL4) Preparing students5) Technology tips: Sloodle, VPs,6) Exemplars: engineering, sims, crisis management7) Stuckness

8) Design issues: innovations

• Virtual spaces, embodiment and presence• Multimodality, practices and identity work • Pedagogic potential/affordances• Institutional semiotics of SL• Emotion, immersion and proxemics• Need for criticality and qualitative inquiry

Areas of inquiry on the move . . .

Some thoughts . . .Right now are we just inside a computer programme?

Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self

This isn’t real?

What is real? How do you define real? If you were talking about what you can feel, what you can small, and taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

The Matrix suggests the possibility that the deletion of our digital identities could turn us into ‘non-persons’ . . .

but perhaps a more accurate idea would be one of becoming changelings, rather than deletions

One of the most well known examples is the changeling boy in Midsummer Night’s Dream over whom Oberon and Titania fight (Shakespeare, 1590)

He exists at the borderlands of human and fairy kind.

The play itself explores issues at the margins - where power and rules change and often breakdown

Perhaps SL identities, like the changeling boy in the play, are seen as insubstantial components of

learning in higher education, but are at the same time sources of conflict and

locations of indeterminacy for those who teach in the borderlands.

• Perhaps . . .• Perhaps not –perhaps we might find out today!