Technology, Education, & The Future

Several years ago, while Assistant Professor in Education at Montana State University - Northern, I wrote a chapter for Ali Jafari’s “Handbook of Research on ePortfolios” entitled “Future-focused ePortfolios”. It described the ePortfolio system that we had started - collecting evidence of meeting standards and trying to provide personal ownership over the portfolios so students would find intrinsic value within them for formative assessment purposes — and the challenges of trying to do both at the same time. Futzing around trying to untangle the multiple presentation and audience purposes of the ePortfolio… I had the increasing suspicion that one of the more powerful applications of these tools was going largely amiss: While many scholars, educators, and others - including students themselves - have discovered the longitudinal assessment value of collecting rich multi-media evidence of learning over time… perhaps the greatest potential for ePortfolios in our era is to connect that growing Personal Historical Learning Consciousness (to coin a phrase) to a rich, Personal Futures Learning Consciousness. I don’t believe that the ePortfolio community - nor futurists - have explored that notion much.
Sure, there are lots of portfolios (”e”, or not) that state goals. Many have benchmarks that are sought after - many times in the form of the programmatic goals or standards: e.g. “demonstrate the ability to collaborate and work effectively with your colleagues”. But having institutions set goals for you is NOT the sort of entrainment that our students need most to thrive in the 21st Century. We need people to be aware not just of events in our lives - but TRENDS. We need to impart a rich, disciplinary view that provides a perspective of changes in the bedrock of human knowledge. We need to provide that enhanced Time Perspective that comes with it, a sense of the collection of events unfolding along a particular trajectory and the ability to project forward into it to determine the possible, probable, and preferable futures. We need students to learn to artfully choose and proactively enact so as to be an agent OF the future. A future-focused ePortfolio could assist people to gain that perspective despite the challenges that:

• The future is surprising and beyond our capacity to predict.
• The future for us today is very different than the future was for most people in ages past.
• We largely assume - wrongly - that tomorrow will be pretty much like today.

I believe that the biggest deterrent for people today is not that the future is too messy and we can’t figure it out (so why bother?) - but rather, that we are entrenched in Euclidean Thinking, Industrial Age bureaucracies, and other Time Perspective-entraining organizational efficiencies that put a boot on our necks, preventing us from being able to SEE what’s on the horizon. These organizational and cultural mechanisms were hatched during a time when change wasn’t happening so quickly - and so, were framed as VERY successful means for us to predict, control, and process our goals and plans. But now - they only work to a point - and then they act as the liability, themselves. We need learning technologies that allow people to surpass these Time Perspective entrenching habits.
If we gave people adequate mechanisms for them to document their Time Perspective as they followed their own goal-setting and trend-spotting in areas important to them (and connected, through Web 2.0, trends and events tangential to their interest area - but ultimately inter-related), people could start to recognize the deep flaws in their assumptions about how change is affecting their plans. As they reflect, over time, on how their plans get thwarted by the seeming “chaos” of the increasingly complex future, people may have the epiphany that their very way of FRAMING the future and working on their image of what the future Is (or rather, will be, I should say), I think ePortfolios can provide an essential task for learners of all types in the 21st Century. We just don’t yet have the substantive architecture for creating those Deep Learning connections between what a student has learned over time - and the future that the students are inheriting.

Jeremy Kemp and I (and now, some others) have done some work on the Virtual Portfolio idea: extending the traditional ePortfolio processes (collection, selection, reflection, connection, interjection, etc.) into 3D Virtual Space. I think that with some work, the use of 3D Virtual Worlds could assist learners to expand their future consciousness. The use of malleable 3D spaces (like Second Life) might allow the modeling of personal trends and events in ways that allow the learner to perceive and make the connections necessary for their entrenched Now-Based Time Perspective to shift toward a Future Frame. Whether using the Virtual Space as a means to create artifacts that then go into a traditional web-based portfolio, or the 3D World acts as the container, itself, for the collection of evidence that a learner amasses over time (and reflects on the future we hope) - Second Life’s much-anticipated “HTML on a Prim” might really be the door opening toward this exciting possibility.

 Hey, the future is at hand! Open the door!

Future Consciousness is, to my way of thinking, tantamount to “wisdom” in the 21st Century. Future Consciousness is probably the most advanced form of human thought that we have. By most measures it’s not something that most people gain until in their early-to-mid-twenties… if ever. Alas, some folks never do gain the ability to look beyond the bugs on the windshield. In a world as fast-paced and interconnected and complex as ours, being able to project possibilities and probabilities - while determining what would be most preferable is a sort of virtue.

There are a lot of dimensions that combine to create this construct of “future consciousness” - and it’s often something that seems to arrive… only to slip away again. But in addition to the various projects that I have at work that contribute to learning and my own personal and family futures… here are a few things that I’ve been doing lately:

(a) Future Consciousness Strategy: slowing down … just as having a healthy Historical Consciousness is a necessary precursor to a future focus (it is the disease of “presentism” that kills Time Perspective), so is always living in the Fast Lane. Moderation in all things - including moderation, like my Pops always says.

(b) Integrating web 2.0 into my everyday life more, as inspired lately by Stephen Downes in his “Web 2.0 and your own learning and development”. Thought provoking, inspiring, and very true. Thank you, Stephen, for a much needed boost.

(c) Getting ready to go through my Del.icio.us Collection of Future-focused Scaffolds: http://del.icio.us/Jonathon_Richter/Future_Focused_Scaffolds … there are a number of tools here that I believe are useful for students and others to “engineer” their engaged environments to assist them to look toward the horizon in more appropriate ways.

(d) Renewing my pledge to stick around and continue my affiliation with professional futures groups… I have just completed the initial stage of development of a new futures-education portal at MERLOT for the World Futures Studies Federation. I had, feeling overly committed to so many projects and areas of research interest, seriously considered in the last several years of weaning away my Futures Education commitments. I am now feeling that this was not the correct way to frame things, strategically. Education and the subject of the “future” are just too intimately connected in theory - yet sadly disaggregated and decoupled in reality - to be responsibly let go of. I MUST find a way to stay involved. Professional educators, ALL - learn about and get involved with Futures Studies.

We must all work together to be more creative, distribute critical thinking strategies and timely content to learners, colleagues, friends, and family — the tools are enabling us, highlighting how important that it is that we challenge old ways of conducting business and traditions in favor of more elegant, efficient, and more powerful ways of Getting Things Done.

I’ve been pondering the emergence and proliferation of Virtual Worlds and how each “animal in the zoo” is strategically positioning itself in terms of it’s design, affordances, functionality, audience / market, etc. to occupy a nice, rich place within the evolving ecosystem of human use of and potential for such in virtual worlds. For instance, Sun Microsystems came out with an interesting piece the other day on Open Virtual Worlds - an open source answer to the proprietary benchmark set by Second Life (which has recently been repositioning itself too). It’s rumored that Google has been testing their version of a virtual space at Arizona State University - and the number of different virtual worlds that promise to immerse kids, teens, adults, and students of all stripes in spaces designed with their unique needs in mind is beginning to ping the ole radar screen with increasing frequency.

Reading about one of my favorite subjects - ecology - this one on the ecological niches of the 74 distinct bat species on the island of Barro Colorado in the Panama Canal from National Geographic (June 2007), I remembered a provocative keynote speech by always-interesting futurist Joel Arthur Barker some years ago at the World Future Society’s annual conference on the evolution of web-based businesses as compared to “gap theory” in ecology: those studies done by bio scientists (and their graduate students) in the rainforest in those areas where a hole or gap appears in the rainforest canopy - whether by fire, flood, stampedes, human machines, or other means. Looking at which species set up shop within the gap first and which ones tended to stay / dominate the gap over time - those that got into the gap first have a significant advantage, he relayed to the crowd of early adopters. Barker’s point had something to do with those businesses that set up shop early and also worked out a complete set of DNA as best they could - tended to survive and thrive longer. Problem with many dot-coms - like many virtual world environments is that they overlook that “complete set of DNA” bit - must have a strategy that will work long-term, not just shoot off but not be able to sustain itself - like the ooh and ahh of a bottle rocket. And of course the issue is just WHAT is a “complete set of DNA” in a rapidly evolving milieu? How does an organism forecast a viable niche within an increasingly interconnected, fast-paced, and complex ecology?

What is a “complete set of DNA” for a virtual world - when the use of such are yet-to-be understood or embraced, even while we hype them up, invest, experiment, and investigate?

My predilection - my soapbox - is that living systems under these conditions need to incorporate a network of orchestrated Critical-thinking, Creative problem-solving, and future-focused strategies. This is much different than those strategies that work best in times that are relatively stable from one generation to the next - where we can transmit the lessons of our grandparents down to our parents to us and on to our kids with reasonable reliability. “Wisdom” of the ages in these circumstances remains intact because the overall rules of the kettle we’re simmering in don’t change. In rapidly emergent and transcendent systems - like the WWW and Virtual Worlds, we need to balance our tried and true traditions with our “think out of the box and smash it” visionary innovations.
So I was looking at this cross-section of the rainforest illustration that depicts how the many different species of bats on that island in Panama coexist without destroying one another by taking different strata in the rainforest and occupying those niches - when I thought of Barker’s speech and connected it to the Virtual Worlds emerging techno-ecology. My “Metaverse Ecosystem” concept map, thus has four layers - roughly borrowing the idea from Natty Geo - but expanding on it metaphorically and adding a “layer” (the bats use only three (3), as typefied by the scientists):

1. The Grounded: “Grounded Virtual Worlds” will be those that are anchored in some meaningful way to the “real world/s” - a Google Virtual Earth that models the Real Earth would be an example of this. What you can do and see in these virtual worlds is intended to be as much like that encountered in the physical world (meat space) as possible. Other Grounded Virtual Worlds would be simulation engines that model occupational, learning, or physical structures intended for learning transference to situations, tasks, and skills necessary in the real world. Mapping how to learn in a virtual world such that those things better transfer to the “real” world will be a growing task for educational research, video game producers, and administrators around the world.
2. The Narrow Space: “Narrow Space Virtual Worlds” will be virtual worlds that target certain markets to occupy specific niches for particular clientele for a particular purpose. World of Warcraft would be a Narrow Space virtual world (I think)… despite being very popular and lots of fun - WoW is used for a pretty limited purpose: gaming for collaborative killing and leveling up. Other Narrow Space Virtual Worlds will evolve to meet the specific needs of artists, elementary age students in Japan, democratic discourse and conducting business, dating-sex-pornography, and creating communities around vision and purpose.
3. The Edge and Gap Space: “Edge and Gap Worlds”: Pushing the boundaries of innovation and taking advantage of the places left undefined by other virtual worlds and organizations will allow a diverse class of virtual worlds called “edge and gap worlds” to develop. Operating sometimes on the boundaries between virtual worlds as “arbiters” or “bridges” between two distinct virtual worlds within the Metaverse Ecology - or by occupying as virtual spaces those spots left undeveloped, the definitions of the “edge” and a “gap” will change over time - sometimes quite rapidly. The Sony Playstation PS3 development of “Home” could be classified as a “gap” space virtual world - taking advantage of the connected home gaming systems’ networked and better graphics card capacities. (though PS3 Home also could be classified as a “narrow” space - to wit, this “metaverse as ecology” is a typology - not a taxonomy - as different Virtual Worlds could be placed in multiple categories - but this is a way of describing the strategies and evolution of Virtual Worlds over time).
4. Open Space: Creating the public marketplace - the virtual world that acts as a “catch all” for many purposes, audiences, and media. Second Life has been successful, in my opinion, because it has for some time been this open public space for virtual worlds development and interconnection to take place. They smartly have allowed people to chat, IM, form groups, and create their own content easily.

I would like to create a nice illustration of a cross-section of a rainforest with these four (4) strata indicated by an icon that, upon mouseover, would provide the appropriate description. Do you think this is a good (i.e. useful) conceptual framework for describing Virtual Worlds?

The SaLamander Project is beginning to make some progress.

• The SaLamander Project was noted as a notable emerging “mashup” technology by the NMC’s 2008 Horizon Project Report at the EduCAUSE ELI conference in San Antonio!

• Wain had the opportunity to discuss the SaLamander Project with C.D.B. Barkley of The New Media Consortium’s Teacher’s Buzz

• “Desideria Stockton” has been using it with her students for doing Scavenger Hunts to find cool places for teaching and learning - brilliant idea (wish I had thought of that!).

• “Fleep Tuque” is starting to introduce SaLamander to incoming Second Life teachers and students - using it for a way for people to compare and contrast the various educational builds inworld.
• She has great ideas (as always!) about how to use the SaLamander HUD:
• have students use the search function by typing in a content area that they’re interested in
• if there’s not much there under a particular content area - start tagging with the SaLamander Sloog!

• People have started signing in to the SaLamander Wiki registry and made some substantive contributions. - and too much spam
• Next Steps:

• We’re going to announce categories for a SaLamander Showcase and some nominations that folks can vote for in the SaLamander Community Wiki - with the top-rated ones announced at the Second Life Community Conference in Tampa, FL in Sept ‘08.
• Provide feedback mechanisms for Second Life EDucation (SLED) builders for people to give them helpful advice on how they might improve their awesome SL learning materials.
• Beginning to design the SaLamander HUD 2.0 with input from the SLED Community.

At the request of my pal Sarah Robbins, I started blogging on the new SL-Education blog too. Here is my first post…. Hopefully I can point to myself over there being more productive than I am here. I have eight drafts of relevant articles to publish here on TEFblog that haven’t made it off the press. sigh. So much to do and so little time to write about it! Must… keep… writing!

Ran across this post on trends in Virtual Worlds and thought it pretty resonant with how things look from my perspective.

1. Many worlds on the horizon
2. Lots of development for working in virtual worlds with teens
3. Businesses continue to frame virtual worlds in the wrong way
4. Communication is a big problem
5. Corporate use of virtual worlds is about to explode
6. Selling virtual goods is a big deal
7. Mobile access to virtual worlds is a wildcard
8. Gov’t is waking up to virtual worlds
9. The line tween online games and virtual worlds is blurring
10. China is getting into virtual worlds
11. Moving between virtual worlds is a growing issue (Interoperability)
12. Advertising in virtual worlds is not yet well understood
13. Virtual Worlds need to become easier to use
14. Media Streaming is becoming easier, but is strangely low-profile
15. Social Networking convergence
16. Which brands should set up their own virtual worlds?
17. Different approaches to graphic realism
18. Booze and fags (sic)
19. Is Second Life going to stay a niche?
20. Nobody talks about sex (at the conferences)

Educators are, like businessfolk, all over the map on the use of virtual worlds for now or the future. Some are dismissive. Some are evangelical. Some see opportunities with big yellow caution flags draped all over them. I’m - as many of you know - convinced of the ultimate conclusion that these Virtual Worlds are eventually going to take over the learning enterprise (for those with access who can afford it, that is) - hopefully in ways that will take advantage of what the teacher does NOT do particularly well - and leaving the people in the “real world” to maximize face-to-face interactions with other people and nature, itself.

There’s a lot to unpack in those 20 trends. But since I am interested in taking my son to do something fun while his mom takes his sister to perform in the Nutcracker ballet - I’ll cut right to the one burning a hole through my keyboard: Communications. This is the classical problem of the information age.

• If industry representatives and EdTech professionals can’t communicate with the common layperson or teacher about what virtual worlds are and why they’re important to teaching and learning, then how can these tools (that look JUST LIKE video games) hope to be implemented by learners that need them?
• What about those working and learning and teaching in different MUVEs, themselves? Are we speaking the same language?
• Even within one world (like Second Life - the de facto exemplar for the moment), how do we identify what particular patterns for teaching and learning work well for certain populations of learners under particular contexts?
• This is a new - or maybe just rather advanced - type of sophisticated ecological question, in my opinion:
• rapidly evolving innovations in different milieu
• different ways of teaching and learning evolving WITHIN those milieu
• issues about how to communicate to those that might contribute to or benefit most from these innovations
• ways to connect the different milieu into a super-system (i.e. the MetaVerse Project)
• Niche markets springing up to serve sectors within and across these milieu.

My opinion is that we need the tools of professional futurists (don’t scoff, laypeople - ok, as you will then - to adequately assist these interdisciplinary efforts to integrate the virtual worlds in a way that makes sense. Environmental Scanning, forecasting, strategic maneuvers, and defaulting to an enhanced “futures consciousness” (the new aim of Education in the 21st Century) should be systematically layered in.

Combining the folksonomy and the taxonomy in ecologically intelligent ways - as outlined in David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” is a window into how we may derive a higher, more sophisticated order out of this chaotic soup.

Saw this post in the Chronicle of Higher Education about comments made by Peter J. Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. So yes, I think Ludlow has a few valid points and that campuses in SL could be more imaginative. Heck, LOTS of places in SL could be more imaginative: with their Sims-like rooftops, garden plazas, general recreations of office buildings, parks, and other places that we know. Why SHOULD we recreate reality in this place where we can do “whatever”?
Because it’s meaningful to people - especially the newbies. People come into SL and they start with what they know because the whole place is so disorienting and disaggregated. Gamers come in and look at it and think it’s a game (so they want to shoot, roleplay, or solve some clue) - although, as there’s is no “backstory”, they often don’t think it’s a very good game. Business folks come in and see it as a geographic place to set up shop and they build their businesses and wait for people to mosey by and drop some Lindens on ‘em (and they decry it as overhyped when their assumptions prove incorrect and folks in SL don’t obey their marketing axioms well). Others want to play house, chat, etc. But people start with roofs overhead, avatars that look like Hollywood cutout figures, and explore the world around them in ways that feel comfortable to them. Campuses are actually doing their students a BIT of a favor by not being too crazy with things right from the beginning, in my opinion - though they would do well to reserve maybe a good deal more of their land for more creative applications. Check out Boise State University’s EdTech Island, University of Cincinnati, or San Jose State’s School of Library Science’s plots - well done and NOT entirely or simply recreations.

Yes, we should be using these 3D Virtual Worlds to their maximum to enhance people’s critical thinking, creative problem solving, and future-focused learning through possible, probable, and preferable scenario building…. but ya can’t do that if you create so much cognitive dissonance in your student body at the beginning that people log off within the second hour of orientation. So while I do agree with what Ludlow says about the lack of campus potential in SL in general… I think he may have forgotten what it was like to start out in SL or what it is like for those who are not early adopters, but are rather “tentative adopters”. Some folks need to be dipped, not plunged.

Well hey there! It’s been awhile since I’ve been here to tell you what I’m up to (in no particular order):

1. Coordinating the Learning Online Research Initiative (aka, the LORI Project): empirically comparing two online courses, one specifically for students with learning disabilities, the other for struggling students but not for students with LD, per se.
2. Lead Designer of the Electronic Transitions Portfolio System: an ePortfolio for high school students with learning disabilities to prepare for life beyond secondary school. We’re using Mahara and modifying it to fit the Oregon Career-Related Learning Standards and using Universal Design for Learning Principles as interface guidelines.
3. Leading the efforts in the SaLamander Project - a developing Community of Practice for educators in the virtual 3D world of Second Life to create a collaborative “teaching commons and searchable database” (using MediaWiki) for Learning Materials - with MERLOT, Sloog, Eloise Pasteur, funded by The NorthWest Academic Computing Consortium.
4. Beginning efforts with Sun Microsystems, MERLOT, and others to create a space to compare and contrast the Learning Affordances within and across 3D Virtual Worlds using DarkStar.
5. Leading the Research Team at the Center for Electronic Studying in their part of the National Center for Supported electronic Text (NCSeT): comparing the relative efficacy of text supports (whether static illustrations or dynamic movies) to enhance the comprehension of reading in an online environment.
6. Introducing Second Life to faculty, staff, and graduate students in a series of workshops through the University of Oregon’s Teaching Effectiveness Program, called SLducks.
7. Working with Tom Lombardo to develop the World Futures Studies Federation’s Futures Education portal.

We’ve been working to get into Sun Microsystems‘ open source virtual world called DarkStar - having received a spanking new Solaris server from them as their contribution to our new collaborative partnership with MERLOT to create a “Teaching Commons” for comparing and contrasting the various 3D Virtual Worlds that are on the horizon. Once we have this all unpacked and installed, we have a number of computer science professors and students interested in getting the first peek at things - maybe getting one of them to teach using the Java-based world in the spring? The idea though, is to work toward creating a Community of Practice where folks can demonstrate and discuss what is working in different Multi-User Virtual Environments across the Metaverse.

View my profile on Virtual Worlds Connect