Second Life: A Kuhnian paradigm shift in higher education?
I picked up mention of myself in a keynote by Scott Diener at the Ascilite conference, 6th December 2009, in Auckland. Scott is the Associate Director, IT Services (Academic Support) at The University of Auckland. He too is interested in the cybercloud as a learning space. In a seminar last August, Scott proposed "learning in the clouds." His vision, however, is not that of eLuminate, BlackBoard, SmartBoards, nor mash-ups of Google docs, blogs, and social media. "Scott Diener has created a simulated hospital emergency room where small teams of medical and nursing students can learn to diagnose and treat patients requiring emergency treatment"1 - in Second Life.
The University of Michigan-Dearborn is leading an effort in Second Life to help students to see the point of the knowledge they are acquiring-the real-world impact that their knowledge can achieve. Hong Kong Polytechnic University holds sixteen student orientation workshops in Second Life for their 400 new freshmen who join the hotel and tourism department. Meanwhile at the University of Arizona the Timeline of Earth project is a product of 2 semesters of a non-major astronomy class at the University of Arizona. Students in the class create, research, build, and script exhibits for ’spotlight times’ during the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history all within Second Life.
What is Second Life? Think the movie "Matrix" and you will be half way home. In his blog, Scott speaks of concepts such as "free range education," while in the keynote he asked, "What happens to universities if the library no longer the protected space?"
Second Life presents a potentially Kuhnian paradigm shift in education. A vision of the professor as one who professes to have knowledge about how to find the scrolls in the new library at Alexandria - the Internet. A wise and insightful person in the agora who could help you solve a problem for a few drachma, or these days a few euros. 400 millions dollars changed hand in Second Life last year according to Scott.
What if the real future of distance education is not the model based on works for "us" as an institution - a teacher centered model - but a free range model of independent instructors in Second Life, with "graduation" being replaced by competency examinations (think Cisco Networks certification or teacher testing). Educause recently published "The Tower and The Cloud" focused on the role of higher education in an age of cloud computing. What happens to our institutions?
Ultimately Scott's argument is a numbers argument. The college admits 400 students to associate degree programs for each fall term. US President Obama has set a goal for all Americans to have at least two years of post-secondary education. That sounds about right as a goal for education on planet earth in 2009. But there are something on the order of 4100 high school seniors to be served here in the FSM. The college is able to serve little better than 10% of the students. Scott makes the same argument on a planetary scale, "World population 1950-2050 [will see growth from a] world population [of] seven billion [in 2010] to nine billion by 2050 (US census Bureau) - how do we educate this phenomenal number of people? Traditional models are just not going to scale - we would need to build 25000 university of Aucklands (40,000 students) EVERY year - this is unsustainable."
Only the Internet scales that rapidly. In a year FaceBook went from 100 million users to 350 million users and discussion of supporting a billion users has already been floated. Second Life has had scaling issues, but these are easier to solve than building 25,000 colleges per year.
For a couple images from the University of Auckland in Second Life, see Scott's blog.
The University of Michigan-Dearborn is leading an effort in Second Life to help students to see the point of the knowledge they are acquiring-the real-world impact that their knowledge can achieve. Hong Kong Polytechnic University holds sixteen student orientation workshops in Second Life for their 400 new freshmen who join the hotel and tourism department. Meanwhile at the University of Arizona the Timeline of Earth project is a product of 2 semesters of a non-major astronomy class at the University of Arizona. Students in the class create, research, build, and script exhibits for ’spotlight times’ during the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history all within Second Life.
What is Second Life? Think the movie "Matrix" and you will be half way home. In his blog, Scott speaks of concepts such as "free range education," while in the keynote he asked, "What happens to universities if the library no longer the protected space?"
Second Life presents a potentially Kuhnian paradigm shift in education. A vision of the professor as one who professes to have knowledge about how to find the scrolls in the new library at Alexandria - the Internet. A wise and insightful person in the agora who could help you solve a problem for a few drachma, or these days a few euros. 400 millions dollars changed hand in Second Life last year according to Scott.
What if the real future of distance education is not the model based on works for "us" as an institution - a teacher centered model - but a free range model of independent instructors in Second Life, with "graduation" being replaced by competency examinations (think Cisco Networks certification or teacher testing). Educause recently published "The Tower and The Cloud" focused on the role of higher education in an age of cloud computing. What happens to our institutions?
Ultimately Scott's argument is a numbers argument. The college admits 400 students to associate degree programs for each fall term. US President Obama has set a goal for all Americans to have at least two years of post-secondary education. That sounds about right as a goal for education on planet earth in 2009. But there are something on the order of 4100 high school seniors to be served here in the FSM. The college is able to serve little better than 10% of the students. Scott makes the same argument on a planetary scale, "World population 1950-2050 [will see growth from a] world population [of] seven billion [in 2010] to nine billion by 2050 (US census Bureau) - how do we educate this phenomenal number of people? Traditional models are just not going to scale - we would need to build 25000 university of Aucklands (40,000 students) EVERY year - this is unsustainable."
Only the Internet scales that rapidly. In a year FaceBook went from 100 million users to 350 million users and discussion of supporting a billion users has already been floated. Second Life has had scaling issues, but these are easier to solve than building 25,000 colleges per year.
For a couple images from the University of Auckland in Second Life, see Scott's blog.
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