This project will explore two facets of the use of Second Life (SL): 1) as an environment that may equalize the conditions of people in their interaction with others and with their virtual environment; and 2) as a medium for a rich educational experience. The first facet refers to the great potential of virtual environments for people with physical impairments to actively interact in equal conditions with other visitors of a virtual place. The second facet focuses on creating an interactive environment for learning. Virtual worlds allow people to carry out activities that are not possible in the real world, either defying the laws of human nature, like flying, or enabling activities unfeasible for the physically impaired persons, like building or moving objects, or more standard technologies like chatting for the hearing/speech-impaired. This project will design and build a virtual workshop to learn how to build objects in SL. Construction in SL can become an entertainment activity that helps improve quality of life for people with disabilities and even a source of income. From the educational standpoint, the great challenge will be to gradually guide the learner through a set of object construction activities, exercises and challenges. We prefer to use the word "challenge" rather than more traditional terms like quiz, test or exam, as a way to break away from conventions; and to enable the exploration of the creativity and aesthetic sense of the learners.
"I have been lucky, that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case. But it shows that one need not lose hope." Stephen Hawking (Hawking)
Within the scientific community Stephen Hawking is without a doubt the best known person with a neuromuscular impairment. Dr. Hawking was diagnosed about 40 years ago with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a devastating progressive disease that severely impairs mobility. Yet, he has managed to stay active and at least three factors come to mind when trying to explain his maintaining in his endeavor: his courage; his passion for what he does; and his work being essentially intellectual, i.e., Theoretical Physics. He has held for a long time a position in which he had “to do research without having to lecture” (Hawking), although not having to lecture may be somewhat misleading; he has been traveling the world, attending conferences and making presentations all these years. He has been using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology such as speech synthesizers (DECtalk DTC01 and more recently Speech+), and predictive text entry systems (Equalizer and EZ Keys).
Being as he is a role model, many people with disabilities have jobs that are not purely intellectual. As the disability progresses, these people have to retire and their quality of life deteriorates rapidly as they may feel useless or marginalized from society. Thus, this project explores the use of a virtual world, i.e. Second Life (SL) from two complementary perspectives:
1. as an environment that may equalize the conditions of people in their interaction with others and with their virtual environment; and
2. as a rich educational environment.
Second Life is a three-dimensional immersing virtual world based on a game engine, but expanded to allow social interactions and user-created content without the restrictions of a game. It possesses its own currency of Linden dollars, which can be exchanged with actual currency and it has an active "in-world" economy. Users can create themed simulations by building 3-D objects and use the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to control their behavior. Users are represented by completely customizable avatars which can move around in conventional ways, like walking, or unconventional ways, such as flying or teleporting (Second Life and Education, 2007) (Mansfield, 2008). In SL, any user with a computer interface, whether a keyboard and mouse, or any AAC interface can build objects, and move around interacting with other users and the environment.
This project will build a virtual environment for education, i.e. a workshop, which will use a hands-on learning approach to building objects in SL and promote scaffolding and mentoring among the community of learners. Scaffolding refers to a learning framework where the learner's proficiency is diagnosed and an adaptive level of support is provided by the teacher or mentor. The temporal dynamics of the scaffolding process implies cycles of comparison between the assessed level of performance the learner is exemplifying at any moment and the level of scaffolding that is responsively provided. This process proceeds toward the learner's autonomous performance (The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity, 2004). Our goal with this approach is to bootstrap a community of practice among the learners, in our case, of virtual world builders in training.
We will focus on helping learners to breaking the ice in this virtual world and become active builders for their own enjoyment or realization, even for people with physical disabilities. Although it is not the focus of this first phase of the project, SL building can become a source of income.
The general objective of this project is to design and implement a virtual workshop to learn how to build objects in SL. This learning subject has been chosen with people with disabilities in mind and takes into account the intrinsic SL attribute to equalize people in the virtual environment, regardless of their physical disabilities. This objective involves:
1. To build an environment that promotes mentoring and scaffolding among the learners-mentors;
2. To develop an initial set of instructional material, mostly in the form of reactive objects to guide the learners' skills development;
3. To develop an initial set of challenges for the learners; and
4. To develop the tools necessary for the learners to create, and continue building instructional material and challenges.
In this first phase the emphasis will be placed on learning the tricks-of-the-trade. Although chatting has made SL and the Web already accessible for the hearing or speech impaired, we will study potential AAC technologies that can be integrated to the SL client such as text-to-speech and predictive text entry tools. We will not develop AAC software or hardware interfaces.
Initially we will review and analyze the literature on the subject, as well as tutorials and educational sites about SL, both on the Internet and SL itself. Orientation towards building rather than giving instructions will be the global criterion for the analysis of this material. We will also review literature on scaffolding as a teaching-learning strategy to apply it in the construction of the workshop. Creativity and innovation techniques will be extensively used in the design of the workshop to force us into thinking out-of-the-box. We will investigate the creation of responsive objects by means of scripts that serve as "learning wheels". These objects will respond to the learner’s actions and provide information and hints as necessary. We envision that these objects can range from generic objects similar to any prim1 to very sophisticated and dynamic objects depending on the level achieved by the learner. Rather than giving assignments or problems with fixed or unique answers we will develop challenges where, in addition to applying the knowledge and skills acquired, the learner is asked to apply her or his creativity in the creation of objects. Objects will only be constrained by the need to be building blocks for more complex objects as new tools and techniques are learned. This may lead learners to go back and modify already built objects to satisfy new building constraints. Learners will be encouraged to exhibit their work and share their knowledge. As they become more proficient, learners will be encouraged to improve or augment the set of reactive objects for others to follow, thus promoting a mentoring culture. One of the ideas that will be investigated is the designation of curators for the collection of objects in the workshop collection.
The student has already an excellent knowledge on SL and so he is expected to develop skills on the design, development and application of virtual world tools for use in innovative learning approaches and the potential of SL as an augmentative and alternative communication media. If we succeed, the social impact of this project is far reaching since it opens immense possibilities for people with disabilities to have one activity for their enjoyment and communication with the world.
** Prim is the abbreviated term used for primitive objects in Second Life.The student will meet with the professor weekly and review his progress. He will also write a literature review and tutorial analysis on SL. He will also design the details and implement the objects of the workshop metaphor. He will also write a report on the potential AAC capabilities of Second Life.
** Instead of buying land in Second Life and paying a maintenance fee, we will buy a computer server and install OpenSim, an open source version of a game engine compatible with second life. This software will run under Ubuntu.
