More Details about New Nexus

Why is this important? What do students and teachers gain by using this virtual world stuff for teaching? Isn't this just an attempt to entertain jaded kids who enjoy high stimulation?

This is not about novelty, this is about the future and harnessing some technology for learning. Without getting into the debate over whether traditional primary and secondary school methods, with their focus on textbooks, lectures, and passive/receptive learning, are outdated, it's not hard to see that virtual worlds can be a great tool for education. There is ample evidence in serious academic research that bears this out; more and more journal articles and books are being published on the subject. And while we continue to learn what works better and worse as we move forward in our New Nexus testing, every time we work with students, the concept is shown to be not only solid but exciting.

To be specific, there are three main benefits of using virtual world (VW) tools for learing: new perspectives, engagement, and salience.

By new perspectives, we mean that when using a VW module, students can experience something "from the inside," as an eyewitness and/or participant. Instead of reading about something, they can participate in it, allowing them to literally gain a new perspective. Examples are as diverse as the imagination: an historical event, a scientific experiment, a foreign language interaction, a mathematical concept realized in a (virtually) concrete demonstration, etc. ad infinitum. This can add both depth and breadth to a student's learning.

Engagement has seemed like an obvious benefit to using VW software, but we have wondered just how broad the appeal would be; not every student enjoys computer games, and game players are more heavily male than female. In watching 30 students play with the Bronze Blades demo for about 4 hours each (and many came further and spent free time with it too), we were surprised to note that none of the students became distracted, spaced out, etc. This confirmed our belief that interactive learning is not only engaging but effective. (One of many examples: Henry Jenkins (et al) paper for the MacArthur Foundation, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century".)

By saying that this type of learning is salient, we mean that it can produce deep and broad learning that is meaningful and memorable to students. One question that will be asked is "what evidence is there that this produces real learning?" There is existing evidence of similar methods of education. But that really begs the question, "what IS learning?"  We believe that while this is a very, very important question that deserves more attention, there are many different, good answers. The Dream Kit will allow teachers and schools to tailor the goals and experiences for their students to their own standards and values.

In addition, students working in teams toward a shared goal in a VW gain real-life experience that is applicable to many work environments.

How was the Bronze Blades module made if you don't have the "Dream Kit" toolset yet?

We began by looking for an existing software platform to use to create our proof-of-concept demos. We needed something powerful and flexible, as inexpensive as possible, and, ideally, allowing for multi-player play. We considered Valve's Source SDK, Bethesda's editor for Oblivion, and we finally settled on Obsidian Entertainment's toolset from Neverwinter Nights 2.  The advantages of this choice were great graphics, a diverse, powerful editor and a good user community available for help. There are disadvantages too; the biggest ones are the instability of the software and the "sword and sorcery" orientation of the game world. (NWN2 is, after all, a computer version of Dungeons and Dragons .)

So do you need to have Neverwinter Nights 2 installed to see the Bronze Blades demo in action?

Yes. For our beta testing, we bought about 20 copies of the game (at a reasonable $20 a pop).

How user-friendly do you envision the Dream Kit being?

There is a basic equation involving three factors: user-friendliness, power/flexibility and cost/energy to create. We want the Dream Kit to be both easy to use and powerful/flexible. To do both will require a lot of work from highly-skilled software engineers - a LOT of work. So we expect that a sweet spot will be sought, a balance between how user-friendly the kit is, how poweful/flexible it is, and how much energy will be put into it. (Remember that we're considering two basic development routes: an open-source approach with volunteers and a funded approach where professionals will be paid to work on the project.)

A guess from August, 2007: if we can make it friendly enough for 1% of secondary school teachers to use, that will be excellent. That one percent can create a lot of content, and with internet repositories of that content growing year after year, it will quickly become a huge library of resources.

If it's only usable by 1% of teachers, how will that be a big help to the other 99%?

If the tool set is free to use, and free hosting for the content that the 1% creates is found on the web, they'll quickly be able to create a huge amount of free content. (If you think about the ratio of teachers to textbook writers, you can see that this 1% idea makes a lot of sense. Even if it turns out that only 1 in 1000 can use the Dream Kit, that will still create a lot of content.)

We envision having institutes in summers that teachers could attend to learn how to use the software, share ideas and collaborate on projects.

And while we hope that most of what the Dream Kit gets used for is free and available to anyone, from home schoolers to public schools to universities, another model is conceivable. It could be set up so that content could be made and sold commercially in addition to the free content. The profit motive would allow more time and energy to be put into content creation, possibly resulting in "bigger and better" content. Textbook publishers could create supplemental content for their books...who knows...

This kind of learning may be fine for some things, but it can't replace serious study for others, can it?

Probably not.  Some things are best learned in other ways...probably. But since this concept has had such little testing, it's hard to say. And we'd humbly suggest that it's hard for people who haven't grown up with computer technology woven into their lives to anticipate how those who have will learn best. -Ask a teenager what he/she thinks.  :)

That said, we are aiming to make the Dream Kit flexible enough that different teachers/schools could use it in very different ways. Some will want to use it only as a supplement to traditional study. Some will want to make it the mainstay of certain classes.

How long do you think it will take to create this Dream Kit?

Years. To make it both user-friendly enough and powerful/flexible enough (and stable enough), it'll take a team of world-class programmers at least a couple years to get it up to speed. There's a reason this hasn't been attempted before: it's hard. But it's not THAT hard. And we believe that when the right people get their teeth into this idea, they'll see it as an incredible contribution to education. Even politicians can get behind that.

Why not just use existing software? Why do you need to create something new?

Two reasons. First, there is no similar, existing software that's available completely for free. Second, it needs to be powerful and flexible enough to allow teachers in diverse subjects and situations, of diverse students to shape it to their needs.