New 3D Studies of Religion Course
// August 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Education, Technology, Uncategorized, second life
My colleague Steve Collis just blogged about some exciting things on the horizon for my year 11 Studies of Religion course next year. I will post some of the blog I got from his site www.happysteve.com. Its all pretty exciting and ground breaking stuff.
What if a School Subject was 3D?
Read on to see how Tim Barrett is creating a school subject in 3D virtual form, so that students literally walk through the course in a virtual world.
You may be aware we established a new 3D virtual island using free software called “Open Sim”. This is open source software, meaning it was created by volunteers who allow anyone to use it without paying. Admittedly, we do then have to pay a company, “Reaction Grid”, to run the software for us. This is as cheap s $75 a month, and they take much of the hassle out of actually getting your virtual world to work. This is much less expensive than Linden Lab’s Second Life, where we run our original island.
This new Open Sim island is 8 times as large as our original, and we have a great deal more control over it, including the ability to allow our young primary students to access the world.
I’ve been spending some time preparing the island for a huge influx of students. I’ve already granted some students access, and also created an account for every member of staff at our school (they’ve been wandering in out of curiosity and having a walk around!)
The next step is for me to recruit student leaders from every grade and train them up rigorously to be ‘moderators’ of the new virtual world. They will protect the space against misbehaviour, cyber-bullying, or vandalism. They will set the tone and culture of the virtual world.
I’ve been busy ‘terra-forming’ our virtual world, adding trees, streams, and a huge mountain, so students have something to explore when they first log in. I’ve disabled flying so they have to walk around, unless they program for themselves a car or plane.
When they first log in, this is what they will see:
They have an invitation to follow a forest path through to a ’sandbox’, which is an area of the virtual world where any student can start building.
They also see another arrow:
You see, I don’t want students to feel forced into doing the training immediately. They can walk through the forest for a bit, if they want, but they’ll be told they have to do the training before they wander far!
So, the student follows the arrow towards training, and sees:
There are some simple posters telling the student to approach the booth and click on it. What happens next is quite magical: the Open Sim software sends a signal to our ‘Moodle’ course management software and links the students virtual world account to their general school learning account. Many thanks to my colleague Grant Harbor for his input and assistance in getting this to work!
From this point onwards, a whole variety of 3D objects will recognise them. These 3D objects are virtual manifestations of learning materials that would have otherwise just been listed on a Moodle subject web page in our school poral.
……Our first steps into true virtual 3D courses are beginning immediately with my dear colleague Mr Tim Barrett: http://twitter.com/tim__barrett
http://www.chaplaincymatters.org/
Tim is our school chaplain and has been teaching ‘Studies of Religion’ for a few years now in an entirely online mode, and in a face to face mode.
He will be our pioneer at taking everything we’ve learnt about student learning in Moodle, and recreating the learning in a 3D space.
It might blow up in his face! Maybe it won’t work! This is an experiment – our first steps!
But imagine, students walking through mosques, cathedrals, churches, temples, monasteries, or recreating scenes or situations at Medina, Galilee, Bodh Gaya. Consider: the imagination gives us the power to connect with ‘otherness’, putting ourselves in others’ shoes and gaining insight into the universal human condition. In Tim’s course, students will literally walk in the shoes of others. Not a bad thing, since many of our students are from the culturally monolithic northern beaches of Sydney.
I’ll keep you posted and I am sure Tim will too…
I’ll finish with some more images of our work-in-progress virtual island:
