“Your NMC Campus Story” highlights the many ways in which educators are using the NMC Campus in Second Life to spark innovation, learning, and creativity. This edition’s journey is brought to us by Dr. David W. Deeds.
Mister (now Doctor) David W. Deeds leased Lot 8 (1024 square meters) on Outreach from the New Media Consortium back in late 2006 as part of his PhD research. His first dissertation paper featured a snapshot of his avatar, Deed Davids, sitting on the turf marker. As a professor in Woosong University’s (Daejeon, South Korea) International Business Department, he succeeded mainly in annoying his New York University cyberneighbors, while also managing to teach the basics of Second Life to his learners and write some more papers on using virtual worlds in education, which have confounded and/or irritated scholars worldwide. David studiously ignores all academic writing conventions but still gets published, so several diehard traditionalists have reportedly put a “fatwah” out on him. His students did run their own SL t-shirt business and promote some educational charities via “Virtual Woosong.” Linden Scripting Language served as the foundation of “Intro to Programming” courses. But re: SL, Woosong University professors and administrators never really “got it.”
One of the Woosong-days accomplishments David’s most proud of is the fact that he helped several colleagues get started in SL. Christopher Surridge (Christopher Flow in SL), of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said: “In addition to being a pioneer and driving force in developing educational media in virtual worlds, David Deeds has also been a passionate and effective facilitator. David’s early support of my own modest educational programs in Second Life made possible basically everything that has happened since. He generously offered space in Second Life for my students, as well as students from Dubai and Japan, to join, learn and grow together in an exciting virtual environment. Without David’s support and encouragement, I would never have begun my adventures in virtual space.”
It wasn’t until David joined a computer science department at Shingu College (Seongnam, South Korea) that things really took off. He made SL an integral part of almost all of his IT classes, taking over 500 students inworld to teach them computer-aided design, programming…and English. David and colleagues still find it funny that of all SL has to offer re: education, it was the chance to practice English “anonymously” with other learners that most excited his students. His kids hosted classes from around Korea and Japan as part of their English language exchanges. Several English-teacher colleagues also joined in and conducted joint classes with other schools throughout Korea. David expanded to a larger lot on Outreach and then was given turf on Sloodle as a reward for helping with their beta testing. Ultimately, SL’s fate at Shingu came down to video cards. The school had invested heavily in labs full of computers that are truly nifty…except that their video cards are just barely adequate for SL…David lost the budget battle for upgrades. Lot 8 soon became redundant and so was abandoned. David still intermittently visits the now-empty plot and sings “The Way We Were.”
After butting his head for years against the “kimchee ceiling” of Korean universities (you could win a Nobel Prize in Software Engineering and they’d still consider you primarily an English teacher), David decided to make a move to international schools as of 2009. His first school was in Georgia (not the state, the country), where people believe avatars steal souls…that assignment didn’t last long.
He started at Changchun American International School (CAIS) in China as of the summer of 2009 and, in addition to creating “Virtual CAIS” in SL, introduced OpenSim to middle school students as part of their technology classes. It’s been and continues to be a big hit. CAIS has an OpenSim environment (Caisland) hosted by ReactionGrid and has also created a local version because of Internet connection problems, which will hopefully be solved soon. As the school’s IT Teacher/Manager, David is stretched pretty thin, but as of 2010-2011 there’ll be another IT Teacher on board and the goal is to dramatically increase the use of SL for teachers’ professional development. Virtual CAIS will serve as “teacher boot camp” for virtual worlds training. Substantial progress has been made this year and colleagues from the directors down are enthusiastic about SL. Changchun is pretty isolated and so the idea is for teachers to regularly attend inworld meetings of the International Society for Technology in Education, among other organizations. Mary Pazsit, CAIS Principal, said: “We’re very excited about the possibilities of the 3D Internet classroom, not just for computer science teaching but for cross-curricular instruction as well. We hope to have every middle and high school teacher trained in using Second Life and OpenSim as of next year.”
David has been invited to present at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) Global Learn Conference in Malaysia in May. He’ll be speaking about his experiences teaching using both SL and OpenSim…his topic: “Web 3.0: The 3D Internet Classroom.” He’s planned a live demonstration of both the SL and OpenSim environments, so wish him luck…he’ll probably need it. As for right now in SL, he’s preparing a middle school art show for an upcoming parents’ day. Parents will log into SL and visit Virtual CAIS, enjoy some virtual snacks/drinks and peruse their kids’ masterpieces.
You can share “Your NMC Campus Story” by writing beth@nmc.org.