Pedagogy in Second Life Overview
Second Life addresses several proven learning theories and instructional models:
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Cognitive Process Dimension:
- Remember: Retrieve relevant knowledge from long-term memory;
- Understand: Construct meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication;
- Apply: Carry out or use a procedure in a given situation;
- Analyze: Break material into constituent parts and determine how parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose;
- Evaluate: Make judgments based on criteria and standards;
- Create: Put elements together to form a coherent or functional whole or reorganize elements into a new pattern or structure.
Knowledge Dimension:
- Factual Knowledge: The basic elements students must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems in it;
- Conceptual Knowledge: The interrelationships among the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together;
- Procedural Knowledge: How to do something, methods of inquiry, and criteria for using skills, algorithms, techniques, and methods;
- Metacognitive Knowledge: Knowledge of cognition in general as well as awareness and knowledge of one's own cognition.
Second Life-specific list of intersection points between the cognitive and knowledge dimension.
Experiential Learning
- Group or Individual experiences a concrete activity
- Observation and Reflection – brainstorming, investigate the links between behavior and actions
- Formation of abstract concepts and generalizations
- Select alternatives, test hypotheses and redefine the situation and concrete activity
Experiential Learning in Second Life
- Experience Disability Exhibit on Roadrunner Island! http://slurl.com/secondlife/Roadrunner%20Island/189/232/31
Transformational Learning
- The “mental filing cabinet” concept
- End results are classified and defined by the learner
- The learner explores options for new behaviors and builds competence in new roles
- A plan of action is developed, and the learner acquires knowledge and skills for implementing the plan
- a “disorienting dilemma” occurs in an adult learner’s life to cause her or him to reflect critically (Merizow)
- the individual’s conception of him/herself and worldview is inexorably changed
- Instruction can be designed, yet learning can not be designed…experienced and transformed by the learner…
- fostering transformative learning in the classroom on establishing meaningful, genuine relationships with students
- Becoming bicultural is a transformational learning process…allows the individual to analyze his/her own behavior in a way that was not possible before…
Transformational Learning in Second Life:
Reflective Learning
- Present in many online courses that use the technology of discussion forums, portfolios, and chat rooms as tools for learners to document reflections.
- Recapture their experience, think about it, evaluate it, and return to experience
- An outcome of both Experiential and Transformational Learning
- a focus on collaborative discourse
- the individual development of meaning through construction and sharing of ideas and other social artifacts
- critical self-reflection
- connected online dialogue
- Constructivism
- Digital Storytelling (OurStory.com)
Reflective Learning in Second Life:
- Interviewing, reporting...Digital Storytelling...Creating in Second Life
- http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%206/249/124/22
Social Learning/Inclusion
- Social Learning: understanding of content through conversations about that content having grounded interactions with others
- Creating a learning atmosphere in which learners and teachers feel respected and connected to one another poses its challenges in online learning environments
Social Learning and Inclusion in Second Life:
- http://slurl.com/secondlife/Colorado%20EduIsland/133/111/22
- What we build as Educators. All of the above are examples of places...we create it with interaction.
