December 9th, 2008 by Learning Systems
In both schools and workplaces, LMSs can aid in the cultivation of teamwork skills. Through an LMS, team members can perform collaborate projects, assigning roles within the team. Team members can brainstorm, plan, do project summaries, maintain logs, and provide a final report using an LMS.
Ultimately, however, good teamwork is something that needs to be practiced in a real-world environment. Online collaboration shouldn’t do the job alone. Empowering people is more about attitude and behavior towards staff and students than processes and tools. Teamwork is strengthened by respecting, encouraging, stimulating and caring for people–not dictating to them. Creating an atmosphere of mutual respect is essential in building a successful team.
December 9th, 2008 by Learning Systems
Organizing teams within corporate divisions and departments on a learning management system is a simple task, but making a team actually work can prove a more difficult one. Although teams seem to be popping up everywhere in the corporate world, they are often teams in name only.
One obstacle in using a learning management system to organize teams or group projects is our individualist culture. In the U.S., we grow up learning how to compete and succeed as individuals, but are seldom asked to work together for a meaningful length of time. The skills needed to cooperate and help one another aren’t developed overnight, or even gradually as we get older. A learning management system can help to facilitate team projects and group learning, but instilling in individuals the skills for working in successful teams is also essential.
December 8th, 2008 by Learning Systems
For many children, virtual worlds are their learning system for discovering what social behaviors are appropriate. For this reason, children should be informed about virtual world safety and behavior before playing. Children who navigate these complex virtual learning systems face some real dangers.
Organizations like Every Child Matters work to ensure that each child has the right to play, to be healthy, to stay safe, and to achieve economic well-being. Safety refers to children’s right to be free from maltreatment, neglect, violence and sexual exploitation; safe from accidental injury and death; safe from bullying and discrimination; and safe from crime in and out of school.
Although these are real-world goals, they also apply to the virtual world. Increasingly the distinction between online and offline is a blurred one for young people. However, when children are aided in their use of virtual worlds, they are provided with not only an interactive learning system but a space for creating, communicating, and having fun.
December 1st, 2008 by Learning Systems
For serious higher education learning, Second Life probably isn’t the ideal virtual world platform. New and innovative “Serious Game” virtual worlds include Virtual Heroes. This RTP-cased serious game company develops simulation and digital game-based learning systems.
A recent Virtual Heroes initiative is an interactive healthcare team trainer called 3DiTeams, which has been designed in collaboration with Duke University Medical Center to train medical and nursing students. It uses HumanSim, a simulation technology that closely mirrors human ability and motion.
Virtual Heroes’ healthcare team learning system, which utilizes Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 2.5, was created with funding from the U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center. The leaning system is based on a healthcare team coordination curriculum called TeamSTEPPS, developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
November 28th, 2008 by Learning Systems
One creative way in which virtual worlds can be integrated into a school learning system is the opportunity for students to actually create a virtual world. This month in Winooski, Vermont, about 80 middle school students were introduced to an innovative technological learning system. They were trained how to use animation software to create a virtual world.
Dean Ali Rafieymehr founded the “Kids in Technology and Science” program four years ago while teaching at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. The animation software program he created is a learning system that caters to children’s behavior. For example, Rafieymehr separates the boys and the girls, saying that when they are grouped together, boys tend to take control. Among the life forms that students designed were T-Rexes, monkeys, lemurs, and skater girls, interacting however the students wanted.
November 28th, 2008 by Learning Systems
Virtual “worlds,” for better or worse, are an ever-increasingly popular online learning system worldwide. Although media coverage of virtual worlds like Second Life has been on the decline, a throng of virtual worlds for kids has grown even more popular than their adult counterparts. For example, according to the New York Times, tween world Club Penguin has more than 4 million visitors per month. And if kids can learn professions like blacksmithing, mining, first aid and tailoring in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft, why not biology or American history?
BBC contributor Bill Thompson writes, “Second Life and World of Warcraft are not really ‘worlds,’ whatever their proponents might claim. They are sophisticated 3-d environments that allow for a much greater degree of engagement than other tools, and they offer tools for interaction and creative expression that browsers, chatrooms and email do not.” Despite the challenges, teachers are beginning to find a place for virtual worlds and their potential for team learning in real world learning systems.
November 28th, 2008 by Learning Systems
According to BBC contributor Bill Thompson, teachers are experiencing great success with the incorporation of virtual worlds into their classroom learning systems.
And why wouldn’t they? Research firm eMarketer estimates that 24 percent of the 34.3 million users ages three to 18 used virtual worlds at least monthly in 2007, a figure that will jump to 53 percent by 2011. As young people become more involved in virtual worlds, their understanding of virtual world interactions and their roles within the virtual world are becoming more sophisticated, and therefore more easily translated into an academic learning system.
How would you employ a virtual world in your blended learning system?
November 28th, 2008 by Learning Systems
I’ve said that adults and young people alike may be engaged by courseware systems that apply gaming concepts in their interactive and narrative designs. But what about teachers who want to go beyond websites, courseware systems, whiteboards and discussion forums in their classroom blended learning environments?
BBC contributor Bill Thompson recently attended ReLIVE08, a conference on the education and research uses of virtual “worlds”. At the conference, he learned about the creative ways in which virtual environments are being used in areas as diverse as language teaching and urban planning.
Sarah Robins-Bell, co-author of Second Life for Dummies, gave a paper in which she looked at 75 different virtual worlds and created a classification scheme that may helps courseware system teachers understand similarities and differences between diverse worlds like Everquest, Club Penguin, Second Life and World of Warcraft.
