Social collaboration and the immersive: a new vision for legal education?

Summary of the session presented by Sara de Freitas (Serious Games Institute, Coventry University) at the UKCLE seminar on collaborative and distributive learning held on 1 November 2007. For further information see Sara’s report Learning in immersive worlds: a review of game based learning, or contact her on: s.defreitas@coventry.ac.uk.

Collaborative learning is definitely not a new prospect for educators and learners, as most learning takes place collaboratively in groups as part of social interactions. However, the major paradigmatic changes occurring with globalisation and the use of the Internet are making our worlds smaller and allowing us to reconsider how we learn, where we learn and what we learn. This session aimed to draw together some of the key issues around a changing vision for education, based upon more immersive experiences and social interactions.

The most significant change agents on education are social, politico-economic and techno-cultural.

Social:

• social networking, flatter social hierarchies
• distributed social networks
• fast access to information
• increasing amounts of data (161 billion gigabytes in 2006)
• mass user generated content – a quarter of all data is original; IDC estimates that 70% of content by 2010 will be user generated
• user participation (1 billion in 2006)

Politico-economic:

• globalisation – global vs local
• control strategies vs open access
• globalised law and economics

Techno-cultural (techne):

• convergent technologies (mobile gaming, augmented reality, alternate reality gaming; Web-based tools), diverging applications (for example legal, medical, business)
• user driven innovations (for example user generated content), sharing content

So what are the implications – for learning, assessment, accreditation? For universities?

There is a clear need for better alignment between:

• policy development
• institutional processes
• empowering the learner

As well as the need for formulating new approaches to learning and by implication the need to consider the possibilities wrought by a new learner?

In this context we may need to consider exploratory learning approaches, game-based learning and social interactive learning in more integrated ways.

The rapid growth of online social networks – for social and business needs (Friendster, Friends Reunited, LinkedIn) has been widely commented upon, and offers wider opportunities for social collaboration (for example collaborative book/article writing) and support of larger and more distributed social groups (MySpace/live chat).

The emergence of immersive learning opportunities includes the use of game-based learning (Flash-based animations, serious games demonstrators), immersive world applications (Second Life, active worlds), as well as other interactive digital media tools (such as software development kits).

Another kind of immersive game – a serious game – is being pioneered by Trusim & Partners:

• four year R&D programme partly funded by the Department of Trade and Industry
• collaboration between learning company, games developer and universities
• aimed at producing an effective process for selecting and developing serious games as part of a ‘blended’ training solution
• research developed through trials of at least three prototype games in different sectors

Another example of an immersive world application is a cross team training exercise carried out at Stanford University. In the exercise an explosion has taken place in a busy urban area. Rreal people control their avatars, located from around the US, with some of the characters played by actors roleplaying the casualties. The advantage of this process is that the scenarios of practice can be infinite, and no two training sessions are the same.

The scope for collaborative learning is well developed in this example. The Serious Games Institute is hoping to undertake similar research in the UK to support cross agency training objectives. One project, a smart building demonstrator project, aims to bridge between real and physical spaces to create enriched and seamless learning experiences.

There are clearly considerable challenges in social collaboration, both in education and on the wider social level. This promotes the need for a new and perhaps distributed vision for learning, incorporating immersive and collaborative learning, but in order for this to be achieved there is a need for greater alignment between virtual and real experiences, the potential of creating new and creative opportunities for learning and the wider use of user generated and shareable content.

Last Modified: 30 June 2010