Serendipity35

Remember the term MUVE? It stands for multi-user virtual environments that you find online. These days they are more often called "virtual worlds."

Most of the attention on virtual environments right now goes to Second Life, but there are other virtual worlds - for example, Croquet, There, ActiveWorlds. I haven't been all that involved in virtual worlds in education, though I try to keep up with projects being done there.

One such K-20 project that has been in operation for over a year is Harvard's River City Project. It's an interactive computer simulation for middle grades science students designed to have students learn disease transmission and the scientific method.

River City, like other virtual worlds, looks like a videogame, which is part of its appeal to students - and part of what turns off some educators. The project's content was developed from National Science Education Standards, National Educational Technology Standards, and 21st Century Skills, so it's not all fun or game.

Students visiting River City are time traveling back to the 19th century with the advantage of having their 21st century skills and technology. River City is a mess. It's full of health problems. The problems are based on authentic historical, sociological, and geographical conditions.

The students work in small research teams to help the townspeople understand why their city is sick. They use the technology to record clues that they think are related to the causes of the illnesses. Then they form and test hypotheses, develop controlled experiments to test their hypotheses, and make recommendations based on the data they collect.

The project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, so access to the simulation, curricular materials, and some professional development are provided free to schools.

It's a lot more high tech, but it reminds me of the approach I was using 20 years ago with my one computer in the classroom and copies of programs like Decisions, Decisions from Tom Snyder Productions. That series (it's still being produced and updated and it's still a good value and a great way to operate in a classroom with limited computer access) was a great way to use a problem-solving process in class. Students had to gather information, consider options, advantages and disadvantages, settle on a solution, and then watch the consequences of their actions and evaluate the results. You can replay the simulation and change your decisions and see how that affects the outcome. I haven't used the series in a decade, so I'm sure the sophistication and graphics are far beyond what I was using.

Whether you are in River City, Second Life, Decisions, Decisions or any well-designed virtual world, you can offer some good educational objectives.

Of course, just being in a virtual world offers some educational moments, but teachers need to do more than just use MUVEs. There are opportunities for developing areas asuch as causal reasoning skills (like fact vs. opinion), collaboration, cooperative learning, listening skills, paraphrasing and summarizing.

One thing that used to drive my students crazy when they first played in this mode was that it forced them to defer judgment until a number of ideas or solutions had been worked through. They were itching to solve all problems quickly - like on The Brady Bunch and the other TV programs they were watching. The slower pace of the program was actually one of its best features.

Notice that I haven't mentioned any particular disciplines. I was teaching English twenty years ago, but I have always been teaching the bigger things and thankfully the software is often less concerned with what you want to teach, and it takes care of how you will present the lessons.