Case Study: Teen Second Life at Suffern Intermediate School with Peggy Sheehy

Scroll down for the actual video footage, folks. STOP PRESS: My school have now followed in the steps of Suffern - see our experience with our own 3D Virtual World click here for news, video, advice, and reflections on our own experience.

On the last day of our visit to the USA, I caught a train up from New York to Suffern Intermediate School, in Suffern.

There, Peggy Sheehy was the first educator in the world to pioneer the use of Second Life for teenage student. Second Life is a 3D Virtual World which you can walk around in, and interact with other people who are simultaneously in the same environment. Amazingly, the 3D environment itself is created by the users themselves. I must mention the world has voice chat, so the social dynamics of interactions are surprisingly like real life. For instance at a party in Second Life you can hear the music coming from the stereo and might need to talk loud to talk over it. If you walk away from someone your voice is fainter to them, so you might walk up to someone to converse with them. You can text chat too, of course.

Now, obviously, you can't let teens run around the unregulated environment of Second Life. In fact Linden Lab will not allow teens into Second Life.

However, the company Linden Lab also offers 'Teen Second Life' for teens aged 13 to 17 (very strictly).

Still not good enough for structured, systematic use by a school. But wait! Educators can purchase a "Private Estate" - a piece of virtual land over which they have complete control. Bingo! A locked-down piece of virtual land!

I first heard Peggy Sheehy talk at a conference held in the adult Second Life environment. Second Life is great for conferences! No registration costs, no travel expenses, no organising for cover for your classes. Just log in and get the wisdom of colleagues, and offer your own wisdom.

As Peggy started speaking I quickly warmed to her and she won my confidence. SO MANY TIMES I have felt like gnawing my own elbow off in a conference presentation. But I immediately had the impression with Peggy that...
- she had common sense and a strong grip on reality / real life practice
- er, frankly, she was smart
- she could tell the difference between the important bits, and the irrelevant bits.
- she was relaxed and could roll with punches (you have to hear her anecdote about the time a pigeon flew into her classroom). This certainly proved true during my visit, when I arrived an hour late (thanks to the bloody New York taxi system - anyone with a car can be a taxi, is what I observed in NY). Peggy offered to be my taxi back and was entirely relaxed about juggling her schedule for this!

Peggy started planning to use SL in 2005 and launched in 2006.

It was such a delight to meet her. She is relaxed, but manic. Her manner with the students, as you'll see is assertive, but relational, with lots of space for the students' initiative (she gets through the 'official bits' as quick as possible!).

If there is one thing that has stood out to me from her observations on the educational value of a 3D virtual world, it's the notion of a "Psychosocial Moratorium" - a term coined by Erik Erikson. The idea is that the social space of a 3D virtual online world is particularly 'safe', and therefore particularly beneficial for nurturing the confidence of adolescents trying to figure out who they are, what they are good at, what they stand for and what they are are known for. As someone who has spent countless hours in the safety of online environments, I know exactly what she means. As of November 2008 I am seeking to set up Teen Second Life for my school, and can't wait to see how the students respond. Peggy has many anecdotes of students who have 'found themselves' through what is essentially a scaffold to constructing social identity (my wording there).

Now, when I visited Suffern, I had my little Dell netbook and webcam, and 'taped' some conversation with Peggy. I also recorded a conversation with some students, and a short, intense, and fascinating first session where a class experienced TSL for the first time!

The following footage is not brilliant quality, and is lengthy, but I found 'being there' very rewarding and have cut out very little from what I recorded. My intended audience is educators keen to explore the real life detail of a case study in the use of Second Life for students.

Let me start with the students and we can go from there to my interview with Peggy. Here are some random students who came into the library and whom I quizzed:

Here is Part 1 of the session introducing a new class to SL. The moment when the students realise you can fly in Second Life is priceless. They've been grabbed, hook, line and sinker. This moment is so significant. It is the moment where a simulated environment becomes interesting and of value to young people who are, themselves, at their age, at an age where their key challenge is to begin to define the parameters of who they are as independent beings in a complex reality. Again I think - Second Life appears to have the potential to be a scaffold.

Here is Part 2 of the session introducing a new class to SL. Some intriguing moments for those who have the time to watch it all. The noise level slowly lessens. The students are at times confounded, at times confident, at all times utterly engaged.

Now let's take a step back from practice and hear from Peggy. My big question is "What's the point?" She announced 3 thoughts and gets distracted after #2.

But we do come back to #3!

Now, if the Second Life environment is built by users, who builds the locked down private estate 3D world used by any particular school?

The answer appears to be:
- the students, students, students (such a good sign!)
- third party developers (Peggy highly recommends a gifted developer - Eloise Pasteur who is efficient and practical with her quotes. There is a funny moment in the recording where I don't understand the surname!)
- third party companies, e.g. NASA and many others, more than willing to make available their 3D Stuff (e.g. a simulated rocket ship) available for installation in a school's virtual space.
- noticeably absent - the classroom teacher. i.e. you do not need expertise!

And finally, some more casual chatting, and Peggy shows me the security system they set up to prevent students from using SL when there was no teacher present in the world. (The teacher can flick a switch in the virtual world that glues anyone who logs in, to the one spot so they can't move.)

My thanks to Peggy Sheehy for being such a wonderful, flexible, energetic host, and so willing to share, so able to remain relaxed while cramming in an extraordinary amount into what was basically less than 3 hours, AND I had 3 cups of coffee! Peggy's twitter ID is www.twitter.com/maggiemarat. Her blog is http://metaversedltd.com/ . She also administrates a school blog at http://rampoislands.blogspot.com/ which says it has been relocated to http://ramapoislands.edublogs.com , although this website seems not to exist. (Peggy - you are sure to read this, where is the new website?)

All this the day after US election day. I was at Times Square that evening... but that is another blog post.

To follow my school's adventures of using Second Life, subscribe using the box on the right hand side. I am committed to posting material I believe will be useful to classroom teachers myself interested in the potential of technology to empower students and thereby transform education. On twitter I am www.twitter.com/steve_collis and on YouTube I am www.youtube.com/lestep. You can see my non-professional blog at http://stevecollis.blogspot.com . I have so much more to post about what I saw in American schools! Fingers crossed I find the time to publish!

Comments

[Helen Otway]

Hi Steve,
This is awesome. Lots of information and reflections. I wish I knew about blogging back in January 2007 when I went on my study trip.
I'll be viewing all the videos :-)

[Lucy Barrow]

Steve, another *awesome* post! Thank you so much! Such valuable information to take away and show other teachers. I am currently in the process of introducing Quest Atlantis at my school and being able to show and discuss the use of 3D virtual worlds in education with this kind of post *including videos* is incredibly helpful.
Thank you for taking the time to share this.
Lucy :)

[Peggy Sheehy]

Hey Steve! So glad that you were able to make sense of ur chaotic day together! I so enjoyed your visit! Here is the correct link for the blog: http://ramapoislands.edublogs.org/
You'll notice that the original had a typo and the word RAMAPO was misspelled.
I look forward to the continued conversations and the schools that will join us in our virtual learning adventures!

[Scott Merrick]

Hey, Steve,
In the course of searching for "second life education" on the new YouTube video player at my new Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach build at Lighthouse Learning Island in Second Life (boy, that was a mouthful), I came across your Part 1 video featuring the work of my dear friend Peggy Sheehy. Further searching for your name and affiliation brought me to this blog post. Yay! It's rare that such an in-depth examination of _anything_ in SL is produced and shared and I'll certainly be blogging it myself. I hope to run into you in Second Life Main Grid, since I'm not in the TG yet, but do look for me, Scottmerrick Oh, often to be found at ISTE Island.

Thanks again for your detailed attention to this virtual pioneer's grand adventures with teaching and learning.

[James Fullerton]

Hi Steve,

Like you, I too am a teacher interested in using TSL as an instructional tool. Just six months ago Southern Lehigh School District, located in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, opened the district’s island in TSL called Sparta Island. Our goal is to offer distance and extended educational pedagogy in the near future. Professionally second language virtual immersive instructional environments and perfecting Socratic seminars in a MOVE are immediate goals of mine. Other teachers within the middle school that I teach economics in to 8th graders are interested in book discussions and creating virtual libraries. This coming April we plan on hosting our first ever student film festival broadcasted both live over the Internet, but streamed onto our island live. Then the island will be opened for other teens participate in and not just students from our school. We have the ability to open the island to all teens, but then close it on a select group.

Like you, I too am familiar with the work that Peggy Sheehy has accomplished only through reading about her adventures online. At SLMS we are encouraging our students register through the usual SL channels and we have the ability to create avs for island use as well (regAPI) when needed.

In talking to the developer of our fine island, the word is that there may be the techno logy in the near future (this year) to connect all educational islands in TSL, preventing outside interventions from other teens and keep our islands “technically” closed. Exciting!

Again, like you, we too will be launching a blog and a wiki site as a reference source for others soon this year. Establishing collaboration between our schools would be greatly appreciated.

James Fullerton

Fullertonj@slsd.org