Learning Innovation Research Group

1. Learning Innovation Research Group National Workshop on Learning in Immersive Virtual Worlds in Higher Education Professor Maggi Savin-Baden Learning Innovation Research Group, Coventry University

2. Learning Innovation Research Group • Research - Problem-based Learning - Immersive worlds - Threshold concepts - Writing development - Research methods 2) Development: support, innovation, facilitation - Problem-based Learning - Immersive worlds

3. The team

4. Current SL Projects 1) CURLIEW Coventry University Research into Learning in Immersive Educational Worlds Leverhulme funded project 2) Reusable machinimaJISC-funded project 3) PBL scenarios for Second LifeLiverpool Medical Deanery

5. (Coventry University Research into Learning in Immersive Educational Worlds) CURLIEW Learning Innovation Applied Research Group Leverhulme-funded project (£513,000) To examine staff and students’ conceptions of and decisions about the way in which they teach and learn at the socio-political boundaries of reality. • Students’ experiences of learning in immersive worlds. • Pedagogical design. • Learner identity.

6. Reusable Machinima Child nursing Issues in the workplace Ethnicity and diversity Health and social care management

7. What is going on here today? • PIVOTE strand • Theatre and Performance • Language learning in SL • Preparing students • Technology tips: Sloodle, VPs, • Exemplars: engineering, sims, crisis management • Stuckness • Design issues: innovations

8. Areas of inquiry on the move . . . • Virtual spaces, embodiment and presence • Multimodality, practices and identity work • Pedagogic potential/affordances • Institutional semiotics of SL • Emotion, immersion and proxemics • Need for criticality and qualitative inquiry

9. Some thoughts . . . Right now are we just inside a computer programme? Your appearance now is what we call residual self image. It is the mental projection of your digital self This isn’t real? What is real? How do you define real? If you were talking about what you can feel, what you can small, and taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

10. The Matrix suggests the possibility that the deletion of our digital identities could turn us into ‘non-persons’ . . . but perhaps a more accurate idea would be one of becoming changelings, rather than deletions

11. One of the most well known examples is the changeling boy in Midsummer Night’s Dream over whom Oberon and Titania fight (Shakespeare, 1590) He exists at the borderlands of human and fairy kind. The play itself explores issues at the margins - where power and rules change and often breakdown

12. Perhaps SL identities, like the changeling boy in the play, are seen as insubstantial components of learning in higher education, but are at the same time sources of conflict and locations of indeterminacy for those who teach in the borderlands. • Perhaps . . . • Perhaps not –perhaps we might find out today!