EPSY 590 VE
From WikEd
EPSY 590 VE Virtual Worlds for Education Fall 2009
Instructor: Anthony (Tony) Hursh, hursh@illinois.edu
Teaching Assistant: Hee Young Choi
CRN: 40618
Credit: 4.0 graduate hours
Availability: The course is intended for students in the Curriculum, Technology, and Education Reform program, but a limited number of seats will be available for non-CTER students. Contact the instructor if you are interested.
Location: As this is an online course, there are no face-to-face meetings. Some synchronous course meetings, office hours, and presentations will take place in virtual worlds.
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Course Description
This course will examine the history, theory, and practice of pedagogy in virtual environments such as:
- Second Life
- Open Simulator
- Project Wonderland
- Croquet
- Alice
- Scratch
- Text-based virtual worlds (such as MUDs/MOOs and TappedIn)
- Interactive Fiction (such as Inform)
- Other commercial and open source gaming/simulation packages.
Students will read research literature, participate in online discussions through the Moodle course management system, and engage in real-time activities in several types of virtual world. The project component of the course requires students to develop educational artifacts in virtual worlds and perform peer review of artifacts developed by other students. Projects will support some aspect of learning or teaching in the students’ own workplace, and will incorporate multimedia, web, and other networked resources. Students are expected to have access to computers that meet the hardware and networking requirements of the software used in the course.
Course Objectives
Students will examine and discuss the psychologies of pedagogy, cognition, identity construction, and social interaction in virtual worlds. They will read and discuss research literature that describes how virtual worlds provide an engaging setting for learners and how human cognition works in enhanced multimedia settings.
After completing the course, students will have a thorough understanding of the theory & pedagogy of virtual worlds for education. They will also have hands-on experience in designing and constructing significant learning artifacts in virtual worlds, including:
- Scripted teaching and learning objects
- Educational machinima ("films" created using virtual world software)
Course Requirements
- Participation in online discussion of reading assignments
- Attending synchronous discussion sessions in virtual worlds
- Designing & constructing virtual world projects (including submission of weekly progress reports)
- Peer review of projects constructed by fellow students
Expected Student Background
Students should be interested in using virtual worlds for educational or training purposes, whether in K-12, university, or corporate/government settings.
No programming experience is required. Prior experience in Tony's section of EPSY 590 NET will be helpful, but is not required.
Hardware and software requirements:
- Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux machine which is capable of running the course software. This will require a reasonably powerful and up-to-date system, as these packages are rather demanding when it comes to processor speed and graphics capability. We recommend that you test your system ahead of time by installing Second Life (http://secondlife.com). If your computer is capable of running Second Life, it should be able to run any of the other course software. Note that you don't need to sign up for one of the paid accounts. The free account will be sufficient for everything we'll do in the class.
- High-speed Internet connection required (1.5Mbps+)
Grading
Grades will be weighted as:
- 50%: Readings, discussion, participation
- 50%: Project (Scripting and Machinima)
