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In today's podcast, Ilona talks to Robin Heyden, an education consultant who works with participatory media and virtual worlds, as applied to science education. Robin is a co-author on the high school biology textbook program, Exploring Life, which has a website component that provides students with animations, interactive features, and simulations. She is also an active blogger for the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), as well for her own blog, Stepping Stones. In addition, Robin is a community manager for Pearson Education's Biology Leadership Conference, an annual conference which attracts college-level biology educators from all over the US and Canada. Most recently, she has expanded her work to include the development of educational experiences for adults and professional levels. [12:39]
Full transcript
ILONA MIKO: Welcome to the latest edition of NatureEdcast by Nature Education. I'm Ilona Miko and today we're talking with Robin Heyden about the educational possibilities of three-dimensional online virtual worlds. Robin is an education consultant who works with participatory media and virtual worlds as applied to science education. She is co-author on the high school biology textbook program, Exploring Life, which has a website component that provides students with animations, interactive features, and simulations. She is also an active blogger for the National Association of Biology Teachers, as well as for her own blog, Stepping Stones. In addition, Robin is a community manager for Pearson Education's Biology Leadership Conference, an annual conference which attracts college-level biology educators from all over the US and Canada. Most recently, she's expanded her work to include the development of educational experiences for adults and professional levels. Welcome, Robin.
ROBIN HEYDEN: Thanks, Ilona, it's a pleasure to be here with you.
MIKO: So you work on education in virtual worlds. What is a virtual world?
HEYDEN: Well, most people know virtual worlds through online gaming, games like World of Warcraft, Halo, Grand Theft Auto. Basically, it's a three-dimensional, interactive space online and in the case of virtual worlds I work in, such as Second Life, there's a social media purpose to that. It's a place to go and connect with other people who have common interests to yours.
MIKO: So what do you do in a virtual world?
HEYDEN: Well, you start by downloading the application to your computer. You create an avatar, which is a representation of yourself in that virtual world. You can make that avatar whatever you want it to be, a human in form or a robot or a rabbit. And once you're in the virtual world with your avatar, you enter in, you join the communities, you meet other people, you attend events. It's a lot of fun.
MIKO: So you're a science educator and you pay particular attention to educational purposes in these virtual worlds. What's the utility of them, particularly for science education?
HEYDEN: Well, that's a good question, and we have to think carefully about that. You want to emphasize the things that you can't do in the real world. There's no point in going to all the trouble of engaging in a virtual world unless it's something particularly special. So you want to focus on some of the fun things like say, flying for instance, which students like to do, but you can also think in terms of problems that you can overcome that are difficult to overcome in the real world, such as problems of scale — concepts that rely on very large macro sort of images or micro images (very, very small); overcoming the laws of nature, for instance, like gravity; being able to do mapping on a very large scale or a very small scale; or doing experiments perhaps that might be cost prohibitive or dangerous to do in the real world.
MIKO: And reduce the time to results, I suppose.
HEYDEN: Exactly.
MIKO: So can you give an example of one of these educational experiences that works particularly well in the virtual world?
HEYDEN: Sure. I'll tell you about a small activity that I recently built to teach students about the electron transport chain. So the electron transport chain is a topic included in all general biology and cell biology courses. It's a part of cell respiration when students learn about the way that cells convert the energy stored in food to energy stored in ATP. It's a real tough topic for students not only because it's just complicated, but because it's biochemical in nature and it involves understanding of things like the potential energy and redox reactions and charge and bonding and stuff like that. So this seemed to me like a really good candidate for treatment in a virtual world setting. Not only does it lend itself well to the unique affordances of virtual worlds, but it's sufficiently important to their success in the course, so it seemed to merit the investment. So just to go back a little bit on what the electron transport chain is as you well know, if you just burned a lump of sugar, the reaction — giving off heat and light — would happen very quickly. In a flash, that sugar would be burned. But in your cells, that burning of glucose happens much more slowly in controlled steps. And those controlled steps are the electron transport chain. So what I did in the virtual world of Second Life was I built a series of platforms in the sky, staggered in relationship to each other at ten-meter elevation intervals, so that an avatar could easily jump from one to the next to the next, sort of like navigating a giant staircase in the sky, to get down from up high to the ground. And I placed a media screen on each platform where the students get some basic information and instructions. And I have them go up to the topmost platform and they pick up an electron (modeled so it looks sort of like a ball) and when they start the activity, I tell them to first jump off the far end of that platform straight down to the ground. When they do that, they fall and land with a splat on the ground. Fortunately in Second Life you don't die, but it is a rather traumatic thing, to fall from that height and sort of have your arms and legs flailing and splat on the ground. And that represents, of course, an uncontrolled reaction like the sugar cube. Then they go back up to the top and try it again. Only this time, they proceed down from one platform to the next, acting as electron carriers as they go, releasing little bits of energy at each stage, one to the next to the next. So in this way, the students get this solid physical understanding of not only the chemical steps in the electron transport chain, but the chemical significance of the cells in their body handling the reactions in this way.
MIKO: In smaller steps.
HEYDEN: Exactly.
MIKO: Physical steps.
HEYDEN: That's right.
MIKO: So this sounds like a great way to help students understand biochemical processes and physical things and objects and fundamentals of physics, as relates to the cell or really anything. But how can the virtual world help students interact with people for an educational purpose? What are some of the advantages you could have outside of just straight-up content to a more of a relational type of learning?
HEYDEN: That's an excellent question and that's really at the heart of virtual worlds. I think primarily I see them as social media devices, a way to collect people in communities with shared interests and connect people from all over the world. When you go into Second Life at any given time, there's usually fifty to sixty thousand people there from all different countries speaking different languages and finding the people that might have shared interests with you could be a real advantage — without ever having to get on a plane or leave the comfort of your living room. One example of that that I can give you is I've been doing some work devising continuing medical education events, referred to as CME. Continuing medical education is the education that physicians need in order to keep their education levels up and continue to have their license and their hospital privileges. And typically, doctors have to do a certain amount of this CME every year in order to keep those licenses active. And when they do that, they typically do have to travel for that. They go to a conference or some sort of a convention or take a course somewhere, and thereby get the credit. So what I've been doing with Boston University Medical School, in their Department of Continuing Education, is to devise virtual world CME experiences for physicians. Just last June we did a pilot with 25 family practice physicians on diabetes care management, talking about issues of compliance with patients and practicing scenarios with patients and helping them to bring this aspect of their practice to life.
MIKO: So they're able to practice out certain scenarios with patients that they might encounter in the real world and be recertified at the same time. It's like practicing in a clinic as well as with your books at the same time that you're certified.
HEYDEN: Exactly. Exactly. Normally when they might go to a CME event of some kind, they would just hear a lecture. They'd sit in and listen to an expert and that would be worthwhile. And we do that as well, in the virtual world, we'll have an expert there who will give a talk. But then we can add this extra oomph by allowing the physicians to have practice with mock patients or standardized patients. And each of those mock patients is an avatar with a real person behind them that has a script, and there's an opportunity for the physician to practice what they just learned with those mock patients and get a feel for that. And then of course, they also get to talk to each other, meet physicians from all over the world. And this last pilot that we did, one of the interesting things was this, it's sort of, this interesting combination of anonymity. Nobody really knows who you are (right?) because you're represented by your avatar, and yet, a real sense of presence and of being there. The avatar becomes sort of an extension of you, and most of the doctors self-reported after the event when we surveyed them, they reported a level of engagement that was quite high and a real sense of shared experience and a certain amount of fun involved in this activity that enriched the experience for them.
MIKO: I see. So are there any other advantages of having a virtual CME training beyond eliminating the need for travel? Like is there some way that the experience is accessible post hoc?
HEYDEN: Well, a couple of the other advantages are — in addition to meeting other doctors and perhaps being a little bit more forthcoming with your questions and feeling a little more brave about interacting — one of the other things that we can do is we can record the experience. So there's the ability to video record within the virtual world and this is sort of a new burgeoning area referred to as "machinima." It's kind of a portmanteau word between machine and cinema, and that is taking video of things that are happening in Second Life. So we can record the interactions that these doctors have with the mock patients, and they can view them later in order to critique or review their own performance and be reminded about the lessons that they've learned in that CME experience.
MIKO: Especially if a lot of information comes at them quite quickly.
HEYDEN: Exactly, right, exactly. These events are power packed. There's a lot of information coming at them and a lot of things to process and so they have their little machinima video that they can post it online and they can look at later and sort of be reminded of what they learned.
MIKO: What about the student with the electron transport chain? Can she go back and review her experience to solidify maybe when she's studying for the test?
HEYDEN: Absolutely, right. So that installation that I described with the platforms in the sky, that's permanently there and once a student has figured out how to get into the virtual world and has an avatar and so forth, they can go in at any time and replay the experience — do it all over again by themselves or in a group and go back over it. We all know practice makes perfect, so it's good for these students to have these repeated opportunities to try their hand at it.
MIKO: Well, thanks for telling us about science and the virtual world today, Robin, really enjoyed it.
HEYDEN: You're welcome, Ilona, it was a pleasure.
MIKO: Thank you for listening to this edition of NatureEdcast. You can find this podcast and others at nature.com/scitable. That's nature.com/s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e. Please join us again next time.
