Interview With Peter Twining Feb 09

Interview with Peter Twining about the Schome Park Project - Feb 2009 Interview can be found at : http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=348 PT=Peter Twining Leon Cych=LC 00:00 (PT): My involvement with Virtual Worlds started in 2007. We'd been doing work in the physical world with kids in school and with home educators trying to get them thinking about what education systems could be like. How their schools could be changed or made better or how their support for their learning could be improved. 00:28 (PT): And our experience was very much that people found it very difficult to break free from conceptions of school. So even home educators, when asked to think about what education systems could be like, would come up with something that would be just like school only with nice toilets and no bullying and probably with a bit more ICT. 00:49 (PT): And we came to the conclusion that the problem was to do with the fact that people really have very little experience of anything that was radically different to the existing school system. 01:02 (PT): So one of my collegues, Kieron Sheehy, said: “Well why don't we give people a lived experience of something that is really very different, and let's see if we can use Second Life to do that. 01:14 (PT): So we then started exploring Second Life in the main grid and I employed a bunch of P.hd students and recruited some colleagues and we started experimenting and seeing what we could do and testing out ideas and seeing what other people were doing. 01:37 (PT): And I have to admit that my role in all of this was, kind of, to observe and chat with people and it was on the social level. My building skills are nil and my scripting skills are even less. So I was really there co-ordinating, stimulating, challenging, trying to get other people to think more radically about how we might use the environment. 02:04 (PT): And we had people who were really very expert in using Massively Mutli-User Virtual Environments and who had high levels of technical competence which meant I didn't really have to engage with some of those more techie things. 02:24 (PT): So we then bought an island in the Teen Grid and we spent something like 1500 hours trying out things; doing preparation so that the island was all set up and ready with activities ready to run, before we got our first lot of students in. 02:42 (PT): And again, my role throughout all of this, was really one of someone who came in and interacted with students and staff and talked about what we were doing and why we were doing it but I really was not very actively involved in doing any of the 'techie' stuff. So I didn't build and I didn't script but I did help organise and I did help cajole, encourage and support and challenge and all those sorts of things. 03:13 (PT): And that kind of carried on throughout the project and of course I then also had a role in terms of making sure that we had a good level of integration between Second Life and the Wiki and the Forum. And we started developing micro-blogs as well so that you could blog from inworld out to your external web blog.

03:38 (PT): And my role there, again, was kind of looking at: 'What is it we need?' So it was the strategic overview and someone else did all the kind of coding and stuff. And then, I suppose, my other role was about trying to get people to document and collect evidence about what they were doing; what they were learning and what the issues and problems were. 03:56 (PT): And that sort of carried on throughout the first three phases of the Schome Park program which ended at the end of May. And I have to say that since then the amount of time I've spent in Second Life has been minimal because we've been spending our time on analysing data and writing journal articles and doing conference presentations and things of that sort. And that's a kind of potted history. 04:25 (LC): So did you have a lightbulb moment... a lot of people are talking about critical incidents or lightbulb moments where you realised the sort of capabilities of this or is that still to come after you've gone through the data? 04:39 (PT): There were a number of lightbulb moments – there was one where we started playing with second life and it was actually in a conference in Norway, and Kieron and myself and another colleague, whilst supposedly listening to the talk were actually in Second Life trying things out and talking about using text chat to talk about the conference presentations and so forth and all the idea about giving people a lived experience kind of was really gelling as: 'Yeah we could do this.' 05:17 (PT): And actually we could do things in here that we couldn't do in the real world in terms of engaging the individuals across the world actually doing things they couldn't do in the real world; in terms of things like really experimenting with changing the power relationships between the adults and the students; really giving students more control and power over what they did; what the curriculum was; how the curriculum was managed; how they were supported. 05:44 (PT): So I suppose it was that initial play, in the context of having a real problem we wanted to solve, because we'd spent six months trying to get young people to think creatively about what education systems might be like and had failed dismally, even though we were working with people like impossibility thinkers and theatre groups, who we had hoped really enable the children to think more creatively about what education might be like and we had not succeeded, and it really did seem to us that Second Life would give us a huge opportunity. 06:18 (PT): Now when kids started coming in it became very clear that the nature of the engagements were very different. So, for example, when we run workshops with home educating kids, they kind of turn up and they will come into the room and they wait for us to kind of tell them what to do. When we set up workshops in Second Life, on Schome Park, which is our Teen and Second Life Island, the kids would come in, they'd look around for a couple of seconds and then they'd fly off. They wouldn't ask us - “Is it OK to fly off?” they would just go and we have pictures of staff sat round wanting to run the induction session and the kids have all gone off to do their own thing and they're building and they're scripting. 07:09 (PT): Another moment that was very telling for me; I was at a conference doing a presentation about Schome Park and someone in the audience said to me, “Peter, have you met all the people that you're working with in Second Life?”. And without thinking about it or hesitating I said, “Yes, of course I have.” Well actually I hadn't met any of the kids, ever, but I thought I had. Now had you asked me that question about people I'd collaborated with for a very long time using Skype or email or even something like FlashMeeting, I would immediately say, “No, I haven't met them.” So that was something for me, that was quite a shock to me, that I actually said without hesitation. “Yes I've met them.” and I genuinely believed I had. So that said to me that there is something qualitatively different about this environment to other forms of online communication.

08:13 (PT): What else happened as a major thing? I suppose I need to clarify that some of the things that were happening were not just to do with the virtual environment, they were to do with the interaction between the virtual environment, the wiki and the forum. But one of the things that I think was very important for us was about the quality of the relationships that got developed and the children's view that, the relationships they were having in terms of the power structures and the trust within Schome Park was very different to the nature of the relationships that they had in school and I think that's partly allowed by the way in which your avatar can present you in different ways. And so you can kind of be decontextualised from your actual physical self. So people don't make judgements about you so quickly based on what you look like and, of course, you can change what you look like very quickly. 09:07 (PT): We took a deliberate decision very early on that when people came to Schome Park we wouldn't tell anyone else about them. So, you knew their avatar name, which wasn't even allowed to be anything similar to their real life name and you knew what they looked like but you didn't know anything else about them at all and people weren't allowed to share personal information about each other. So that meant we had 13 yr olds working quite happily alongside adults, we had 13 yr olds quite happily working with 17 yr olds and it didn't impact on the fact whether you were 13 or 17 wasn't part of the equation. So I think that was quite powerful. 10:00 (PT): One of the other things that happened very quickly was it became clear that we had a higher proportion of kids who were active in the project who were somewhere on the autistic spectrum. So kids who identified themselves as having been labelled as having Aspergers syndrome for example and again, they found the environment very liberating in terms of it allowed them to communicate and interact with other people more on a level playing field than they were able to do in the physical world. So that was quite interesting and powerful I think. 10:35 (PT): What else has been telling for me? I suppose recently I have been doing some reading about why virtual worlds encourage people to be playful because I think they do encourage people to be playful, they encourage you to challenge boundaries and try out the rules. And I've framed this as being because virtual worlds are kind of unclaimed educational spaces. So if you go into a classroom in a school, you know immediately what the kind of ground rules are; you know what the teacher's supposed to do; what the kids are supposed to do and you know where you are supposed to stand and you know what the nature of the interaction's likely to be. When you come into Second Life most people actually don't understand how to operate because the ground rules haven't been established and so people try things out and they test the rules and they test the boundaries in order, in a sense, to recreate them. So Castranova describes this as being like the Wild West. When you first went to the Wild West it was kind of lawless and gradually as communities formed laws started to be formed and it became less lawless and less wild and turned into California. 11:56 (LC): The interesting thing about BSF, I've seen some builds already, is that they are mirroring the real world and I don't know what I think about that really, in a sense, because they've got perfect builds of schools that are yet to be built in Teen Grid and in Main Grid, for the teachers and for the pupils and I'm not quite sure if they have a space for that kind of more creative way of doing things. I'm a bit worried that it's just going to turn into some virtual equivalent of the real world – a mirror world - where people do exactly the same things but at distance. 12:35 (PT): I think you're absolutely right and actually I saw something on NewsBeat about, and I put in quotes, “The first school in England to use Second Life in class time.” I think this went up yesterday (4th Feb 2009) and what they're doing is they've got kids walking round their island and finding certain questions about, I think it's the circulation system, and when they click on the

question they get some information from a web page and I found this fits in very closely with existing practice in schools where the virtual environment actually isn't doing anything other than making it a more interesting sort of activity for the kids but it's a kind of gloss. It's bit like cow programs which you go exploring and doing stuff but in order to open the door you have to answer a maths problem. Now I may have misinterpreted it but that was how it looked to me. And it seems to me that is exactly the same sort of thing that is happening with Building Schools for the Future. People are actually coming in with existing school rules, existing school expectations and they're just replicating those in a virtual space. And I think that loses the power of the virtual space. 14:02 (LC): I think so, I mean what we're going to be involved with from March on the Learn 4 Life island to start building community because we spent a couple of years on making the place is a holodeck program where we're going to get researchers and teachers and coders and builders together just to have fun to see if they can build something like an ARG or just to explore the different means of doing it but also to bind it in with the web 2.0 tools like storyboarding or using cartoons to think up or look at ideas and just to boilerplate some kind of ways of working – it's more organic – it's more to do with the people who are involved in it and their professional development and what they can take from that to wherever they want to take it – it;s not really formalised in that sense. 14:54 (PT): I think that's really important, I mean one of the things that we discovered was that when we started out in Schome Park we had very few rules and regulations about where people could build or what they could build and we were much more interested in supporting them in the process of learning to build. As we moved through the Schome Park program we started to run into problems with too many things being built on the island and the kids set up a governance structure which included a planning department and they put in place systems for controlling the amount of builds on the island which was important, essential, because the island would have just ground to a halt. But what it did was shifted the focus from the process of building to: What is it you are going to build and how good is that build going to be and how useful will it be to the rest of the community? And what happened was, not only did the bureaucracy stop kids from experimenting and playing but the focus shifted away from: How do I build? to a focus on: What's the quality of the finished product? And I really think that changed the whole nature of the engagement and it made it much less playful and it, in practice, meant that very few kids engaged in building activity. 16:18 (LC): Hmm that's very interesting, can you reveal any insights from the data you've got? 16:28 (PT): What we've been playing with are a kind of range of dimensions of practice. Let me give you an example. If we think about the way in which people learn we quite often talk about – learning about, learning by doing and maybe learning through role play. OK, so learning about might be: reading a book; going searching for a web page; reading some information; being told something by the teacher so you're learning about it – it's an information dissemination kind of model. Learning by doing might involve you making something, so we had kids within Schome Park who were creating museum exhibits to show other people about archaeological artefacts and they were thinking about how best to present those artefacts by actually creating the displays. So they were involved by learning by doing. Role play, again, is osmthing we get involved in in educational settings and it's something we had kids doing in Second Life so, for example, we had kids who got married and they knew that they were pretending to get married but they were engaging in the process of: planning the wedding; inviting guests; arranging all the details of, in terms of costumes, the food for the reception, booking the church; actually they had to build the church and all those kinds of things. There was a lot of planning and organisation and thinking and even things at the level of writing the script for the wedding ceremony and then they had the disco afterwards and the party and all that kind of stuff but they knew it wasn't real. I know they knew it

wasn't real because at one point I was saying I was really worried about this, what's going to happen if the Daily Mail discovers we're allowing kids within Schome Park to get married? And we had quite a long discussion about what might happen in this situation and at the end of this discussion one of them turned round to me and said, “Peter, you do know it's not real don't you?” 19:04 (PT): So those are the kind of three, I think, fairly well understood, modes of interaction within education. But we found that there was a fourth mode of interaction and the fourth way of learning that you don't often see within formal educational contexts, which was where the kids actually became, they weren't taking on a role they weren't pretending to be something but actually were becoming that thing. So an example, the governance structure and the planning committee – the kids who were involved in sorting out the planning permissions and monitoring the planning permissions, weren't pretending; they weren't pretending to take on a role, they actually were the planning officers, they actually would come out and delete your build if you hadn't got planning permission. And that was a very different level of engagement and a very different level of process from “pretending” to be a planning officer and it had real implications because if you'd spent several days, maybe tens of hours building something and a planning officer came along and deleted it, that was very real. And we were finding that the activities that had the most potential to enhance the kids learning in terms of their knowledge age skills were those activities where they were really becoming the role. They weren't pretending to be it but they were actually it. And I think that's interesting and I think it challenges our thinking about what we do in schools because it's very difficult in school contexts to actually get the kids really becoming something rather thsn pretending to be. So if we take the example of a science experiment, they kids very often are not actual scientists, they are going through the motions of and if they don't get the right results – well they've done it wrong – well that isn't how scientists would view it. OK, so they are not actually being scientists, they're being school scientists and that's a very different thing. 21:10 (LC): Yes, it's quite interesting because I attended a meetup with people called Pixel to Person, of adults who are in Second Life recently – it's in a pub in Kensington called the Greyhound. A lot of the people involved were very interesting – the videos are on the Learn 4 Life site but a lot of them were sort of musicians or there was a Guardian journalist there who'd set up a film school for developing countries for children who could send films up through their cm phones and it seemed to me they'd found some way of boiler plating these roles in Second Life. For example the journalist had created this non-profit organisation and it was one of the best ways he could think of to create a global office where they could coordinate real life activities and I found that quite fascinating because he was really thinking about how to use the medium in as best way he could in the real world or offline if you want to call it that. And I found that quite fascinating, they were binding their roles quite closely into using the medium in a very efficient way and I found that quite interesting. 20:31 (PT): Well it's like all technology isn't it? Where, if you've got a real problem that the technology allows you to address, then it becomes very powerful. 22:44 (LC): And so where is Schome going from here? 22:49 (PT): OK. We've got a number of possible developmental routes. We have currently got a bid in for funding to do further work in Second Life; well it might not be Second Life it might be some other virtual environment. But one of things we were finding within Schome Park program is that an awful lot of children who register to become part of the program didn't actually manage to become deeply involved. And so they might come in and spend a short amount of time in Schome Park but they might then drop out of the project altogether. And we're wanting to look at ways in which we can provide what we call magnets and levers to try and draw kids into the environment and give them pointers, cues about how well they're doing which supports them and motivates them

and keeps them engaged and helps them to become part of the community. So we're looking at what are the techniques and strategies that are used in other massively multi-user environments like World of Warcraft but without the violence and are there things we can learn from that about ways of creating magnets and levers that pull people in and support them and help them become part of the community so you don't lose them in that first hour or so. So that's one possible route that we're taking. 24:18 (PT): We're interested in doing something in the main grid, or again, another virtual environment working with adults and I'm particularly interested in the possibility of working with initial teacher educators and I'm keen to try and start integrating physical world activity with Second Life or virtual world activity. So actually this funding project bid we've got in at the moment is looking at how we might work with people in after school clubs or other out of school clubs where they are meeting on a regular basis as a group in the physical world but they're also engaging within a virtual space. Because I think that mixture is quite powerful. 25:07 (PT): We've then got some completely different routes that we're exploring. So for example we're looking at issues to do with developing courses online about internet safety where the people developing the course are actually the students taking the course. So we've started to develop an infrastructure for this course in a wiki and are interested in how we might move that forwards. 25:44 (LC): Now that's very interesting because it then brings in issues of digital literacy as opposed to lockdown or filtering. It actually throws the onus back on personal responsibility which does sound really interesting. 22:56 (PT): Well I mean its one of the things that was I think was a major success for the Schome Park program amongst many of the failures was that we had a public wiki and a public forum which anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world could sign up for and could take part in the discussions in the forum or editing the wiki. And everyone said to us: “You're crazy because this just isn't safe but actually, the way the community developed, was such that everyone within the community was taking responsibility for the wellbeing of other people within the community so we did have people who came in and posted inappropriate messages; they pretty quickly gave up because they discovered that within 30 seconds of posting something someone would have removed it. And almost inevitably it was one of the children within the community rather than an adult because the kids all had moderator controls and things of that sort. And they understood it was their communtiy and how to deal with problems and issues that came up. 27:07 (LC): Which is a far more pro-active insightful way of doing things rather than laying down an acceptable use policy or something like that because if you're actually building an acceptable use policy and you're collaborating about the rules of the game, within your community, I should imagine it gives you that much more responsibility/ insight into how things run? 27:28 (PT): Well I have to say we did have an acceptable use policy not least because there are terms of use that Linden Lab impose on Second Life but the issue for us was about who polices those things and do you frame them in a way that actually empowers the members of the community or in a way that is about you imposing control on them. So the children within the community were trusted and were part of the process of making sure the community worked well, which included the policing of it and dealing with problems. 28:07 (LC): What's fascinating me at the moment is the use of mirror worlds and different types of virtual environment that are beginning to emerge – I mean Google Earth's latest features would suggest that it might shape up to become something quite interesting as well

and the Open Sim project seems to be becoming quite mature. You mentioned World of Warcraft I think – there's someone called Intellagirl – I don't know her real name, I've forgotten her real name who has done a lot of research on the different types of virtual worlds like, for example, World of Warcraft, there's no trail, things happen and then it vanishes. They all have different aspects - I think she's done lots of research on about 50 virtual worlds. Are you looking into the aspects and capabilities of these other types of virtuality that are springing up? 29:03 (PT): OK. Well for me there's a key distinction between what I call open virtual worlds like Second Life and what I think of as the restricted virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or The Sims. And so the key distinction is this: that in the open virtual worlds, you – the user, can create anything, so you are given tools that allow you to build and script and you have complete control of the environment within certain, quite loose limits. In a restricted virtual world everything has predesigned and pre-scripted so within World of Warcraft, as you move up levels and you develop skills, you start to be given access the power to build a special sort of sword but that sword has actually been designed and created previously by the software developers. So you think you're building it but you're actually revealing something that someone else had designed in advance. Ok it's restricted in a sense that you don't have a complete control, there are much stronger limits on what you can build and design and do within the environment. For me the open virtual environments are much more interesting though I am wanting to bring in some of the features and techniques used in the restricted virtual environments to try and act as magnets and levers to bring kids in and support them in staying involved as part of the community. 30:40 (LC): I mean part of the Holodeck project that we're going to get going from March is to look at a lot of web 2.0 tools, cartoon making and other things that can aid the process of activities in the real world that can feed back into the virtual environment so that those processes, thst higher order thinking skills are engaged and then people have to reflect on what they're doing and it's just a sort of way of trying to look at how these processes work or these mechanisms work which I think would be quite interesting to see. But in the first instance it is just adults then it will, at some point, feed down into Teen Grid and I think, for me, that is the most exciting aspect, it's not the actual stuff that you have, it's what you can do with it and the actual processes and workflows and ways you can reflect on working around these things and as you say it's the sort of, smart focus activities where smart lenses that create activity, community activity, what is the key to that? 31:54 (PT): I think you're absolutely right, it is about processes and it is about what you're doing. That was illustrated for us in the kind of way in which the development of Schome Park changed. We started off in phase 1 designing Schome Park around different subject areas. So we had an area for physics; an area for archaeology; an area for ethics and philosophy and after the first phase we kind of realised that this was not necessarily appropriate and we then created a new version of Schome Park which was completely open and we left the kids to design and build the things they needed because it wasn't the physical environment that was the key thing, it was the process of coming up with ideas and activities and things that you wanted to engage with and which gave you real tasks, real purposeful things to do. But you're right, that whole issue of reflection is very powerful and very important. 32:56 (LC): One of the other things that strikes me as being interesting just through interacting with adults in Second Life, is that if you actually do meet them in real life, those communities tend to bind in quite strongly, but then you have a sort of interesting thing happening; that you know the people but you've also got localised, geographically in the real world, localised communities and you've also got distributed communities and I think it is only at conferences when people meet as well those ties become firmer and that whole aspect

of how the two meet, as well, I think in the future, might be one of the things that is a key to engagement. 33:38 (PT): It was very interesting for us because one of the things we did in phase 3, is we started involving people who were working in schools. And so they were meeting with their kids physically, usually in a lunchtime club or after school club, as well as engaging within Schome Park – so engaging virtually. And there were interesting clashes because within the physical space the adult was the teacher and was in loco parentis and was responsible for everything those kids did. When they came into the virtual space, they were just another member of the community and there were a completely different set of ground rules and they didn't have responsibility for those children any more than any other member of the community did and they didn't have authority to discipline the kids within Schome Park though, clearly they did, within the physical space. And, of course, if you're in a classroom and in the virtual world at the same time, you've got these two different sets of rules which are clearly in conflict with each other. It's very interesting, it raises all sorts of issues about the extent to which you can bring the sorts of things we're trying to achieve in Schome Park into existing formal education settings. It also raises questions about which are the most effective learning environments. 35:08 (LC): I can remember a very early project, I think this was as Second Life was beginning, you could actually buy similar space in other worlds and there was a project in London with a teacher working with children who designed their own avatars and put them in and the first time she tried to talk to them in that virtual world they just scarpered, they were off and she had to call them to account in the real world because they were all in the same room. So I can see that I've heard several instances of that happening recently with people going into Second Life and finding that those protocols they try to bring in just do not work – that's fascinating too. So in terms of virtuality and the real world how do you see things going in the future out of interest, generally in terms of environments? Because I've heard a lot about 3D projection, and telepresence where they try and bring people into the real world, how would you see thast fitting in? 36:14 (PT): I've not really engaged with that sort of thing because there's a bit of me that thinks, actually these virtual spaces are very real for people who actually engage with them. And it's a bit like: forums have particular uses; wikis have particular uses; virtual worlds have particular uses; physical spaces have particular uses and there are ways of integrating them but at the end of the day one needs to recognise that different tools do different things. I mean my focus really is about how do we make the virtual spaces more effective rather than how do we integrate the physical and the virtual? Because there's a bit of me that thinks that's happening in our heads all the time anyway. 37:12 (LC): I think education, from what I can see, is a growth area in virtual worlds, in many ways. There's a lot happening – it does seem to me that a lot of people are in their own silos still and that that needs to open up a bit more in terms of access but I think that's probably the way Second Life mainly is set up and I do think there are going to be changes there. I thinkt at should be quite interesting to see what does happen in the next few years. I think it's not mainstream yet still by far, but there's more attention being pulled towards it. I think there's less worry and more quizzical stuff going on with the media in many ways. I don't know how you feel about that? 38:02 (PT): Yes, I think you're right and Second Life is an early example of an open virtual world and it has lots of shortcomings and we're going to see much better environments emerging over the next few years. Personally I like to think about what I call the virtual Schome environment, which is an environment that is a mixture, I have hinted at this, a mixture between open virtual worlds and

restricted worlds, in that, its designed in a way that provides some of the scaffolding and support that people need as they're becoming a member of a community. In other words, as they're learning. And I think that when we get to the stage that we've got environments that do that and as part of that are capturing information about the way in which people behave, perform, what they do, they might become quite useful tools for doing things like assessing knowledge age skills. So let me give you a concrete example. One of the things tht was very problematic for us within the Schome Park program was time management. Young people would say they wanted to come to an event and not turn up. Or they wouldn't say they wanted to come to an event and would turn up. Or they might come halfway through an event or they might leave partway through the event. And they might come to the first session but not turn up for the second session. Now it would be very easy to set up the system so that it logged whether you signed up to say you were coming to an event; whether you turned up to the event; whether you stayed for the whole event; whether you came along to the next event and stayed for the whole event; indeed whether you organised an event. When you organised the event whether people came to it, and if they came to it did they stay for the whole thing? And if you organised a sequence of events, did they come for the whole sequence? Well you can capture that data very easily and you can start to extrapolate from that data some things about your ability to manage time; how interesting the events are that you've organised and so forth. And you can start to build that up into a much more sophisticated picture. That builds on not just single events but sequences of events; not just attending events but helping to organise events; planning events; being involved in events that involve a lot of people or involved in organising so that you're starting to co-ordinate rather than just individually run things. And you can start to see how there's a whole layer of knowledge age skills in that in terms of possible teamwork, leadership, collaboration, time-management, real problem-solving, all those sorts of things. And one of the big problems for us in the education system, it seems to me, is that whilst we recognise these things I'm calling knowledge age skills are important, they're very difficult to assess on a large scale because they involve processes and capturing information about process is much more difficult than capturing information about knowledge or products. So it might be that the virtual Schome environment becomes a really powerful tool for supporting assessment of knowledge age skills and that allows us to change the focus within the education system away from the sorts of things that we assess at the moment using standard national tests/ exams to a focus on the sorts of knowledge age skills and innovation and creativity that so many people seem to think are important in the 21 st century. 41:57 (LC): Yes, I think also that with the advent of a lot of web 2.0 phenomenon that are happening at the moment especially something called Twitter, I'm sure you've heard of Twitter, which is going the rounds at the moment, it seems to me that in many ways and looking at some of the research that's coming out of the Institute of Education and other areas like MirandaNet, that it seems to be pointing towards a more dynamic curriculum on its way in a sense once these learning spaces start to emerge if they're not just to be repositories. It surely lends itself to a more dynamic curriculum? 42:15 (PT): I think the whole notion of that we have a focus on content, you talk about VLEs and people seem to be interested in content and learning objects and I think that's missing the point. Because, actually the things that we think people need in the 21 st century are about process. Now you can't develop processes without content and different disciplines have different sets of rules for how you engage with problems, so being an historian is not the same as being a mathematician but it's the being the historian, or being a mathematician rather than knowing a particular historical fact and I put fact in scare quotes there, or knowing a particular mathematical fact that's important – it's the skill of being an historian and being able to evaluate a range of contradictory evidence that's critical not knowing when some king was born. 43:42 (LC): I'm looking a things to do with Learning Design at the moment and there are

some sort of, well, schemas that will unfold certain things in certain contexts. There's been a lot of work done by Daden in the University sector to do with paramedic training for instance and they are developing an Open Source learning design engine that can unfold certain pathways to doing things or modelling things in-world. What do you think about that kind of use of virtual worlds? 44:14 (PT): It's interesting your example is set within a kind of workplace context where clearly the learning is authentic, in a sense, you can see why you're doing it. And my anxiety about most of formal education is that, actually, the authenticity is just isn't there, there's a real divide between what happens in the formal educational context and the real world and the kind of purposefulness is missing. And it seems to me that we need to get back to a situation where we have that purposefulness. And I suspect that very often, pre-determined curricula, so that things that have been designed, make assumptions which may be flawed. You need to get people's interest and motivation and the most effective point at which to teach someone something or support them in learning something is when they need it. And you can't always know when someone's going to need something. Different people will need different things at different times – so I'm slightly nervous... 45:22 (LC): Yes there are multi-entry points, obviously to learning, within that, even if you have a linear system you still have all these multi-entry points where you have to back or forward or bind in something from somewhere else or a community engagement around it. I think, possibly then, the key, really then, is community in many senses? 45:40 Absolutely 45:44 (LC): So for the foreseeable future you are going to pursue one of these or several of these lines further down the road? Where are you going to be outlining your ideas and where are you going to be in the next few months so that people can know where to come and see? 46:03 OK, well we're in a phase at the moment where we're frantically publishing stuff and it's very frustrating because the timelag between submitting a journal article or a book chapter and it actually appearing in the physical world is terribly long so there's a kind of delay from us finishing phase three of the Schome Park program at the end of May and having written quite a lot of journal articles and book chapters, some of which will be coming out this year, and some of which probably won't appear until next year. We're currently working on a report that we will publish on the Schome website about the Schome Park program first three phases and that is work in progress and stuff is starting to appear on the wiki actually at the moment. So we're putting up many case studies at the moment. 47:05 (LC): And you've made a call for papers for... ? 47:07 I'm editing as special issue of the journal Educational Researcher and that;s focused specifically on use of virtual worlds in education and I'm particularly interested in any work people are doing which goes beyond just describing what they're doing in virtual worlds but is trying to explain in terms of underlying models or theories about why what they are doing is interesting or effective? And, indeed, in the way I was talking about dimensions of practice, the way in which what they are doing is extending their thinking about what we might do to support the learning in a range of contexts. 47:56 (LC): That sounds fascinating Peter, I'd like to thank you very much for coming along and giving me some of your valuable time today. And I hope to see all these developments coming out soon.

48:07 Well, check out the website. http://www.schome.ac.uk – sorry I had to plug it. 48:19 (LC): No – it's wonderful