The idea of making EU schools a safe and controlled experiential ‘playground for life’ where pupils acquire the knowledge and skills required to enable them to participate fully in the workplace and in society is having to overcome major barriers, such as the current isolation of schools from the community-at-large and a lack of motivation in pupils.
This isolation between schools and other sectors of society is evidenced by a lack of correspondence between formal learning environments inside of school and informal learning environments outside of school, a lack of connection and smooth transition between school and work, and a lack of educational opportunities and resources that allow pupils to investigate and learn in real settings. Other symptoms of the isolated school are the lack of, and consequently the need for, better development of pupils’ social abilities and overall attitudes and values, such as their understanding of, and openness to, cultural diversity.Independent of cultural and socio-economic factors, the complexity of the problem is further compounded by the lack of motivation in pupils which is attributable, at least in part, to a failure to provide them with an engaging and meaningful contextual learning experience.
In today’s technological society, with widespread adoption of ICT in classrooms, ICT offers significant potential for bridging the contextual gap between school and community, essentially providing the school with a ‘window to the world’ and for introducing innovative techniques to make teaching and learning more effective and motivational.
Teachers are at the centre of successful classroom, and beyond, ICT integration. Lankshear and Snyder (2000) confirm the importance of the ‘teachers’s effect’ in ensuring full integration of ICT takes place to create technology-rich classrooms that change the nature of teaching and learning, and develop more independent and self motivating learners. They also stress the importance of the ICT competences and skills of the teachers themselves which, depending on their level of proficiency, can either act as a barrier to, or be a major enabler of, this integration and uptake.An assessment of emerging technologies that can promote school openness and enhance the learning experience emphasizes the opportunities afforded by Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs).
MUVEs are virtual worlds accessible via the Internet where humans interact (as avatars) with each other and with software agents in a cyberspace that uses the metaphor of the real world but without its physical limitations. Because of the lack of a preset structure and narrative, which gives the educator more freedom of movement than a strictly game-based scenario and the massive potential for cooperation and content creation, MUVEs are quickly gaining favour and credibility amongst educators.In order to capitalise on this technology, the educational benefits it can bring, and any associated market opportunities that could arise, the time-to-adoption window is within the next 24 to 36 months as foreseen by the Horizon 2007 report.
Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world—or diverge wildly from it—present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s. (Horizon Report 2007)
MUVEs offer a wide range of possibilities for enhanced learning such as:
- highly flexible engineering of learning spaces and user-content creation.
- extended social and human-machine interactions between person to person, person to object and between objects.
- the potential to develop virtual school and community based scenarios that mirror those that exist in the real world.
- the possibility to implement non-traditional learning approaches and methodologies such as socio-constructivism and situated learning, experiential learning, learning by projects, learning by doing, game based learning, simulations and role playing
- and the potential to use them as tools to engage learners, foster motivation and facilitate self-organisation of learning.
Research evidence shows that ICT, when underpinned by innovative teaching, can motivate and engage learners, address students’ lack of motivation, and improve progression. MUVEs are a promising playground for learning because through MUVEs one can overcome the limitations of geographical distance in the real world. The possibilities are limitless given that one can take advantage of these technologies to create collaborative learning environments.