Interview with Peter Twining about the Schome Park Project - Feb 2009Interview can be found at :http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=348PT=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 whateducation 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 fromconceptions of school. So even home educators, when asked to think about what education systemscould be like, would come up with something that would be just like school only with nice toiletsand 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 peoplereally have very little experience of anything that was radically different to the existing schoolsystem.01:02 (PT): So one of my collegues,Kieron Sheehy, said: “Well why don't we give people a livedexperience of something that is really very different, and let's see if we can use Second Life to dothat.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 wecould 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 VirtualEnvironments and who had high levels of technical competence which meant I didn't really have toengage 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 hourstrying out things; doing preparation so that the island was all set up and ready with activities readyto 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 andinteracted 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 Ididn't script but I did help organise and I did help cajole, encourage and support and challenge andall those sorts of things.03:13 (PT): And that kind of carried on throughout the project and of course I then also had a rolein terms of making sure that we had a good level of integration between Second Life and the Wikiand the Forum. And we started developing micro-blogs as well so that you could blog from in-world 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 thestrategic overview and someone else did all the kind of coding and stuff. And then, I suppose, myother role was about trying to get people to document and collect evidence about what they weredoing; 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'vespent in Second Life has been minimal because we've been spending our time on analysing data andwriting journal articles and doing conference presentations and things of that sort. And that's a kindof potted history.04:25

(LC):

So did you have a lightbulb moment... a lot of people are talking about criticalincidents or lightbulb moments where you realised the sort of capabilities of this or is that stillto come after you've gone through the data?

04:39 (PT): There were a number of lightbulb moments – there was one where we started playingwith 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 andtalking about using text chat to talk about the conference presentations and so forth and all the ideaabout 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; interms of things like really experimenting with changing the power relationships between the adultsand the students; really giving students more control and power over what they did; what thecurriculum 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 wantedto solve, because we'd spent six months trying to get young people to think creatively about whateducation systems might be like and had failed dismally, even though we were working with peoplelike 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 didseem 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 theengagements were very different. So, for example, when we run workshops with home educatingkids, they kind of turn up and they will come into the room and they wait for us to kind of tell themwhat to do. When we set up workshops in Second Life, on Schome Park, which is our Teen andSecond Life Island, the kids would come in, they'd look around for a couple of seconds and thenthey'd fly off. They wouldn't ask us - “Is it OK to fly off?” they would just go and we have picturesof staff sat round wanting to run the induction session and the kids have all gone off to do their ownthing 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 allthe people that you're working with in Second Life?”. And without thinking about it or hesitating Isaid, “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 usingSkype or email or even something like FlashMeeting, I would immediately say, “No, I haven't metthem.” So that was something for me, that was quite a shock to me, that I actually said withouthesitation. “Yes I've met them.” and I genuinely believed I had. So that said to me that there issomething 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 thingsthat were happening were not just to do with the virtual environment, they were to do with theinteraction between the virtual environment, the wiki and the forum. But one of the things that Ithink was very important for us was about the quality of the relationships that got developed and thechildren's view that, the relationships they were having in terms of the power structures and the trustwithin Schome Park was very different to the nature of the relationships that they had in school andI think that's partly allowed by the way in which your avatar can present you in different ways. Andso 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 whatyou look like very quickly.09:07 (PT): We took a deliberate decision very early on that when people came to Schome Park wewouldn'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 knowanything else about them at all and people weren't allowed to share personal information about eachother. So that meant we had 13 yr olds working quite happily alongside adults, we had 13 yr oldsquite happily working with 17 yr olds and it didn't impact on the fact whether you were 13 or 17wasn'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 ahigher proportion of kids who were active in the project who were somewhere on the autisticspectrum. So kids who identified themselves as having been labelled as having Aspergers syndromefor example and again, they found the environment very liberating in terms of it allowed them tocommunicate and interact with other people more on a level playing field than they were able to doin 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 readingabout why virtual worlds encourage people to be playful because I think they do encourage peopleto be playful, they encourage you to challenge boundaries and try out the rules. And I've framed thisas being because virtual worlds are kind of unclaimed educational spaces. So if you go into aclassroom in a school, you know immediately what the kind of ground rules are; you know what theteacher's supposed to do; what the kids are supposed to do and you know where you are supposed tostand and you know what the nature of the interaction's likely to be. When you come into SecondLife most people actually don't understand how to operate because the ground rules haven't beenestablished and so people try things out and they test the rules and they test the boundaries in order,in a sense, to recreate them. SoCastranovadescribes this as being like the Wild West. When youfirst went to the Wild West it was kind of lawless and gradually as communities formed laws startedto 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 aremirroring the real world and I don't know what I think about that really, in a sense, becausethey've got perfect builds of schools that are yet to be built in Teen Grid and in Main Grid, forthe 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 somevirtual equivalent of the real world – a mirror world - where people do exactly the samethings 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 upyesterday (4

Feb 2009) and what they're doing is they've got kids walking round their island andfinding certain questions about, I think it's the circulation system, and when they click on the