Schome Park was an element of the Open University’s Schome research initiative, and was active from 2006-2008. It was established as a means of putting into practice some of the new learning theories and pedagogies proposed by Schome research staff at the Open University...

1. CASE STUDY
Schome Park
by
Clare Cullen
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2. Schome Park was an element of the Open University’s Schome research initiative, and
was active from 2006-2008. It was established as a means of putting into practice some
of the new learning theories and pedagogies proposed by Schome research staff at the
Open University. The Schome initiative aims to overcome some of the problems of the
current education system by building upon evidence from existing sources: learning the-
ory (particularly socio-cultural theory); cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT); evid-
ence from educational research (including practitioner and action research) in areas
such as motivation, leadership, and the management of change .Ultimately, Schome
hopes to bring together children, parents, policy makers, academics, students, home
educators, employers, teachers and other practitioners from around the world as part of
a community who will collaboratively devise a new educational system.
Case profile – Schome Park in a nutshell
Schome Park
Exploring the educational potential of virtual worlds
http://www.schome.ac.uk/
Website
http://www.schome.ac.uk/wiki/Main_Page
Status No longer active, running from 2006-2008
Interviewed person Peter Twining, Project Director
The Open University, the National Association for Gifted and Tal-
Funded and promoted by…
ented Youth, the Innovation Unit, Becta
Combination of formal setting (e.g. schools) and informal setting
Location of the Learning Activities
(e.g. home)
Young people aged 13-17. Whilst the project was not aimed solely
at marginalised groups, the target group included:
| students from the National Association for Gifted and Talented
Youth (NAGTY), who are deemed ‘gifted’ or ‘talented’ but who
are underachieving in school
Target group(s) | students from socially disadvantaged or ethnic minority back-
grounds who are currently under-represented in higher educa-
tion (GOAL)
| students from Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) who have difficulties
in mainstream schooling
| students on the Autism spectrum
Number of users 149 users
Educational Sector(s) Secondary School
Category of the Learning Activities Non-formal, informal
Virtual world, wiki, blog, chat, forum, social networking, media-
Web 2.0 technologies used...
sharing (YouTube, blip.tv, Flickr)
Methods to support inclusion Co-learning, peer mentoring
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3. Short description and key characteristics
The Schome Park teen Second Life Project aimed to use virtual worlds to explore new
educational possibilities. Through co-learning, the project sought to establish a genuine
and inclusive learning community where students and teachers are able to learn from
each other and contribute to developing a vision of what ‘the education system of the
learning age’ should be like.
The main goals of the project were:
| To explore the educational potential and pitfalls of Teen Second Life (it was the first
project in Europe to do so)
| To develop the knowledge-age skills of participants, specifically: communication,
confidence, creativity, leadership, motivation, problem solving and teamwork
| To try out alternative approaches to supporting learning to inform thinking about vis-
ions for Schome (an education system for the information age).
As part of the wider Schome program, (not school – not home – Schome) Schome Park
aimed to develop ideas about future education through using virtual worlds to explore
scenarios that would be difficult or costly to establish in ‘real-life’. The planning stages of
the project began at the Open University in late 2006.
There have been three phases of the project so far:
| Phase 1: The Schome/NAGTY Pilot, January – May 2007. Members from NAGTY were
asked to join and NAGTY actively sought to recruit members who were under-per-
forming at school.
| Phase 2: June – December 2007. It included some of the original NAGTY students
plus new students who were more representative of the student population as a
whole. During Phase 2 the first group of students from the USA joined the project.
| Phase 3: January – May 2008. It included some of the original students from Phases 1
and 2, and introduced more students from the USA.
Phase 1 was funded by NAGTY and the Innovation Unit. Phase 2 was funded by Becta.
Phase 3 was funded by The Centre for Research in Education and Educational Techno-
logy, and the Pedagogy, Learning And Curriculum Research Group (both at the Open
University).
Dimension of learning and inclusion
Schome Park is accessed through the Teen Second Life grid and all learning takes place
in-world. Throughout the project, a wide range of activities were organised around the
three core strands (physics, archaeology, and ethics & philosophy) as well as a range of
others led by staff (e.g. research methods, artificial intelligence and machinima – mak-
ing films within Second Life) and by students themselves (e.g. a regatta, a wedding, gov-
ernance meetings, a murder mystery evening, low prim building, chess matches, etc.).
Students did not undertake tests or courses as such, but they created material in-world
and organised and attended scheduled activities. Activities were normally arranged and
published via in-world noticeboard or on the wiki and forum. Students were able to at-
tend the activities that interested them, which usually took the form of an informal dis-
cussion, rather than a lesson. Communication in-world was usually via chat. Schome
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4. Park was designed to be an asynchronous learning environment which students could
access, develop and build upon whenever they wanted to.
Figure 1: An area of the Schome Park virtual learning platform
The learning focus of the project was on ‘co-learning’, where each participant was able
to direct and contribute to learning, regardless of their age or role in the project.
Schome Park staff took on a mentoring, rather than a traditional teaching role. They
taught activities yet were equally willing to learn from students and attend sessions or-
ganised by students. There was also a ‘buddy’ system, whereby older SParker students
would support and advise new members. Most learning that took place was peer-learn-
ing and students were encouraged to ‘tap in’ to the expertise of the staff members and
PhD students.
The project team found that giving the students the opportunity to work alongside pro-
fessionals and academics as a ‘researcher’ of learning in virtual worlds was a good in-
centive for most users to participate. Evidence suggests that users were able to develop
their knowledge age skills and improve confidence and self-esteem, leadership, man-
agement, problem-solving, team-working and decision-making skills. Many users also
developed advanced ICT, social media and Second Life skills.
Whilst the focus of the project was not on inclusion, the team actively recruited stu-
dents from the National Association for Gifted and Talent Youth (NAGTY) who are under-
achieving in school. Of these students, 23% were from ‘socially disadvantaged or ethnic
minority backgrounds who are currently under-represented in higher education’
(GOAL). In the second and third phases of the project, Local Education Authorities re-
ferred students from their Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) with behavioural problems at
school. Consequently, a significant majority of the students involved in the program
were marginalised to some extent by the mainstream school system and were offered
an opportunity to further their learning in a different environment.
The project was especially successful with students who suffered from low self-esteem
or experienced difficulty communicating in social situations, as well as young people on
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5. the Autism spectrum who might have difficulties with face-to-face learning. By using the
Second Life platform, learners do not have to deal with things like physical appearance
or problems of social interaction, and this gives them more freedom to learn. The initiat-
ive was also valuable for learners who found it difficult to concentrate for long periods
of time, as they were able to decide when and for how long they used the Second Life
platform and take responsibility for their own learning. Unfortunately, the project team
found that the initiative was less successful with their GOAL cohort, the young people
from deprived backgrounds who were less likely to have access to the technology at
home.
Innovative elements and key success factors
As well as being one of the first projects to research the educational potential of virtual
worlds, the initiative was also innovative for its use of several Web 2.0 technologies to
support the learning programme. Additional Web 2.0 tools included the Schome Park
wiki; the Schome Park blog; SLogs (effectively a blog which allows users to send mes-
sages and photographs to a web page from inside Schome Park so the students could
blog as their avatar); blikis (collaborative blogs which are not necessarily chronological);
some students set up a radio station which streamed music into the island and played
over the internet. Students also created a series of machinima film projects, which they
shared on YouTube and Blip.tv. Additionally, some students uploaded Second Life snap-
shots of their experiences of Schome Park to the project wiki, as well as to their own
photo streams or Flickr.
Figure 2: The Schome Park ‘bliki’, a combination of a wiki and a blog.
One of the main successes of the project was establishing a genuinely collaborative
learning community. Staff noticed that students initially had a very individualistic atti-
tude to their learning and what they could gain from the project. They worked on their
own to create Second Life objects and took personal ownership of these objects. Staff
5

6. gradually encouraged students to shift their focus away from what they wanted to do as
an individual, to identifying the community needs and how they could work together to
achieve them. Students were given greater control and responsibility over the gov-
ernance of the island. In Second Life, users are allocated a limited number of ‘prims’,
which are the objects that make up the environment, and students had to work collab-
oratively to manage the number of prims and settle disputes about what was most be-
neficial to the community.
There was also strong evidence of peer support amongst users, with SParkers often
helping each other to learn how to achieve things within the virtual environment. Users
were also able to leave each other feedback on the forums and blogs, for example ‘barn
stars’ for good work.
The project had a very positive impact on the personal development of its students. As
mentioned above, many users were able to improve their self-esteem, confidence and
team working abilities. Through using forums and the wiki, they were also able to devel-
op empathy and reflect on the opinions and ideas of others. One Schome Park user
noted:
“Because I've got as much time as I want to compose a reply on the forums, I've become
much better at diplomacy, and it's pushed my empathy a long way, improving it in doing
so. Generally speaking, I can get on with people a lot easier on the forums and in world,
and that's carried over into my social skills in the wider world.”
The project also advocated the importance of diversifying learning and provided its stu-
dents with an unconventional curriculum. Through involving PhD students from the
Open University and volunteers from other establishments, Schome Park was able to of-
fer a 125 diverse range of activities, such as Artificial Intelligence sessions. Students
were able to correspond directly with specialists in the field, giving them a wider view of
education.
Significantly, the initiative was able to reach beyond the achievements gained by stu-
dents in-world, to link with real-world competitions and events. Some students had the
opportunity to take part in the UKSC satellite competition, another group of students
came second in the Learners Y Factor competition and met each other face-to-face in
London to give a presentation on their experiences of Schome Park archaeology lessons.
Problems encountered and lessons learned
Technical: Second Life demands high bandwidth usage, which can potentially exclude
users without a sufficiently fast internet connection and also requires users to have their
own computer at home. These factors could be said to contribute to the “digital divide”.
In Schome Park, this is thought to be why the GOAL cohort did not engage in the initiat-
ive as much as other users.
Students with basic or very poor ICT skills would struggle with the interface and some of
the Second Life skills, although it has a ‘gaming’ aspect which is appealing and facilitates
ease of use.
Social/behavioural: Invariably there were disputes between students in the virtual
world. These conflict were usually resolved without the need for staff intervention.
Schomers stated that the forum provided a beneficial environment for the resolution of
such issues.
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7. Organisational issues: Some staff members felt that there was lack of support for staff
development and they sometimes lacked the necessary technical knowledge to achieve
more ambitious tasks. Some staff members expressed the need for greater coordination
and direction and development of understanding of the Schome Initiative and strategic
development of publications. These problems were attributed to a lack of funding.
Challenging cultural norms: Some staff and students found it difficult to adapt their
thinking to a new way of structuring education and re-imagining teacher-student roles.
This was especially evident in the third phase of the project when established groups of
students and their teachers joined the community. These students found it difficult to
experience what Schome Park was really like as they were still behaving as if they were
in a traditional school environment.
Measuring learning gains: Another issue involves formalising the informal aspect of
learning in the project. It is difficult to monitor learning and improvement in-world as
the expectation is that students have more freedom than in a traditional learning envir-
onment. Some staff felt that the project needed to establish links to the curriculum.
7

8. Collaborating institutions in LINKS-UP
Institute for Innovation in Learning, Friedrich-Alex-
ander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen,
Germany
www.fim.uni-erlangen.de
Arcola Research LLP, London, United Kingdom
www.arcola-research.co.uk
eSociety Institute, The Hague University of Applied
Sciences, The Hague, The Netherlands
www.esocietyinstituut.nl
Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firen-
ze, Prato, Italy
www.pin.unifi.it
Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Salzburg,
Austria
www.salzburgresearch.at
European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN),
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
www.eden-online.org
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