Question: How is Life? Answer: First or Second?

My name is Simao Oliveira and I have been a student at University of Aveiro for 5 years now. Right now I am taking my ERASMUS period in IT College. I did my bachelors degree in New Technologies in Communication and am now taking a masters degree in Multimedia Communication.

Simao Oliviera

My first experience in SecondLife was in my third year of my bachelors degree when we had to do a project for a course where one of the professors was Luis Pedro. At that time we took it as a challenge because it was a quite unknown, emerging platform and interesting to explore. The project was quite successful and after that we did some other projects for some Portuguese companies and some institutions in Portugal. They were quite successful as well and we got some good experience.

Now when I had to write my master thesis I thought that I could do it on the topic of multi-user virtual environments like SecondLife and also OpenSim to try to see how these new environments and this new web topology can be used in educational purposes and how they are useful to these new students that we have nowadays – students that are tech-savvy and digital natives (they have new expectations and give new challenges to the development of the learning process).

What is SecondLife – the idea behind it and how does it work?

Luis Pedro: SecondLife is an application that is a part of a bigger group of applications named multi-user virtual environments or MMPORG – massive multi-player online role-playing games. There’s some kind of doubt where to put SecondLife but we like to put it into multi-user virtual environments because of a set of features:

• Mainly the persistence of the environment.
• The fact that the residents create their own content.
• The social and economic interaction that profiles SecondLife and other tools like OpenSim into multi-user virtual environments.

It’s an environment that was created by LindenLab in United States. The only thing that LindenLab provides for the user is the land that is being sold to the users. All the content that is developed by the users is their own – the content is not from LindenLab but from the users or groups of users that have built it.

SecondLife has experienced a massive growing of interests by the users in the last few years – there are 15 million registered users, 700 000 logged in users in the last 30 days. This is massive for an online environment. People from all over the world are using it, so taking into account the time-zones of the world you can say that the environment is in use 24/7. There is a special place for higher-education in this environment so a lot of institutions (mainly in the United States, but also in Brazil and Europe) are taking high stakes in SecondLife using it as another environment for their students to learn, communicate, interact with teachers and other specialists. It is an environment with lots of potential in terms of education and, of course, in business also.

Simao Oliveira: If you look at SecondLife form beginner’s point of view, it’s basically pretty much like a game. It has all the characteristics of a game. Except for non-defined roles and there are now scores and objectives beforehand. You are not restricted by defined goals which can be either good or bad. If you are into games and you like games then SecondLife is not going to fulfill you’re need for a game. It’s basically a platform for interaction. It’s a platform that leaves place for your imagination, for you desire to do pretty much whatever you want. And also it can show some of the new functionalities that Web might (or might not) present in the future. It might be a bit of a preview of how web can be presented to us in a new way.

We can say that SecondLife could even be called a world inside a real world. It’s living a parallel life.

Luis: Yes.

Simao: If you think about it, it’s not that much different from everything you do. You have little worlds inside your life and SecondLife is pretty much another of it. You have the advantage of being able to log in and out of that world whenever you want, so it’s like a little world in your world so why not.

Can you point out some main or bigger usages of SecondLife until today that you have seen in the world. How are companies or people using it?

Luis: I will talk mainly in what indication is my concern.

One of the main areas that is emerging right now in SecondLife is about role-playing in behavioral training in professional training scenarios.

For instance nursing schools are training future nurses in terms of diagnosing the problems with patients in SecondLife. Basically what you have is a simulation of real world scenario in which patient comes in and you’ve got to make decisions about diagnosing problems of that patient. The system records to an external database all the decisions that are made by future nurses and the nurse has to justify how and why you made such a diagnosis to that patient. So it’s far better than to try it with real patients because there’s a health problem in there. It’s a massive area of training right now in SecondLife.

We are talking about nursing but we are also talking about bank employees in what concerns robberies and what they do have in terms of procedures. What procedures they have to follow in the case of robberies.

You have a lot of scenarios where you can test behavior of both sides not endangering their lives or the lives of others.

Another massive area where you can test some knowledge and precision in terms of simulations is related to physics because SecondLife has a physics centre that is really good. OpenSim physics engine is said to be a lot better than SecondLife one but it’s pretty good so you can see all over SecondLife various simulation SIMs where you can test weather phenomena, biological phenomena and so on. The main advantage is the possibility to do close to real test in close to real scenarios in controlled environments where you can save a lot of money.

You can test people about knowledge or procedure precision and that’s an emerging area. Of course in terms of education there’s also space for other kinds of activities, more like the ones you normally use in face to face communication in classrooms, the usabilities of other assets, the use of voice in communication between teacher and students and students to students. There’s a whole new kind of opportunities that you can do in SecondLife that saves a lot of your money or even allows you to be in scenarios that are really difficult to create in the real world.

Simao: I would like to point out other usages besides education because SecondLife has a very strong economical side, business side and also a ludical side.

I think maybe economical side is the one of the most interesting as well, although maybe companies have misused and misinterpreted SecondLife in the past. I think SecondLife has the advantage of presenting added value in the creation of communities around brands, creation of communities around a spirit that the brand wants to offer. It’s also a way to create a channel of communication with innovative part of people, the people that normally try these kind of innovative means before other people. This is an interesting value gaining process for brands that sometimes is a bit misused.

Sometimes the brands want to create a presence in SecondLife or even virtual world and they think they are going to get revenue from SecondLife which I think is an attitude that is quite wrong. Because first of all even companies and platforms that are more structured and stronger and have broader history have struggled to find a business model that can bring them revenue. It doesn’t mean that they don’t create value and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t strengthen their name as a brand or as a company. A lot of brands went there and tried to sell stuff inside and tried to create the value that was really not well handled. Whereas others were able to actually use the attitude of a brand or a company to actually create added value. I remember the cases of Scion brand which was a brand of Toyota. It’s a car manufacturer. They built customized cars. They bet on customization, the personal side of buying a car and creating a car and they did it with SecondLife which is a platform which is pretty much ideal for that kind of thing. You can basically just create a model of a car and say to people: “Hey, you can change everything you want in the car and you can manipulate it and in the end we can offer you a model of a car that you can keep in your own world.” That’s a very good attitude towards the consumer. You don’t just put there a model of a car and say: “Hey, if you want a car just pay us some million dollars.” That’s like saying to the consumer that you are doing the same as you’re doing in the real world. You’re not using the added value that this platform is bringing you. And that I think is what in business side I particularly like in SecondLife – that you can actually have a different side to the business, not just extend the world you already know.

Let’s turn more to the educational side and try to figure out the possibilities and usages. I want to know how, in your experience, have the students got used to Second Life or how they have started to use Second Life and what kind of problems have they had and what kind of success stories you have seen from the students side?

Luis: The learning curve of SecondLife is little rough in the beginning, they have to manipulate quite a few number of things: camera position, movement, communication features, positioning features, search features, math features. A lot of features they have to control.

I would say in the beginning it’s a more complicated process in terms of being in the world of Second Life. In terms of communication, most of the students are used to using chat tools or even to use the sound feature of Second Life. So yes I would say they can feel little bit lost in the beginning. It’s a very large world with very large number of SIMs.

It’s a rough parallel that can be pointed out – it’s like the web if the web is messy. If you don’t know where to go, you can feel a little bit lost. So it’s a matter of finding your space in the world, in finding your favorite SIMs. But this can be very facilitated by your integration in communities, your community tends to adopt you and to guide you. So that was also strategy we developed and used.

It’s a lot easier to overcome those initial difficulties and problems when you are integrated in a community of users that share common interests with you. There’s an initial phase in terms of using the environment that is a little bit difficult, mainly in terms of positioning you in the world, your movements, your communication features and moving around in SecondLife. This in terms of using Second Life as a normal user for educational purposes I think is very easy because the communication tools that are provided by SecondLife are very close to the ones that the students normally use to communicate – based on text and/or voice. It’s really easy for them to communicate with teachers, with colleagues and so on.

I would say this initial difficult phase can be a little bit rough to deal with but it’s very easy to overcome with the help of a community or group where students can be integrated and feel integrated.

Is the feeling of groups and working together one of the main prerequisites for the students?

Luis: Yes. I wouldn’t say a prerequisite but I would say it’s a very important requirement because if you think Second Life is in broader terms a social community. Second Life exists because of its users. If Second Life didn’t have users creating contents in SIMs, Second Life would be just bunch of land with absolutely nothing. So I would say that teamwork and community spirit is a very important asset for users to use when they are in SecondLife. Of course you can be more solitary but every once in a while you’ll have to communicate in order to buy things, to be integrated in simulations or in activities that go on in Second Life. It’s inevitable like in your normal social life in the real world.

You’ll have to be able to talk to people in order to be a better learner or better user of some kind of real world scenario.

Besides that the main purposes of using Second Life in education, in business, in marketing or wherever is to be able to share a message or product or knowledge with the rest of community, rest of the world so you’ve got to be able to have those teamwork skills that are very important in this kind of environments of course.

Simao: Yes. That community sense is even present in the meta information, in the meta data about the platform, because when you’re learning to use the Second Life you do it mostly by getting help from the community. You learn how to build, how to script, how to use the platform and you learn about new places and new experiences in the world through community. You don’t just get there and the place is there and you just discovered it by yourself. The place is there, like prof Pedro said, because someone built it, because the community built it.

Besides the usage of it and even the way you start facing the platform and you build you knowledge about the platform is because of the community. It’s not just something you can do on your own. You’re not an island inside SecondLife. You will become eventually part of the community, whether you like it or not.

Of course teachers will definitely have the same problems in the beginning and they just need to learn to orient themselves around Second Life, understand where they are and just start to use the communication possibilities For teachers it is also important to organize the learning process. What are the challenges for the educators?

Luis: Teachers have the same difficulties that I told you before about students or common users in terms of being and navigating and controlling the features of Second Life. But they have additional difficulties in terms of organizing the learning experiences.

As in what concerns the teachers difficulties I think the main difficulty is being able to understand the full potential of Second Life and to be able to complement some of the things that are maybe carried out in the face to face scenario. Or using other tools, technologies and finding the space and the room and the main functionalities to use Second Life in the learning process. I think initially they might come up with an idea of using SecondLife to mimic real world classroom experience and that’s not very welcomed by the students because if you try to imagine yourself in a room in Second Life like an amphitheater where you are listening to a teacher or seeing some PowerPoints you miss quite a lot of non-visual clues that you can feel in a real world scenario and yet you don’t have in terms of communication.

So the room for interaction is also a little bit restricted and it cannot be compared to the possibilities of communication that you have in a real world scenario. I think that’s the initial struggle by the teachers – to find the activities in which SecondLife could be used in learning process with more potential and with more outcomes for the students. From what we’re able to see from the researches that have been conducted, we can see that Second Life is more adequate for another kind of activities – more informal ones, more based on debate than for the, I would say, more formal learning activities of lecturing.

You have (to Simao)  already experienced using Second Life in education so maybe you can just comment it from the students’ side?

Simao: Experiences I’ve had with SL were mostly autonomous, not under a structured curriculum, so it’s kind of hard for me to say which kind of difficulties you actually feel. But I think from the students’ side it’s mostly a motivation question because sometimes when you have a new platform you kind of wonder what’s the added value it can bring to you and to your learning process. I understand that Second Life is a bit complicated to understand at first because you face it and most people will maybe think of it as some kind of game and they’ll ask: “how can I use this for learning? How can I actually get some advantage out of it?” I think you would’ve said the same some years ago about pretty much all the tools you’re using nowadays. It’s a process that requires some time.

Some students are able to use it more productively, some students will get lost in the multiple features that it has. First of all you have to aim it for the right people. I’m not saying Second Life will be awesome for everybody, so some people will not just use it and I think that’s normal.

If you’re able to aim it at the right people and if you have 50 people and even just 5 of them are able to use it properly, it’s already an advantage. So I think you have to aim it at some people, get the advantages out of it and if the other 45 are not able to use it, you’ll have to think of something else. But you still got 5 people using it correctly and those 5 people will be integrated with other groups of 5 people and that’s going to be interesting and so you’re going to learn anyway. Because, like prof Pedro says, the process of learning nowadays is through community but also through personal space of learning. So even if not all of your friends use Second Life you can use Second Life with other communities, other sub-communities that you have in you personal learning space.

Could you point out some first steps or some clues for a teacher who maybe first time logs in to the Second Life. What should they just try out or do in the beginning to get the positive feeling of it or just understand it and also what could or should they think regarding their own subject.

Luis: I don’t personally know any specific steps or rules that apply at that step but I will try to give out my on experience.

My experience started when I went to SL because of common interests that I had with some people who already were in SL. Some people that I knew before from using other technologies and were trying out SL. We kind of learned together how to overcome those difficulties, to find interesting places to explore, what to build and what to do in terms of teaching. So it was a common experience for a lot of us by supporting each other. My personal first experience was heavily based on this kind of a community based exploration with my colleagues.

I would say that for a teacher to try it and start using it, it would be very nice to be able to share touts and questions with people that have been around for longer. That was our case. We had some initial difficulties like every other university. Among them was a difficulty involved with the teaching and learning process. We were able to find people inside Second Life, that had a lot of experience to initially guide us and direct us to interesting sims and interesting practices inside Second Life so we were able to see what was going on.

Initially I remember that I assisted some classes in a New York university that has their own sim in Second Life. So I went there and sat there assisting some classes. I remember myself thinking that this kind of an approach with just a PowerPoint and teacher talking doesn’t work in Second Life – at least for me. I thought that I will not do this when I think about organizing a class activity in Second Life.

I think that initially community support is very important – it is very important to feel the environment and try it out. To be able to go to regular classes, simulation activities, debates (there are lots of debates and open sessions in Second Life). To be able to participate and feel for yourself and have the chance to be a better judge about what could work or not work from your point of view. It is very important to be inside the world to test it, to feel it and to draw your own conclusions.

Simao: If you are going to go to SL without necessarily an educational purpose or just out of curiosity, you will probably find something you are interested in. Maybe in the beginning you should try to point your interest to the things that you actually like and then build from there. I am sure that for instance a person that likes architecture will find interest in SL. I am sure that people that like arts will find interest in SL. I am sure that people who like music will find something for them and so on.

Maybe if you are trying to get in touch with the platform you can direct your attention to something that you like and from there you will probably learn a lot and get used to the platform in a much easier way than otherwise.

Could you describe your personal experience and problems that you had to face when starting to use the system?

Simao: In my case I had an obvious motivation of having the project complete and that is already enough motivation to become used to the platform. Besides that it was also interesting to see such a new way of using a 3D paradigm that I was used to see in games (and I wasn’t much of a gamer).

It was interesting to see how people could actually interact inside something that I was used to see as a game and familiar previously as a place for shooting someone or completing missions and getting more points. That was quite interesting for me to understand.

Because I was also interested in questions such as publicity and marketing, I thought that it was very interesting how you could actually understand that platform to use it as a new tool to advertise your products, to work inside it. I was sure that most people would not be able to understand it as soon as possible.

Even thinking to the future when there will probably be more similar environments – how can you transmit messages through there to you consumer base, to you student base, to a community. From my personal experience these themes were what motivated me.

Can you point out some success stories that you have personally seen or heard in SL?

Luis: Some of the recent success stories in terms of education are connected to the features of role-playing and simulations that are being developed and carried out in SL. It is very-very interesting from the user and from the employee point of view to be able to test his acquired knowledge in close to real scenarios without endangering no-one or himself.

This nursing process, the training process that I was pointing out, is a very successful case in terms of role-playing activities and scenarios used for professional training.

Also border control – one other thing that the Canadian Border Control uses as an interesting scenario of testing the guards. They have people coming in, cars coming in, trucks coming in and they have to, in this simulated random process, be able to see and point out the right procedure in order to inspect the people that are coming to Canada in a virtual scenario. So it’s better for them to test this out in there than in a real world scenario where it would be very dangerous (pressure etc). That is important. The pressure side could be also the down side of it because you don’t have the same pressure in a close to real scenario – on the same time it is very difficult to transpose the same pressure in simulated scenarios. In terms of procedures and requirements of knowledge in your education it is a growing test bed.

Another feature that is very important is the simulation side of SL where you can predict some physics phenomena using Second Life. It is very-very useful in terms of training people that going to be in real messy world scenarios.

Another important feature is related with psychological support. Aveiro had an early test-bed with psychological support that now you will find all over the place in Second Life. These groups of psychological support offer help in a very wide variety of fields – for example addictions, epilepsy and lots of other themes. You have the advantage of really being anonymous – no one has to know who you are. This is very important to be able to express your feelings and be open in these support groups that give psychological help.

These examples are mostly from informal education. In terms of more formal education the success cases are quite similar to the approaches in the informal side – for example stimulating debates, empowering learners to conduct their own learning experiences.

This illusion of roles and ranks in terms of students and teaching can be observed and learned upon on – at the end of the day, you can find some pretty amazing results in terms of learning, in terms of being able to love to learn.

Simao: For me maybe the cases that impressed me the most have been built by professional multi-media producing companies that were able to become also quite big inside Second Life. People from Electric Sheep Company (a quite famous company inside SL) were able to build and produce some very detailed and complex sims and videos inside SL. For me this is interesting because building and scripting inside SL are my main interests.

To see a platform, that many people conceive as very limited or basic used to conduct real business impresses me a lot. I have seen people inside SL that make money by for example building sims based on Van Gogh paintings. I think that that’s what art is all about – people are able to create new experience out of things that are already existing. That was very interesting for me and I think that these are some of the experiences that impress me the most in SL.

When talking about pedagogy and SL – are there any changes that need to be introduced into the learning process when facilitating SL in teaching?

Luis: Yes, and I would say that the changes are mostly related with attitudinal change. So you have to take into account the attitude that the teachers and students have in the normal teaching-learning process – this is hard for both sides.

It is hard for the teacher to step down from their position and be another learner with their students or being just another person that contributes to that learning community. It’s not easy for the students also to step up and be more autonomous and responsible in order to conduct the learning experience and to be able to feel that the learning experience benefits from each input into it. To understand that they are not there to only listen and write down what the teacher says. I think that in terms of teaching-learning process the change is really much on the attitudinal side to be more responsible and to be more participative member of the learning community in which all people are important.

Simao: I think that what also changes in time (as teachers and students face each other as different parts in the educational process) is the ranking system that still is very deep inside the thinking and how people regard education. It’s probably going to go through a process of changing and it will take some time, because you will still have teachers and students that are very old-fashioned. So with time and with the new profiles of the teachers and the students – I expect it to be inevitable.

Are there any subjects that are particularly suitable for SL?

Luis: One of the subjects that is well suited and well tested in SL is language learning. It’s a little obvious because you have people from around the world and you can be in situations in which you have to interact with people and content that was made in another language. You have to make decisions and solve problems in this kind of a real environment that was built in another language and with other cultural values in which the avatars are from another country and language. These language learning sims are really successful and massively explored in terms of the learning process.

There are some others. Namely in terms of physics, like I told before, because of the simulation possibilities that are around in SL. Also some biology subjects are quite developed – one of the possibilities that you have as a user in Second Life is to be able to build a space, a sim with your own ideas about landscape, about tree species (how to use them and so on). In those terms they are quite used subjects or quite explored subjects is SL but I just named a few because there are many-many others that have really cool implementations and real learning experiences in Second Life.

Simao: I also think that any kind of activity that revolves around communication can be used inside it, so the imagination is the limit. You can pretty much do anything. I think that if you just want to communicate inside it or conduct processes inside it. If you want to interact with the world and interact with the objects inside it, you can also do it. If you want to interact with the platform itself or want to teach scripting inside it, you can do it. If you want to teach architecture inside it, you can do that also. Design and 3D design are also possible. It is also a good platform for people who would want to build 3D objects but are not good in more complex platforms such as 3DS Max or Maya, and who would like to do something in 3D. In there they can do it in a very easy to use (maybe not in the beginning but also easy to learn) platform. They can build what ever they want and even make some money out of it. It is a good platform for learning pretty much anything.

All this building and owning land in SL costs a remarkable amount of money even for a simple educator. Are there any kind of alternatives that could be used?

Luis: Yes, in fact for a common educator to be able to have a sim in SL it might be difficult without institutional support. To have your own space in SL or your institutions space in SL – that’s difficult. Not to use it with your students and to be able to go through a bunch of sims that have learning possibilities – that’s all free.

To develop and to implement your own space in SL there is an initial pay that’s not easy to get for all institutions. I think that it may be a limitation but in the other end you have strong community support – for instance the university of Aveiro and the island that was built by Simao and his colleagues has been used and is being used by other universities that come to talk to us and use it for not regular but occasional activities. We don’t have any kind of problem when this is in an institutional setting to authorize that people use our space for teachers and for their students – there’s no problem in it.

This community support is also very important because people understand that initially you have to be able to get the budget to implement your presence, your institutional presence in SL. That doesn’t affect, from my point of view, the educational possibilities that are possible with SL without paying.

Simao: First of all – in SL you can also be part of broader network which is what some institutions choose to do – to become a part of a network of learning. If you think about it, most sims will not be full of people all the time so eventually you can pretty much be flexible about that – you don’t have to have your own island but you can co-operate with other institutions to have a place that will be used more frequently. And why not, it is much more interesting than having an island that’s empty all the time.

Of course now with OpenSim, it’s a platform that still needs work. It’s still in development but will offer I think in the future it’s pretty much what SL should have been doing by opening up more for the community but hasn’t that much. Of course the community starts to look for other options because not everyone can afford, like you said, prices for an island. So if you have free alternatives, why not use them.

OpenSim will develop as much as people want to use it and as long as Linden Lab insists on charging much money for presence there, people will turn to OpenSim and OpenSim will develop. Eventually you will have a service and not just a paid service but you have a platform that is free, that people can actually implement in their own servers. Eventually it connects pretty much anyone to any grid that you are interested in. OpenSim is probably going to be the future of SL, which is strange to say but OpenSim will probably be the future of SL and maybe the savior of this environment.

Development itself is not very costly and if you are interested in developing there you will get things done. As soon as you don’t have to pay so much for an island you should certainly see much more presence there and maybe even more interesting projects from people that weren’t able to pay for it but still had good ideas to get to the platform.

Do you see any tendencies in the future development of SL and similar environments overall regarding education?

Luis: I think that the main trend (and I am not going to speak only of SL) that we are assisting today (like I and Simao said earlier) is the movement towards personal learning environments and the movement toward autonomy and responsibility. The shared autonomy and responsibility of the learning process between students, the communities of students, the learning communities that include also the teacher and other educational agents.

This opening movement towards more personal learning environments in which you should include all your learning resources, tools, core subjects, interests and so on. The idea that you have a cloud of interests and that you should be able to include all those interests in a learning platform that doesn’t exclude your personal interests, your school interests and your hobby interests for instance. I think that the movement is towards these personal learning environments that include not only one but several tools in which Second Life will be one of them. Also other people that normally are outside school, so you have opinion makers and so on that can contribute a lot to your learning experience and that are far away from your learning scenarios, settings and tools that you use to learn formally in higher education for instance.

I think this integration movement is very important. In the other end there are, in terms of developments, some key issues to solve – namely the interoperability between all these tools in order for the user, the final user (maybe learner or community or teacher) to be able to assemble in a much easier way. I think that in conclusion terms that this is the main trend that we are assisting today in what education and mainly educational technology is concerned. It’s integration movement towards more personal learning environments.

Simao: On the more technical side I think this kind of platforms will also become more user friendly. The way of manipulating the environment and the way of receiving and sending information is a bit too complex right now for at least beginners and people that are not used playing games and are not too used to having so many sources of information interaction. Technological development of networks and terminals would help platforms such as Second Life or OpenSim that are basically platforms that depend on networking and on graphical quality to provide good experience. Nowadays there are still a lot of people that can’t use Second Life because of broadband issues or graphical card issues – that will eventually just disappear and in the end it will be much easier for most people to actually to be able to use it.

The creation of standards is very important point in anything and you’ve seen that pretty much since last year. It’s always one of the key points. If you want the technology or a standard to support you to be successful you have to create standards and to make sure they are compatible with other platforms. And of course openness. Open your source code, open your technological side to the community. If you do that you have much more tendency to success than you would have otherwise. So I think that’s necessary shift in Second Life.

Thank you. Maybe you have some final words for Estonian educators that would encourage them to use the environment.

Luis: Well I would say there are no recipes. The teachers need to be increasingly more authentic in his approach to teaching and to learning, I think teachers need to develop this kind of sensibility to move around in e-learning communities and to feel what are their needs in terms of positioning himself as another member of a learning community.

In some parts of the learning process you have to be more directive in some other phases you might be more close to your students in terms of being an active member. In other phases you need to provide more support and carefulness in their activities. I think that’s common feature for teaching process is for teachers to be able to move these ways up and town in terms of their interference in the learning process. There are no cookbooks but I think that attitude will all change to be able normally more directive and more supportive in initial phases and to fade you teaching presence along the process and to give some room to the students they could just step up and be the main actor in the learning process. I think it is what I really mean in terms of this switch that is necessary in the learning process.

Teachers just don’t need to be afraid of the students

Luis: No. Nowadays students have a lot of access to the information they hadn’t before. I think it is very natural that in a subject where to in a particular theme what students maybe may know more than you and you know more than them in some issues and some other themes, so I think that’s the heart and soul of the learning community. This balance, this bouncing between your knowledge – my knowledge, me and you – teacher or student – it’s indifferent for this case. So I think that’s important and I think it’s mostly attitude change more than procedure.

Simao: In my opinion also some teachers have fear for this kind of platform. Sometimes you’re just afraid of something just because you don’t know it. Not saying that everyone will be able to use it or benefit from using it. But they should try at least. They shouldn’t just give up on things without trying them just because they don’t seem natural to you. That’s pretty much my advice. Even if you go in and say: “ok, this is not going to help me.” At least you were able to understand it and you made an effort. What I see also that many people just don’t want to use it and just criticize it without knowing what they’re talking about. If you are not willing to even try and make an informed decision, don’t criticize just for the sake of it because that’s just destruction and that’s wrong. If you go in and you don’t like it then make good criticism that can help and that’s my idea around the educational context.

• Interview was conducted by Marko Puusaar (educational technologists, Estonian IT College).