Virtual World, Real Learning: Graduate Students discuss Second Life® projectVirt

Open House and Graduate Student Presentations

On June 11 we held an Open House Event to celebrate the newly renovated Adaptation Home. At the six hour event Sweeney, Lynnze, and Shay all added their own special spin to the talk about graduate student contributions to the exhibits.

grad student presentation

In addition to the adaptation home, we have moved the Stroke Challenge exhibit formerly at HealthInfo Island to the area in back of Project Theater. A copy of the Caregiver Strategies holodeck is next to the Stroke Challenge.

A total of 34 visitors attended the presentations and/or explored the exhibits.

Next: Expansion of the Garden of Healthy Aging.

Renovated Adaptation Home Nears Completion

Discussing renovations to the adapted home

Last night we met with Kathee Gibbs (top photo, far left) to discuss final renovations to the Adapted Home. We have a duplicate of the home at our sandbox where we experiment. Kathee made some suggestions that Sweeney (”Holodeck queen,” pink jacket) will put in place and was very pleased overall with the displays. Later on, Plato Pizzicatto (our collaborator from Penn State Abington, white shirt) stopped by. Carly Charlesworth also stopped by unexpectedly (and serendipitously). Carly provided insights and suggestions from her experiences of severe sciatica when she used a wheelchair and crutches.

The renovation gives visitors the option to click on the light switch for each room (labeled holo-emitter, above) and choose Mobility, Cognitive, or Low Vision scenes.  Additional information can be accessed by clicking the icon board in each room (labeled more info, above). Grad student Lynnze Inglewood has done the scripting for the boards. We will also launch a Wiki that provides web links and information about home adaptations, universal design, and healthy aging (which we will renovate next with particular attention to psychosocial issues in aging). We expect to announce an Open House upon completion of renovations next week or early the following week.

Graduate Students Present on Second Life® to Japanese Visitors

SL presentation

On Monday, March 11, first year graduate students Shanna Corbin, Lindsay Allan, and Shyvonne Gallagher provided a lively presentation about the Jefferson OT Center in Second Life®.  In attendance were 5 students from Kitasato University in Sagamihara, Japan, and about 70 students and faculty in health professions at JCHP.

The audience response was interesting, too. After Shanna explained the benefits of SL for some persons who have severe physical disabilities, one of the JCHP physical therapy students stated his opinion that SL discouraged people from being involved in real life. Another point raised was that people might accomplish a lot in SL, at the expense of real life. It didn’t seem to dawn on  the student who asked the question, that accomplishments in SL can be “real.”  The OT student presenters did a great job fielding questions, and people seemed to enjoy the presentation and find it interesting.

Thought-Provoking Slideshare

This slideshare from Judy O’Connell is well worth the view, if you are an educator who wants to be part of real learning and teaching in the 21st Century and can be open to the pardigm shift required.

Adventures in Research and Teaching in Second Life®

This was the title of my recent presentation at a pre-conference for the Professional and Scholarly Division of the Association of American Publishers. Held on February 4 in Washington, DC, and organized by Jack Farrell , I joined co-presenters Carol Perryman (SL: Carolina Keats) of HealthInfo Island and Kristin French of the Nature Publishing group for a lively discussion around the topic “Mashup at the Library:  Managing Colliding User Needs, Technologies, and the Ability to Deliver.” Our one-hour presentation was well received, and several participants commented that it was a very interesting mix of of academic, library/consumer health, and business perspectives. Participants (who included personnel  from the National Library of Medicine) asked many thought-provoking questions, covering areas such as:

• The learning curve in SL and the need to orient and train staff
• Use of and challenges with available methods for getting accurate statistics on numbers of visitors
• Data gathering methods in research on SL and confounding factors

OT Grad Students Do Final MS Projects in SL

Alana Scorbal (Therese, left) and Wrenna Beerbaum (Suzanne, right), completed their final Masters in Occupational Therapy projects on December 7, 2008 at the Department’s Final Project Presentations. Alana’s focused on the program evaluation of The OT Center at Jefferson in Second Life, and Sue’s consisted of development and evaluation of an exhibit on Healthy Aging and Neuroplasticity. Congrats to both on a fantastic job! See report of evaluation.

Occupational Therapy in virtual worlds featured in new journal article

Check out the latest from International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. My colleague Maged Kamel Boulos, with whom I worked on the Sexual Health Sim, is lead author on the newly released paper,Web 3D for Public, Environmental and Occupational Health: Early Examples from Second Life®. I was pleased to contribute a section in the paper about how occupational therapy exhibits in virtual worlds can provide education about health and environmental adaptation,  helping people to visualize the ways in which their home environments can be improved and gaining greater awareness of ways to minimize risks for work-related injury.  Of course, the role of occupational therapy is much more than just this, and we look forward to expanding our exhibits in the future. In particular, we  are planning an expansion of our “garden of healthy aging”–stay tuned!

The Evaluation Begins…

The program evaluation commenced on November 8, 2008 with opening of the Garden of Healthy Aging and the reopening of the Adaptation Home and Main Building exhibits. The Garden of Healthy Aging provides interactive displays in a serene setting to allow one to discover various ways to keep your mind and body active as you age. The Adaptation Home permits the user to explore (with or without a wheelchair) different ways to modify a home to increase safety and independence when a limitation is present in mobility, vision, or cognition.

The Main Building encompasses informative videos, materials, and quizzes on a range of health topics, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, backpack awareness, and assistive technology.

So far, the overall opinions from the participants have been positive! We have had 29 participants take the survey and 20 of whom have taken part in follow-up interviews to further elaborate on their impressions of the exhibits.

Ø 86% of respondents strongly agree/agree that visual, interactive 3-D displays help them learn better than reading the same material on a 2-D website.

Ø 79% of respondents strongly agree/agree that the information given in the exhibits at the OT Center in SL will be beneficial to them in real life.

The interviewees have given complimentary and constructive feedback which we will use to enhance the exhibits to maximize the learning experience for user.

There were some difficulties during the preparation stage. Things did not go exactly as planned, but in the spirit of the Adaptation Home exhibit as well as occupational therapy, we ADAPTED and OVERCAME. We modified some of our original plans (using holodecks throughout the house) to an interactive, well-received display that illustrates typical problems and adaptations that can be made. 

We hope you will stop by the Jefferson OT Center @ Eduisland II and explore our exhibits…Please check back on the blog for updates as the data continues to be collected and analyzed.

Thanks, Alana Scorbal

IRB Approval of Program Evaluation: A SecondLife® Milestone

Our application for exemption was approved! We’ll be doing a program evaluation of the OT Center at Jefferson in Second Life. I expected questions from the IRB (ethics board) about the methods/aims and so on, but…nothing. I have to credit grad student Alana Scorbal for the literature review she wrote and which we used, in part, as the opening text justifying our application:

Virtual reality is emerging as a new venue in the educational arena through the use of a virtual world called Second Life® (Stott, 2007). Second Life® is an online three-dimensional world in which individuals assume online personas called avatars that interact with one another in simulated environments (Boulos, Hetherington, & Wheeler, 2007). Virtual worlds can be utilized in any number of contexts, such as public education and health care (Skiba, 2007). According to Woodford (2007), the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) utilize Second Life® in order to encourage health promotion and education to the public. A reported nine million users, or avatars, have ventured into this virtual world and dozens of colleges have leased space in Second Life® (Bugeja, 2007).

According to Babiss (2007), the therapeutic and educational benefits of Second Life® have only begun to be discovered. Occupational therapy needs to seize new opportunities beyond traditional boundaries (Pattison, 2006)and become entrepreneurs in this new field technology that is virtual reality. Current technology, such as Second Life, can assist occupational therapy in advancing the profession by reaching audiences that were inaccessible in the past to inform the public of the valuable information this profession holds (Babiss, 2007).

Thanks are also extended to Rachelle Munro for her helpful guidance. Rachelle conducted a study via Texas A&M in which I participated. I applied her ideas about recruitment and informed consent to our program evaluation. Additionally, Kathee Gibbs’s generous donation to our center will enable us to provide lindens as honoraria for participation in the evaluation.

We applied for exemption as follows:

Research activities in which the only involvement of human subjects will be in one or more of the following categories are exempt from IRB review. Please check those items that apply to your research.
_(2) Research involving the use of educational tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey procedures, interview procedures or observation of public behavior, unless: (i) information obtained is recorded in such a manner that human subjects can be identified, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects; and (ii) any disclosure of the human subjects’ responses outside the research could reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability or be damaging to the subjects’ financial standing, employability, or reputation.

So, good to go! We’re looking forward to the process itself and of course, to finding out what people think of our exhibits. Let me know if you’d like more information about the application for your own IRB/Ethics board proposals.