Success with Virtual Labs: It's More than Watching an Animated Scalpel Dissect a
Virtual Frog, or Subscribing to a Dissected Frog Feed
Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
You may remember the first virtual biology labs. Everyone seemed to be eager to find a way to dissect a frog, or to show you how to manufacture a tornado. Those were quite interesting and entertaining, but at the end of the day, what could you actually do? Did the virtual lab help you make decisions? Did you have the same sort of hands-on experience you had when you actually worked with the beakers, the pipettes, the Bunsen burners?
Chances are, the early virtual labs were too passive. Further, they did not necessarily connect to the text you were reading, so instead of reinforcing course content, they took you off track.
Most virtual labs today are quite different -- they require you to take a more active role, and you have to see the consequences of your actions. They take a page from the great sims and role-playing games / experiences and ask you to put yourself in the place of an ER nurse, a researcher at an overpopulated guppy pond, or a fire-damaged prairie dog town. You have to make decisions that will have real impacts, and you'll be asked to develop decision-making skills and even community leadership skills.
So, today's virtual laboratories are not just labs for your course. They're laboratories for life.
So, how do you get the most from your virtual laboratories? How do you make sure that you are successful in the lecture course as well as the lab? Top considerations:
Relate to the learning goals and outcomes
Track closely with the text and lectures
Share your experiences with fellow students
Ask for "lab partners"
If possible, try to replicate in real world (depends on what it is -- think ethics, safety, etc.)
Relate to the core text -- make the core concepts come alive in your mind.
Find out what the assessments are and relate them to the labs.
Take advantage of practice labs.
Make sure you have the right plug-ins, fast connection, good computer.
Repeat the lab experiments, but use different settings, to see a range of possibilities.
As you go through the ten checkpoints, keep in mind that what you're trying to avoid is what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls "interpassivity." Interpassivity is what happens when you program your TiVo to record television programs for you, and you start to feel the satisfaction of having gathered all those programs, even though you never actually lifted a finger, and you did not actually preview the programs you collected (hoarded? !) and plan to watch. The idea that you may never actually watch the shows, is another aspect of interpassivity. The idea of what you have is a substitute for actually doing something with it.
One could argue that subscribing to RSS feeds and going out and creating a bot or mashup to automatically collect songs by your favorite artist, or their videos is another aspect of interpassivity. Mashups that mine Flickr images containing a certain metatag can also push you toward interpassivity. While searching is not in itself passive, the automating of the thinking, screening, and decision process does start to make you passive. Who serves whom? Are you the mind behind the bot? Or, is the bot minding you? You may want to avoid answering that question!
Interpassivity is dangerous. It blocks true interaction and engagement with materials, with people, and with your own mind. Thankfully, most new virtual labs require you to do something different for each task, and the automation occurs in limited amounts - usually in the service of a simulation, and not in conducting searches.