Sunday, January 25, 2009

THIS WEEK: Ed. Support Faire!


This week, Educause is holding a Second Life Education Support Faire in-world on their island. A wiki on the event is here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Education_Support_Faire

The SLurl to get there is :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Faire/32/184/35

From their Facebook page: "The SL Education Roundtable (along with the Montclair State CHSSSouth Free Land Initiative and EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds Group) are participating in the SL Education Support Faire.

The SLER meeting for this week (Tuesday, 2:30pm SLT) will take place from there and we have an "area" where where will be volunteers hanging our for most of the week.

The following folks have generously volunteered to hang out in our area for the hours indicated. Come by say hi, network, relax, and come back as many times throughout the week as you'd like.

All times in this description area listed in SLT" (and remember, SLT is the same time as Pacific Standard/Daylight Time (PST/PDT), or GMT-8).

Sunday, January 25
7am - Aerdna Beaumont
8am - Linda Sautereau
9am - Linda Sautereau
10am - Luipher Fhang & Margaret Michalski
11am - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
3pm - Aedna Beaumont
4pm - Philled Graves
5pm - RubyTuesday Ballyhoo

Monday, January 26
7am - Willow Shenlin
8am - Donna Piaggio
9am - Margaret Michalski
10am - Teachergirl Razor
11am - Luipher Fhang
12pm - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
3pm - Aedna Beaumont
4pm - Philled Graves
5pm - RubyTuesday Ballyhoo

Tuesday, January 27
8am - Donna Piaggio
9am - Wonderalica Alturas
10am - Wonderalica Alturas
11am - Luipher Fhang
12pm - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
2:30 - 3:30 - come by the Pavillion for the SL Education Roundtable
4pm - Aedna Beaumont
5pm - Profesora Farigoule
6pm - Margaret Michalski and Profesora Farigoule

Wednesday, January 28
9am - Margaret Michalski
11am - Luipher Fhang
12pm - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
3pm - Ignatius Onomatopoeia & Aedna Beaumont
4pm - Philled Graves
6pm - Margaret Michalski

Thursday, January 29
4am - Corwin Carillon
5am - Corwin Carillon
7am - Oronoque Westland
8am - Oronoque Westland
10am- Teachergirl Razor
11am - Luipher Fhang
12pm - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
3pm - Aedna Beaumont
4pm - Olivia Hotshot and Logan5 Obscure
5pm - RubyTuesday Ballyhoo
6pm - Margaret Michalski

Friday, January 30
6am - Linda Sautereau
10am - Margaret Michalski
11am - Luipher Fhang
12pm - Luipher Fhang
1pm - Wirecutter Renard
3pm - Aedna Beaumont
4pm - Margaret Michalski

I urge you all to stop by and take a look around, and when you're there, please say hello!! These are some of the most friendly and helpful people you will find in your your journey to understand what it means for you to explore Second Life in your teaching practice.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Training soon? Check your audio.

If you are signed up for a training session, we'd like to remind you to log in to Second Life prior to your session to be sure that your audio chat functions are working. If you aren't sure and need assistance, we are on the island half an hour early so we can help you. These three a half hour sessions are packed with information, so the less we're dealing with technical issues during the workshop, the more we can share.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Grid Status Sunday: Log-ins Intermittent

I don't want to use this blog space to report on grid status generally, but with our training session coming up on Tuesday, (and our Monday holiday) I wanted to let those of you trying to get in this weekend know that Second Life is experiencing technical difficulties. This may effect your ability to log in prior to our training session- I will email you directly if on Tuesday if we are still having problems logging in. If this ends up being the case, we will as a back-up meet in my Elluminate virtual office, and I will provide a link for you in the heads up email.

You can always check the current status of the grid when you're unsure if the problem is on your side or theirs at this link: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/

"Second Life is creepy."

I recently met with one of our college administrators who just joined Second Life, to give them a few minutes of over the shoulder time to get them up to speed, and have a chat while we were at it about some of the ways we see working together to enable Second Life for our students and Faculty. They brought up that as they were creating their character at home, their daughter saw that they were doing so and commented "Oh, you're using Second Life? I think its kind of creepy." The administrator went on to explain this was primarily because of the adult side of Second Life being what was known to her daughter about the space, no doubt because this is the aspect of the world large exposure media focuses on. This led us into a discussion of the public nature of Second Life, and what pros and cons that seems to present.

I brought up Project Wonderland, and told the administrator that its possible to spawn your own instance of an open source server with many benefits re: scalability, privacy, etc.- But then also talked briefly about the idea that we could remove our students from the messiness of random interaction that is more likely when the virtual people you interact with are strangers without a campus affiliation and role to define (control) them, but is that really what we want to do? So many of Second Life's communication and learning affordances have to do with access to ideas, ways of thinking, learning cultures that aren't like our own- and I think if the chaos and messiness weren't there, we'd actually kind of miss it. I definitely think we don't yet know enough either way to make this decision for our organization.. after all, we're a team of community colleges- access to all is what we're all about.

When we participate, feelings are effected, but pixels can re-render- no avatars die. Our classrooms and real-world physical campuses hopefully offer a level of safety and comfort- how do we offer this to our virtual students, faculty and staff, considering the anonymous and open nature of Second Life participation? What about some current learning theory that states we learn more from conflict and failure than we do from safety and success? Our island is open to the public, we have a sandbox, but we also have groups that enable greater access and abilities on the island with affiliation. How is this the same/different from what we do on physical campuses?

Such a huge thing to think about really. It's a multi-faceted issue, as most are when regarding our residence in the Metaverse. I just want to boil down to finding the best way to inform our students that Second Life (like the real world) has some creepy aspects, but overall, it's absolutely NOT a creepy place.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Training Times Announcement Sent


If you are a memeber of the OCCDLA who has signed up for training during the last two weeks of January, you have been sent an email with your date and time assignment. We've also sent you a SLurl to our fire pit in the Cascades on the island- our starting point. Remember, you'll want to log in once prior to our training session to make sure that all is functioning on the machine which you wish to use for your training session.

I will be available on island a half hour prior to training beginning if you need any help getting your audio working- and our island team is getting very excited to meet you all!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Second Life Education Support Faire- Jan 25-30th!

From Michael @ MHCC- Thank you Michael! :)

A "Second Life Education Support Faire" is being organized by Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life) to be held between January 25 - January 30. You can read more about it here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/10/second-life-education-support-faire-january-25th-30th-2009/

From the site:

To support the educational community, we would like to invite you to participate in and attend Linden Lab’s inaugural Education Support Faire! Over the years, Second Life has provided ways for the world of academia to put to use creativity lending to immersive education, distance learning, knowledge sharing, faculty networking–and many other ways to enhance the collective educational community’s efforts in the real world. The success of projects surrounding these efforts within Second Life can be attributed to the many innovative educators, academics, and students who have chosen to utilize Second Life for these purposes.

The main goal for the Education Support Faire is to bring together educators, academics, and students to explore the support mechanisms available to residents who use Second Life to enhance real world educational efforts.

With many networks of support provided by and for residents in Second Life, we would like especially to extend an invite to Second Life educational minds to take part in presenting at the Educational Support Faire.

Might be worth checking out! The faire will be held here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Supporte/151/152/36

Have a great day! Peace, -- Michael

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Bloom's Taxonomy and Second Life


I found this great chart online a while back in the public domain that listed Bloom's Taxonomy like a ladder, and stacked verbs appropriate for each level beneath, and placed activities that aligned above. Taking this one step further, I've added a third tier of information to this chart. It's by no means an exhaustive list of possible ways to use Second Life for teaching and learning, but rather an aid to get your creative juices flowing when you want to use Second Life appropriately in your lesson plans. Click on the image above to get a copy in PDF you can save and print- and feel free to send me feedback or suggestions for improving it.