Hallelujah!

Our team has finished our presentation for IT 6750. It was great working with Alex and Blake to analyze the trend of using virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, in higher education and corporate training.

Another Prensentation on SL in Higher Ed

Muve'in On Over

From: intellagirl, 3 weeks ago

| View | Upload your own

Presentation for the 2007 Serious Games Forum at Purdue University


SlideShare Link

Presentation on Second Life and Education

I have to confess that I haven't watched the presentation yet, but I'm sure that if Laura was involved, it will be very informative.

From: sorry.afk, 1 day ago

| View | Upload your own

SlideShare Link

CSI: New York and Second Life

I finally got around to watching the episode of CSI: New York from last week that was supposed to portray Second Life. One question kept going through my head: Had anyone involved in producing the episode actually ever been in Second Life? It certainly didn't seem so.

The avatars and sims did look like ones that could exist in Second Life. However, the CSI characters' avatars did things that I've certainly never seen avatars do: find out from a white rabbit (or anyone else) where a particular avatar is currently located, walk off in synch while holding hands, teleport together to a different location, assemble a crowd on the spur of the moment for any kind of activity, pick something up with a hand.

I'm afraid this show is only going to make it harder for educators to convince administrators and students that Second Life is different from violent computer games.

Help for Educators in Second Life

Right after I joined Second Life back in May, I learned about SLolar Central, "a place where [educators] can experiment with modes of communication, movement, etc., to enhance their SL experiences, offering free temporary 'homes' for people to use as they explore." Yesterday I checked with KJ Hax, one of the founders, who told me that there are still spots available. Anyone who's interested should go to their Google Group page and download, complete, and submit the Temporary Office Space Residency Application.

My Adventures in Second Life

If you'd like to read more about my adventures in Second Life, please go to my main blog.

Co-Author at Tek Trek Blog

I'm going to be co-authoring the Tek Trek blog with Bethany Bovard. I hope to post my first entry next week.

Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning

According to an e-mail message sent to the SLED (Second Life EDucators) listserv this morning, the Sloan Consortium "has embarked on an initiative to help online educators gain a better understanding of how the technologies available today can help make their classrooms better." To accomplish this, Sloan-C has launched a new website. The site was designed to support Sloan-C's upcoming conference on emerging technologies for online education, but the site and its forums are open to anyone interested in this subject, not just people who attend the conference.

List of Podcasting Tools

Thanks to the Savvy Technologist for pointing out this great list of podcasting tools at Mashable.

Presentation on Using Second Life for Higher Education

An overview of Second Life, how it works for education, and examples of SL uses for a selection of subjects.


SlideShare Link

SL-NET's First Professional Development Session

On Friday, SL-NET held its first professional development activity. Shaun and the other committee members did a great job pulling it together. CDB Barkley and Max Chatnoir talked about what educators are currently doing in Secondlife. At one point, we had about 35 "people" present.

There are more pictures available at the SL-NET website.

Also posted at 4R x T.

Technology on Campus

Through a post on a blog I regularly read, I learned about Campus Technology magazine, which "is the only monthly publication focusing exclusively on the use of technology across all areas of higher education." Naturally, I subscribed to its RSS feed.

One two-part article featured on the main page caught my attention. It's titled "Teaching with Technology: Facilitating the Process." Part 1 is about "Strategies for Adopting Instructional Technology." The authors, Ric Keaster, Leroy Metza, and Angela Hillegass, start by pointing out that P-12 teachers must learn to use technology in order to incorporate it into their classrooms. "Likewise, instructors in colleges of education cannot teach prospective teachers to use technology unless the faculty, themselves, use technology in the college of education classrooms as a part of their instruction. There is something about 'modeling' that goes a long way in education, regardless of the level of education under consideration."

(This certainly sounds familiar given what we're doing in IT 6750.)

Obviously, as the authors point out, this will involve "two primary areas of new knowledge where faculty members need professional development: online instruction and face to face instruction." The article "deals with . . . the need to provide faculty not only with the technological tools for enhancing instruction, but also with the knowledge of how to best use these materials to maximize the time faculty spend with students in physical college and university classrooms." It then examines how this was accomplished in the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences at Western Kentucky University.

The process included the following steps:

1. Creating an atmosphere and culture for change
2. Developing and communicating the vision
3. Planning and providing resources
4. Providing training and development
5. Monitoring and checking progress
6. Continuing to give assistance

Steps 4 through 6 were presented in the Part 2 of the article: "The Means to Bring about Change."

More on Ning

As I mentioned before, I'm using a Ning social network for my hybrid technical writing class at Red Rocks. Each week the students have to do an online assignment, most of which will be in site, where they can post in forums or on their own blogs.

Their first assignment was to join the site, post an introduction, and respond two at least two other people's instroductions.

In class yesterday, we talked about tools for technical writing, primarily rhetoric and technology. Here is their second assignment, to be done this week:

On the web, find a free or trial version of a software program or web-based service that may be used for creating documents, communicating, and/or collaborating (as discussed in Chapter 3 of the textbook). Test the program or service. On your "My Page" create a blog entry in which you tell where you found it (be sure to include a working link to the website), explain what it does, and discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Use the name of the program or service as the title of your blog post.

I've also joined another Ning social network. This one is called College 2.0, and it's for people in higher ed who are interested in online education and Web 2.0.

Also posted at 4R x T.

Read/Write Web Poll on Top Web Technology

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has a poll up today asking with of the following technologies readers "think will have the most impact over the next 10 years":

1. Ajax / browser-based apps
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Attention data
4. Gaming
5. Mobile
6. Online Video / Internet TV
7. Rich Internet Apps
8. Search
9. Semantic Web / structured data
10. Virtual Worlds
11. Web services / APIs
12. Other

As I commented in response to his post: "I voted for 'Virtual Worlds,' but I think the real answer will be a 'mashup' of several of the web technologies. As an educator, I think being able to access web-based applications and search functions from within a virtual world will have a huge impact on education."

Top 100 Tools for Learning?

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has prepared a list of the "Top 100 Tools for Learning" based on responses from 109 "learning professionals." I ran across the list while I was searching for references to AECT and Second Life together and got a hit that took me to the Centre's page for Second Life. I was excited until I looked at it more carefully.

It's hard to take the list seriously when Tool #4 with 37 mentions is Google's search engine. The next "search engine" listed is Dogpile (#98), which is a metasearch engine or metacrawler not a regular search engine, anyway.

Ask.com and Exalead are much better search engines than Google, but I always advise my students to use metacrawlers (like Dogpile, Kartoo, Clusty, and Ixquick) or directories instead. They get much more relevant results that way.

Controversy Close to Home

One of the first people I met in Second Life was Jeff Corbin (his name in real life), a research associate in physics and astronomy at DU. He has built the Science School in Second Life, which DU will be using for classes.

Andy Guess, in an article titled "In Second Life, There's No Fallout" at InsideHigherEd.com, describes Jeff's Island: "Science School is nestled behind a three-dimensional, real-time weather map with pixellated clouds hovering above the ground, near a telescope that can be used to view constellations during the winter, when its real-life counterpart at the University of Denver is inaccessible due to snow-covered mountain roads."

With grant money from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Robert C. Amme, a professor of physics at DU, and some colleagues are going to build a nuclear reactor in Second Life as part of a master's program "in applied science with an emphasis on environmental impact assessment that will feature classes held in Second Life."

The comments on the article indicate what we face in using this technology (Second Life and other MUVEs) for educational purposes.

Slideshow: Blogging as Professional Learning

Thanks to Nancy White at Full Circle Online Interaction Blog for mentioning Graham Wegner's presentation titled "Blogging as Professional Learning." (I tried a couple of times to embed the slideshow in a post, but I couldn't get it to work.) He explains why and how blogging is important for teachers' professional development.

He even referred to two edubloggers I regularly read: Will Richardson and David Warlick.

Educational Uses of Second Life

I saw this video at http://elearndev.blogspot.com/ and thought it did a good job of presenting Second Life's educational potential. It also showed the Globe Theatre on Renaissance Island, where I live in SL.

Economy of Attention

In class Tuesday night, Professor Wilson mentioned having read an article on the "economy of attention." I'd never heard the phrase before, and I was surprised to see a post on that topic in a blog I read regularly, Read/Write Web.

According to Richard MacManus, "The Attention Economy is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. Note that the Attention Economy is different from the tradional meaning of an economy, because it isn't about buying and selling - although ultimately those things may occur."

This certainly applies in education. Our students, particularly in higher ed, "agree to receive services [i.e., knowledge and skills] in exchange for their attention." They are paying not only in money but in time and energy. As faculty, we need to make sure they are receiving what they paid for.

At the end of his post, MacManus links to four other articles on this topic that were published by Read/Write Web.