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

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Presentation for the 2007 Serious Games Forum at Purdue University


SlideShare Link

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.

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.

Training in Second Life

In an article published in the August issue of T + D magazine by the American Society of Training & Development (ASTD) and online at Learning Circuits, Anders Gronstedt discussed the use of Second Life (SL) in corporate training. After briefly covering what SL is and how to communicate there, Gronstedt explains how tools in SL "can be used by training professionals to illustrate technical concepts in powerful new ways."

He quotes Chuck Hamilton from IBM, who said: "One of the advantages of Second Life is that you can manipulate the sense of scale and perspective. . . . You can crawl around a big oil rig or fly around a network diagram."

Gronstedt also points out one of the problems with training in SL: "Second Life is creating more virtual classrooms. Unfortunately, most e-learning still looks like a classroom lecture. It takes time for a new medium to develop its own character and unique vernacular."

However, as he points out, there "are signs that some learning organizations are pushing the envelope. IBM has balloons flying in the air that you can enter to explore 360-degree images—a virtual reality within the virtual reality."

Some of the barriers to extensive use of SL in corporate training are

1. consumer focus
2. firewall and security issues
3. system requirements
4. people's time commitment

Gronstedt concludes, "Virtual worlds provide learning organizations with a powerful, unique ability to engage and empower employees in ways that accommodate their digital and mobile lifestyles, adapt to their individual learning needs, and encourage collaboration."

I agree.

Article on Work-Embedded E-Learning

I finally got around to reading the July/August issue of Intercom, which is published by the Society for Technical Communication. In an article titled "Work-embedded E-Learning: Wherever You Are, Whenever You Need It," Harry Calhoun, Kristine Berry, and Christopher Dawson discuss what work-embedded e-learning is, how it's different from "help screens and other forms of user assistance," how it's accessed, how satisfied users are with it, what its benefits are, and what some best practices for creating it are.

The article is available through EBSCO's Business Source Premier database, which can be accessed through the Auraria Library and a lot of others.