Reflections after ELI – Tweeting, Faculty, Second Life

Just returned from the Educause Learning Initiative’s Annual Meeting — Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0. I learned a lot and yet there are always those tidbits that you walk away remembering. The first was the experience of Tweeting during a key note session. There was essentially a conversation going on among the audience, as if we were passing notes, for lack of a better analogy. I missed the next featured session and thought I’d check the ELI Twitter feed to see what I could glean. Nothing really. You hadda be there. There was not summary, no context. It was truly a conversation in real time.

The next tidbits happened at my presentation Introducing university faculty and instructional staff to second life: A pilot initiative. It was well attended for the last day of the conference. I argued for the unsustainability of workshops as a default means of learning new technologies (e.g. Second Life) and wanted to have a conversation with the audience. I heard some good ideas, compromises between traditional follow-along workshops and unstructured workshops. The word workshop was even questioned, what about having learning labs. It reminded me that we have a Fac Room in ITS for that very purpose. So it would be a matter of staffing it with someone with that skill set. That sounds too easy, so it might be.

Then after the workshop I had a nice chat with Kyung Huh from the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment at U Texas, Austin. He’s been supporting their SL initiative which has been around since 2006. Like us they’re looking at its instructional value. He said that for the most part, faculty projects in SL don’t end up becoming what they set out to be. And it appears that while they perceive value in teaching in SL, it’s not instructional value but administrative value. In the end, they use SL to meet with students, either formally or informally. I thought his experience and insight was useful and mirrors our thinking too.

Finally, I saw one faculty presentation demonstrating the use of SL in a class. Two instructional designers were dedicated to a class of 20 graduate students to help them recreate/interpret a novel. In this case, they created rooms in the house, the main setting of the story. They had to find, build or buy what they needed. The instructor’s research in materiality in literary criticism prompted this approach. I saw that connection right away and didn’t become skeptical with the Engagement word, until she began reporting out student experiences and technical frustrations. I couldn’t help but slouch back into my same old song and dance: Engaged with what? And why? What about weighing the time on technical and supporting tasks with the student learning outcomes of the class?  I asked myself if she could have accomplished the same goals with PowerPoint, like Laurel Amtower did.

And finally, finally, in listening to others in faculty development, support roles, I realized again that we’re doing something quite extraordinary. Now I have to figure out how to tell a story about it.

Croquet compared to Second Life — Looking back and foward

I’m subscribing now to the Virtual Worlds News and read this post about the Media Grid “plans to roll out a cross-platform, immersive world for education for academics, students, and trainers everywhere.” That brought me to Croquet’s wiki and to this 2006 discussion on why SL isn’t the wave of the future of virtual environments. Interesting stuff to keep up on.

Disabled find Sanctuary in SL

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I’m glad to see this blog post. In my SL social circles, I’m meeting ever more folks who are finding the life, living, comfort and pleasure in SL they cannot have in RL. They have illnesses or life situations that prevent them from doing so.

Lightweight SL Client coming in Feb

Now this is interesting and worth paying attention to !Hoo!

“The net effect on our residents will not be so much new features, but the performance of simulators when many scripts are being executed, should be much more predictable.

SL educators events calendar

I wanted to post the calendar here. It’s also under Links. I forget to use it too. It’s however a great, quick glance at all kinds of events. The SL search function works too, but this is much more to the point.

Bernie Dodge unveiled his learning equation: Power = Attention x Depth x Efficiency.

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Preparing for ELI 2008

Educause’s Learning Initiative Annual Meeting is just around the corner and I’m preparing the data I’ve collected over the last 5 months to present.

Aurilio, S. (2008, January). Introducing university faculty and instructional staff to second life: A pilot initiative. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting. San Antonio, Texas.

This years theme is Preparing Students for Life 2.0 and quite a few of the presentations are about Second Life. I’ll be making as many of them as I can. I’m also looking forward to hearing Henry Jenkins, whose paper on participatory culture and new media helped me reframe the idea of a digital divide. How are we going to prepare students for life 2.0 with unprepared instructors, facilitators and guides?

Some empirical data and thoughts:

On the one hand it’s great the workshop was seen as effective; on the other, the reason for that extends beyond the topic, expertise of the instructor (Cathy is superb) and timing (Winter break). I marketed it well. I mention this often overlooked piece of the puzzle because it is directly related to sustainability. Another important piece is whether anyone really learned anything and whether there are better, more cost effective ways to learn those skills and knowledge.
If I sound like I’m critiquing the workshop modality, I’m critiquing it in the context of participatory culture and serious resource constraints. These workshop smile-sheet results together with the data for the website and actual consults suggest that a costly  solution to what may not even be solely a training problem “is what people want.”

Some of the many, many unknowns I wonder about:

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