Preparing for ELI 2008
Posted on January 20, 2008
Filed under Announcement, Events, Reflections, Research, Reviews
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:
- The average visit time on this website has been less than 3 minutes
- The workshops were very well attended and rated by the majority as effective.
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:
- How many faculty and instructional staff subscribe to the website?
- To what degree do they participate in the flat and 3D web for professional connections and learning?
- How many workshop attendees have continued to participate in SL since the workshop?
- How much did it actually cost to provide the workshops?
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