Reflections after ELI - Tweeting, Faculty, Second Life
Posted on January 31, 2008
Filed under Events, Reflections
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.
Comments
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)Leave a Reply
