Learning in Virtualities on June 24
SDSU-DistanceEd-SL
Yesterday’s LAT published a piece about corporate America’s embrace of Second Life. New World Notes’ Wagner James Au, shared some of the back story. Great journalism, it was and what I love about the blogosphere.I added my 2 cents to his post, as I have been here and there, in the Metaverse- YouTube, Twitter,etc. I’m still refining it.
The LAT article is another tidbit to add to my box-o-examples of using SL in courses at SDSU. For now. Change is always afoot.
We’re just starting to go distance-ed at SDSU. Let’s get our footing in the 2D virtual realm first. Let’s get some experience under our belts with the tools we got already. And more importantly let’s start thinking anew about teaching and learning at a distance. It’s a different paradigm, model and set of theories.
It seems that the corporate world has allowed SL to become “official” meeting places for their globally distributed workforces. And why not. It’s outrageously cheap. It’s a new approach. What it offers (small and large scale social events at cool places with cool activities) are simulations of events. I could be mistaken, but I can’t imagine that IBM hosts Aspen ski weekends for it’s middle management in RL (real life). I could be wrong.
In any event, without making this more important than it is, three conditions come to mind and make this relevant to SDSU, 1) People cannot get together face to face, 2) People value (enjoyment, connection, etc) entering SL to meet with others. 3) It’s an alternative, not the only way of adding social connection to a distance learning endeavor.
pICTsl Farm goals for 2008
Will 2008 be full of interesting developments and innovations in virtual worlds beyond Second Life? That’s what some are saying. We’ve given the Farm 2008 some thought. We asked our audience what they wanted “to know” about virtual worlds and we got some great and challenging responses like:
- How are organizations using VE (Virtual environments) for education and training?
- What difference are these programs making?
- When VE programs work, why? When they don’t, why?
- How faculty are using virtual environments for research?
- How is it used for teaching?
- How the administration is using it for student orientation, and helping them to decrease their time-to-degree?
To get at any one of these questions in a systematic way is a big project. At the same time, there are vw (virtual worlds) projects in the pipeline (so I heard at MetaverseU) and a lot of discussions about them as well. We decided to participate in these discussions and bring what we learn back to Farm…well the flatweb Farm-this blog and website. This is what we’ll be up to.
Between February 2008 and 2009 we will:
* Follow near future trends in virtual worlds relevant to SDSU
* Develop a knowledge base on this site which will include vetted resources that will help us understand these spaces and the domain as a whole.
* What are important characteristics of each space?
* What are the implications of these developments for SDSU in the near future?
* Who is doing what in these spaces?
* How is Second Life evolving?
We’ll also:
* Maintain the pICTsl Farm in Second Life
* Offer on demand consulting in Second Life
* Offer a Summer Session Introduction to Second Life Workshop
Updates on the Metaverse
The metaverse is indeed expanding. First is the announcement that Media Grid’s is looking at a 3-5 year timeline for developing an education grid: “a dedicated, not-for-profit grid of computers for educational content, worlds, and learning games that can be used in a classroom. All information would be marked with metadata so educators could build their own virtual experiences from a large distributed database of content. Pre-constructed virtual learning environments will also be available for quick classroom implementation.” Read more.
Second, the New Media Consortium’s Virtual Worlds program announced its plans for 2008. They’ll be adding new services for educators, including live mentors for newbies, space development services, a learning prize for content development, an educational resources repository. Great stuff.
And finally, the German magazine der Spiegel, interviewed SL founder Rosedale on SL. Making it crash less is his first priority, he says. Read more
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.
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.
