Linden Lab and ISTE have combined forces to launch a new educators pilot programme - essentially a new SL registration and orientation experience, targetted at educators.Quite nice... though I'm slightly struggling to understand how it differs from the work that NMC put into their education orientation experience?
Here's my latest alt - Hughling Wulluf - created using the new facility (note that checking whether your chosen name is already in use is slightly tedious using this interface because you have to re-supply your password (twice) each time - I wanted Howling Wulluf but it wasn't available). Hughling is watching the introductory video in the new ISTE orientation area.
Good to see that the Sloodle tools are available in the resources area :-)
As I mentioned when I reviewed the NMC orientation experience, one of the problems with this kind of generic approach (less generic than the main SL registration admittedly but still pretty generic) is that it doesn't cater well for national (or more local) requirements - there is nothing here specifically for UK educators for example. Should there be?
One final thought... the most valuable part of any orientation experience is meeting and chatting to helpful people. When I used this new facility there was no-one around to talk to. So although the content I found was education-specific, the experience overall was rather disappointing. IMHO the most useful thing that these kinds of initiatives could do would be to create a rota of willing educational volunteers - people who are happy to hang around welcoming new avatars to the world. My guess is that doing so would have much more impact than new builds and resources. That said, I appreciate that setting this kind of thing up isn't going to be easy.
