YAOEE - yet another orientation experience for educators

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.

Teaching and learning with MUVEs

This looks like an interesting peer to peer learning programme (whatever that is!) for those who wish to grow the use of MUVEs in their teaching practice:

The European funded MUVEnation project is now launching 'Teaching and learning with MUVEs'. This is a one year postgraduate programme, delivered online, for future and in-service teachers who want to use innovative methods and tools to address learners motivation and participation issues in compulsory education.

For full details see the announcement.

Barriers to innovation

Steven Warburton has a nice post on Liquid Learning discussing the barriers to innovation in virtual worlds in the context of teaching and learning.

Six Barriers to Innovation in MUVE-based teaching

view presentation (tags: teaching muve malaysia lyict)

He suggests 6 areas in which there are barriers - technical, identity, culture, collaboration, time and economic - which seems like a useful breakdown to me.

He closes with a discussion about the choice of technology for a remote presentation with colleagues from the UK to an audience in Kuala Lumpur. In short, Elluminate was chosen over Second Life:

Not only were we going to have to trust the technical robustness of the platform (gulp) but we were also forced to assess the question of added value from using Second Life? Fighting server lag, low bandwidth problems, variable audio quality and the sheer awkwardness of manipulating an in-world slide viewer were just too much to contemplate so we shifted to the Elluminate.

While this doesn't seem unreasonable given the nature of the presentation (RL presenters speaking to a RL audience) he ends with:

here is a vision for SL that would help make it more usable - a whiteboard, an integrated IRC type chat client and a status indicator panel.

I suppose so... though SL already has an "IRC type chat client" (in-world chat - which in my experience serves perfectly well as a back-channel while voice is being used to carry the main presentation) and status indicator (just ask people to '/clap' or chat something when you want explicit acknowledgement). I agree that the whiteboard is missing and as I've argued elsewhere, this highlights SL's fundamental problem with handling text-like documents in any collaborative sense.

Learning to teach in Second Life

The Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life project have a draft report available entitled Learning to Teach in Second Life. Looks interesting...

What follows is a summary of the things that we found out by teaching 4 sessions in Second Life between November 2007 and March 2008, as part of the ‘Learning from Social Worlds; Teaching in Second Life’ project (supported by the Eduserv Foundation, June 2007 to May 2008.). The various pieces of research that we undertook alongside our teaching (examining communities of practice, ‘gate-keeping’, the Second Life ‘pain barrier’, etc.) are not covered in this report. Please note that there are lengthy reflections on our teaching in SL at the project blog, as well as links on a page of SL Resources to information from many other educators working in Second Life.

We found that: Second Life can be useful, that Second Life can be ambiguous, and that participants may have very different perspectives on a session.

Educause SW - does your campus need a Second Life

A useful blog summary by Topher Zwiers covering the Second Life session at the start of the Educause SW Regional Conference, which I attended virtually thanks to Topher's live-blogging.

There are some interesting references here which I need to follow-up, particularly the stuff about Chickering & Gamson's 7 Principles and Dodge's PADE formula (see here and here).

JISC online conference e-books

Via the Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life blog I notice that JISC have made available two e-books that contain the proceedings of their online conference 'Innovating e-Learning 2007: Institutional Transformation and Supporting Lifelong Learning' which was held earlier this year. I ran a session on Second Life as part of the conference.

The results of this session and the ensuing discussion are available in the Institutional transformation [PDF] e-book. I'm not sure who has pulled all this material together but they've done a pretty good job. Thanks!