Teacher’s Buzz, November 13, 2006

Sung to the tune of “Oh What A Night”:

Oh what a night,

Late 2006 and Teacher’s Buzz was nigh

The crowd was mighty and the buzz was high

Oh what a meeting, what a night!

Well, ok, song parodies apart, Teacher’s Buzz last night saw the biggest gathering that I can recall. The primary focus was Second Life at the recently concluded NMC Regional Conference, but, as always, the conversation went in many directions, including a pretty cool demo of video and slide show screens.

The takeaway for me was the convergence of two ideas, that trigerred some reflection on the nature of the learning process in immersive environments like Second Life. One was the theme of mentorship, a recurring topic at Teacher’s Buzz, and one that showed up last night as well. The other was something Heidi Trotta mentioned at the presentation given by her and Danielle Sirliss, and that was the fact that despite our many efforts to provide documentation and other materials for orientation and scaffolding, students tend to ignore them. Question is why?

To seek a possible answer(s), I looked back at my own learning experiences within and with Second Life, and realized, they were all social experiences. I tended to ask somebody I knew, sometimes, even people I didn’t know, or check with Live Help, anything that facilitated interacting with another person rather than reading the Help section . The other aspect was that it was invariably a just-in-time scenario; I sought help when I needed it, no more, no less.

And so, how can we leverage this context of learning through social networking as it were for our own teaching and learning processes in MUVEs? I don’t know the answer to that one yet. Perhaps more time inworld will reveal the answer! Or perhaps, that just my excuse to finish this post

Frustrated!

For no reason at all, today, Adium quit working on me. What’s even more frustrating is that it’s working just fine for other people. Nothing, on the face of it, has changed since yesterday, so I have no idea what could be causing this. And I have no idea what a “Gaim error” is either, so I can’t fix this!!! I can log into my various IM clients just fine through Meebo so it can’t be an issue with any of my IM clients. And using Fire is not an option I really want to consider.

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Teaching Field Research in SL

Ed Lamoureaux of Bradely University will be teaching a field research course online in Second Life during the Winter break. At the NMC REgional conference, he shared his goals, visions, and challenges that he foresees for this course.

Ed is a theory guy who says that games suck. SL on the other hand is an opportunity to learn and teach about virtual environments for living and learning. But one cannot teach undergrad new media students with that attitude, you become a dinosaur, and you suck. In Sl, he can be comfortable doing non-shooting or sterotypical gaming stuff and stay relevant.

As a field researcher and conversation analyst, SL and this course gives him an opportunity to do field research and ethnography. Can take beginning researchers and risk less with this kind of research, than doing it in real life. Also, SL offers a distance education opportunity that may not be possible otherwise. Ed curently has 5 students on board and has agreed to take one student each from Trinity, Ball State, and University of Nevada, Reno for a grand total of 8.

Students have to have the necessary equipment, create an avi, and learn ttheir way around SL on their own by the time they start class. Students also have to have a rough idea of their topic of field research when they apply to their course.

There’s more going on in the evenings US time in SL, and that’s one of the reasons the class will meet at that time. One hour will be devoted to real life style lecture and discussion using NMC’s TeamSpeex server for voice chat. Question is: Should a real life type format be brought into Second Life? On the other hand, research cannot be taught without some element of plain good old-fashioned teaching. Establish the teaching space as a sitting space and thea vatar will stand if they want to speak in their turn. Students will get the day’s notes as a note card that they can add to their inventory.

One of the unexpected challenges that arose is that conducting research in SL could actually be more difficult than doing it in real life. Normally, this kind of research would get an exemption, but in this case the research plan has to be approved by Linden Labs as well. Also, the university is requiring individual proposals from each student prior to approval of their research. This is partly because every body in Second Life is an identified subject due to the fact that their avatar names are always available. Students will carry a notecard in their inventory to identify their research as being approved under the Human Subject Procedures.

In the event that SL goes down or if the University closes, or if Second Life is sold, students will register for a credit at a time: Section 1, 2, and 3. The students will get grades for a section at a time. The Registrar will hold their money and pay each section off as they go through the course.

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NMC Regional Conference 2006

It’s a gorgeous day in San Antonio, Texas, as Trinity University and the Center for Learning and Technology host the 2006 NMC Regional Conference. Most of us typically only get to see the front end of a conference, so as hosts, it was a rate opportunity to see the behind the scenes work. And I got to be intrepid photographer, in a manner of speaking , and capture the NMC crew at work.

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