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 
2 Comments on “Teacher’s Buzz, November 13, 2006”
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November 22, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Excellent questions and insights. We need communities of practice (i.e., robust user communities) if we ever hope to scale and support transformation of teaching and learning with the integration of information technologies. It’s all about education and community.
November 22, 2006 at 3:08 pm
I couldn’t agree more. I would also contend that these communities already exist and often times, are no more than a keyboard’s length away. For instance, I regularly access them via blogs, IM, Skype, webinars, and sometimes, just good old fashioned POTS ;-). So the other challenge is: How do we make faculty who don’t integrate information technologies into their teaching and learning processes a part of these communities and help them tap into the wealth of their collective wisdom.
I suspect the answer in part is that faculty see information technologies as a distinct entity, aside and apart from their curricular or research process. For their students, of course, it’s just a way of life, a part of what they do everyday, it’s not even perceived as “technology”. And until the twain do meet as it were, we will grapple with these challenges.