I thought I would write this down quick before I forget, more to keep tabs on the list for class next year than anything else. 3D social/chat spaces seem to be the buzz now, on the the Web. Recent ones that I have discovered include (I’m excluding Second Life just because it’s not recent to me any more):
Can you add to the list?
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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
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