This weekend there is a conference in Second Life about the use of virtual worlds in education.
I guess the surprising thing is the extent to which this is real and now and not something that is only *going to* happen......
The conference itself is a clear and compelling example -- I have heard presenters who were in Ireland, Illinois, California, and Texas. Before one presentation they asked members of the audience where they were -- all over the USA and Canada, and Finland and Ireland and Russia and Brazil and I'm sure more that I missed.
All of us there, together, able to talk to each other. The audience was easily able to comment and ask questions. We could all talk to each other (in real time) as well as to the speakers, could answer each other's questions, add details to the speaker's comments, etc. The speakers had voice, but they also could see the chat, so their answers to questions were often immediate, just as if we were all in the same room.
I mean.
How cool is that?????????????????????????
This speaker (on the stage, seated, in a purple tshirt) is an anthropologist. He has worked for years doing anthropology in Indonesia, and when Second Life happened, he started doing anthropology in Second Life.
He was pretty interesting and engaging. As with any conference, some speakers were ... less interesting.
Looking around at the audience.
One thing you can do in SL that you can't do in RL is send your camera around and look at people's faces right up close. Or their pants........... It was the pants I was looking at, but this blue guy is sort of interesting, too.
This woman is an employee of Sun (computers). Sun has its own proprietary virtual world, called Wonderland. As they wanted to use it for corporate meetings, etc, they needed much more stringent access control than SL has. That was one of the drivers for making their own world.
This presentation was about Wonderland, and what it can do. It sounded pretty cool. I thought it was interesting that there was this talk about what is (I thought) direct competition to SL, here in SL......
This is today's presentation by a PhD student from Dublin. I thought I would show the arena....... The presenter is on the stage, in a long blue dress. (Her hair was blue, too, but that's hard to see here as we're all so tiny.) You can just see me (front row, nearest the stage, on the left).
There were a lot more people there who don't show up. Trying to conserve bandwidth, they only show you the people who are the closest to you, sometimes, when there are a lot of people around.
Is it still "gawking" if no one can see you doing it? Is it still "gawking" when everyone has *chosen* to look exactly as they do?
Some people look like anyone you'd see walking down the street. Others ... not so much. For a very wide variety of reasons!
Ok. The next presentation.
I hadn't thought of PhD students being sort of like lawyers -- using a very specific vocabulary in order to avoid being misunderstood.
"Affordance" seems to mean the characteristics of something that make it more or less useful for a certain task. Or perhaps the characteristics of something that make it possible to use it for a certain task.
I'm pretty clear that "mapping pedagogy to affordances" means "using the particular strengths [of whatever] to facilitate teaching."
At any rate, this presentation was about designing educational opportunities which would make good use of the strengths of Second Life.
They settled on an interactive map that helps students understand the disparities in power/affluence/etc between the northern and southern halves of our planet. (We were supposed to be able to go see it and do the things that there were to do, but I went to the island and couldn't find this part of it.....)
Students worked in groups of four. They did the activities, talked over what they had learned, and made books which they knew from the outset would be available to the next groups of people who did this lesson. (This was a four-hour activity.)
(The books come ready to have images uploaded to their pages, which makes them easy for people to use, without having a huge "how to build in SL" learning curve.)
Here we are looking at the same kind of book -- this one made by the instructors to spell out what is expected.
Everybody felt pretty good about this. The participants/students felt that they had succeeded in effectively completing the assignment. The designers/teachers agreed, and felt that their design of the assignment had been successful in engaging the learners via leveraging (pronounced with a long first E, wherever the presenter is from!) the strengths of Second Life.
After the presentation, I went to their island and looked for the north/south build, but didn't find it. I wandered around a bit, and then went to yet another island.
(Update from another visit -- their north/south builds were -- way up in the sky. Perhaps I will, someday, learn to look there for stuff I can't find........... The maps didn't offer me anything to interact with, so I still did not get a sense of how this activity worked.............)
You knew I was going to find the shore.
No beach here; the waves crash right on the grass. Best *crashing* waves I've seen yet........
And I like the sitting animation.......
I'm not sure what that ball of ... bubbles? light balls? ... at the top of the white ... string? wire? ... is, but isn't it interesting that it is substantial enough to drape wires of colored lights using it as the support of one end of the lights?
Walking on.
What's this????
I click on the larger piece, and choose "sit here" from the menu.
Noting the airspace between my bum and, well, anything, but particularly that ball that matches the ... um ... backrest? I'm guessing I was supposed to sit on the ball rather than the backrest.
But hey, in SL, this works.
See the cat on my lap? Awwwww. This was the first time anyone's given me a cat to pet while I sit......
The sitting animation had me pet the cat, and had the cat wiggle its tail.........
The cat has the same surface as the chair. All over. No face! I told my better half "It's not a real cat! It doesn't have a face!"
Yes.
Well.
Anyway.
I enjoyed sitting there and petting it, watching the wave crash into the shore.
Ok. Walking on.
Finishing with one more pedagogical thing.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment