Discovered Skoolaborate

Was browsing through a mail list post on SLEDT and followed a link to Skoolaborate:

Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS [learning management system, e.g. Blackboard, Moodle], wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students. By providing a common place to learn and share ideas, educators can leverage the power of new media to engage students and provide opportunities that might otherwise not exist. Using a group of islands in SecondLife, Skoolaborate helps students to collaborate on social action projects that benefit students who are less privileged than themselves. These projects integrate curriculum and digital technologies into collaborative global actions.

The idea of social action projects sounds very relevant for GP. However, there are lists of requirements and ‘minimum commitment’ you can find here. Still, that doesn’t stop us from learning from their experiences. The blog has been in existence since July last year, so the amount of material to sift through might be just right.

Also stumbled upon Schome, which looks terribly interesting. But I must get ready for my lesson soon.

CNN Future Summit – Virtual Worlds

Broadcast on CNN International in June 2007. Posted on YouTube by Nick Yee (see this page).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbY_zAOt-Ug

Thinking about Second Life in education

A candid discussion (started in March this year; last reply December 15) of the use of Second Life in education can be found on this page on the Classroom 2.0 blog. Found via the Edublog Awards. The following is what I extracted from the discussion:

Some (potential or actual) applications described

• Learner flies around an expanded 3D model of an eye to learn its parts and their functions
• Build an internal combustion engine to demonstrate how the parts of it work so they can get up close and personal to see it actually in motion without being burned
• Build a space station — pick your lesson plan here between astronomy, physics, materials sciences, math, geography …
• Use a 3d model of the solar system to teach about the planets
• Museums and science exhibits
• Language learning – Second Life English
• Education UK – An island in Second Life supporting teaching and learning
• Eduisland II
• Simulations for nursing students to use as pre-tests for their clinicals

Issues raised

• Cost of buying islands
• Cognitive overload dealing solely with the interface and navigation controls (including learning them)
• Going out of the classroom model
• unfamiliar, hard for people to grasp educational uses quickly
• less than 5,000 active teen residents on the Teen Grid (source)
• Not a viable teaching platform in the US because it’s not accessible (to all students). Regulations 504 and 508 prohibit the use of these technologies to actually teach a class for any institution receiving federal funds. That said, a lot of institutions are using them anyway on the grounds that ‘we don’t have any blind students’
• Controlling the learning
• Expensive, funding required
• Very time-consuming – ‘bleeding edge’
• Bandwidth-hungry
• Most people are not early adopters
• Hardware requirements are too much to ensure equal or ubiquitous access
• User contribution aspect of SL seems significantly more technical and difficult to participate in
• Lack of focus on rigorous content, e.g. ‘advanced math and science skills’
• Not currently developed to the extent where it is efficient for a teacher to utilize its full potential
• Safety

Interesting mention

• Google SketchUp – ‘a free, easy-to-learn 3D modeling tool that enables you to explore the world in 3D’
• River City – ‘A Multi-User Virtual Environment for Learning Scientific Inquiry and 21st Century Skills’
• Runescape – a browser-based MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)
• TappedIn – ‘The online workplace of an international community of education professionals’; ‘a groupware website with integrated chat and a geographical metaphor (offices, buildings, etc.)’
• Project Darkstar – ‘a research effort aimed at simplifying the process of developing multiplayer online games that can be deployed on a massive scale and made available to players using virtually any client device’
• Sloodle – ‘an Open Source project which aims to develop and share useful, usable, desirable tools for supporting education in virtual worlds, making teaching easier’
• Virtual Worlds Review – Last site update: February 20, 2006
• Croquet – ‘a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices’. See also this group for Croquet/Secondlife/OpenSim 3D virtual classroom users and developers

Digital Life

Digital Life, the supplement to the Straits Times every Tuesday, has as its cover story, various accounts of Singaporeans involved in Second Life.

But you’d need a subscription to read The Straits Times Interactive online.

Best of SL Videos

Beth Ritter-Guth over at The Stingy Scholar made the list with hyperlinks. I’ve linked the videos here, so you can view them more directly.

1. Beth’s favourite. Kurt Vonnegut, author of her favorite short story ever – Harrison Bergeron – was in SL:

2. ‘U2 on YouTube from SL‘ raises awareness about One.org (a charity to end AIDS):

3. ‘Second Life: Get One’ has many zany images that demonstrate the possibilities of SL:

4. ‘Machinima: Text 100 in Second Life’ demonstrates how SL can be used in business, and the discussion points can be applied to education, as well. Beth thinks it is an advertisement for the company that put it together, but you can go ahead and ignore that part:

5. ‘Tour of Info Islands’ is awesome because it really shows the potential of SL for the nerdy-cool folk like me.

6. A wee video about the making of Suzanne Vega’s SL Guitar is pretty wicked, too:

7. Suzanne Vega sings Tom’s Diner in SL. She was the first Big Name recording artist to show up and be cool in SL.

8. Trekkies, check out this clip.

9. Beth is a huge fan of Sun MicroSystems for their support of the SL platform. Here is a video of the Sun Pavilion and their first press release in SL. Visionaries:

10. Finally, Beth hopes this exists in SL because she truly is an addict of the Game Show Network, and – she hopes the Price is Right is in SL, complete with neutering ads by Bob-the-Boss-Barker.

A video to get things started

This is the promotional video for the NMC Campus entitled ‘Seriously Engaging’. NMC stands for New Media Consortium, which is ‘is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies’. (See this NMC page.) The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform NMC’s work in ‘educational gaming’. (See this About page for the NMC Campus Observer.)