Projekter i SL

På Online Educa i Berlin finder der en række seminarer sted om SL, i nyhedsbrevet fra Online Educa skriver de at :
Using Second Life for educational purposes is one of most exciting trends in the field of technology-enhanced learning. But what is behind all the hype? What are the actual benefits of Second Life for learners as well as for trainers? Various sessions at Online Educa Berlin will explore the use of virtual worlds for educational purposes.

Blandt oplægsholderne vil der blandt være:
- Paul Sweeney, Director of Education at Languagelab.com, UK

- David Richardson fra Högskolan i Kalmar, Sverige har fokus på, hvorledes SL kan understøtte læring af engelsk som 2. sprog. Resultaterne af hans arbejde er "Kamion Island" et pilotprojekt.

- Sian Bayne, Professor at the University of Edinburgh UK, som bla. benytter SL "to give our distance students a sense of community and presence." De har i SL skabt "Holyrood Park", et sted vi sikkert vil kunne besøge :-) og kikke nærmere på. I real life et gammelt vulkansk bjerg, som ligger umiddelbart udenfor Edinburgh, en lokalitet jeg havde mulighed for at besøge i foråret.

Desværre kan jeg ikke lige checke SL og stederne op, min avatar Juuta Juutilainen har sovet tornerosesøvn så længe, at jeg har glemt både pasword til SL og til den e-mail som blev brugt i sin tid ;-((( så jeg må i gang forfra.

Penn State Undergraduate har netop købt en ø i SL

Penn State Undergraduate Admissions var repræsenteret ved den nyligt gennemførte College Fair arrangeret af eye4you Alliance. De har nu modtaget deres nye øde ø fra Linden Lab, og er netop gået i gang med at bygge. Håber at være klar til Januar 08; men det finder vi nok ud af mere om til den tid...

Hvordan det er at undervise i SL

Direkt fra min blog:
Well for my sins I have signed up to a teacher training course to learn all about the potential of Second Life for language teaching and the mechanics of giving texts to students and getting them to respond orally and so on. The course is courtesy of Language Lab who to my mind are making impressive efforts to use the potential of Second Life rather than simply replicate the classroom online. They have built an amazing island with loads of facilities such as a bank, hotels and a church where students can really be in the situations where they need the language.

But although I was born in SL last October 2006, I am still not very proficient so it was a real challenge to be required last week to plan a 15 minute teaching session. My biggest worry was that SL would crash on me. The only computer in the house which will run SL is still not very happy about it and so I do seem to crash quite easily. And that's OK if you are a student but it seems to me to be the height of bad manners to be the teacher and crash. However our own teacher was having problems with her audio and managed to log in and out unobtrusively several times while we carried on dutifully so I guess that this is just one of the things you have to live with like rain in Northern Europe!

The challenge we were given was to take one specific teaching approach and try to apply it in our 15 minute session. I took NeuroLinguistic Programming since I have never tried it before. But when I consulted the two books which had been gathering dust on my shelves for the last few years I discovered to my horror that NLP was all about mirroring, matching and pacing through body language as well as targetting all the different senses. And me with my limited ability in SL techniques and all! In the end I lighted on a word appreciation exercise and even managed, through a Heath Robinson approach, to play some soothing music while they were thinking. After thinking, my 'students' had a really good discussion about what the words in question meant to them and my 15 minutes was over so I hadn't had time to consider words they didn't like and a visualisation method for learning spelling. Relief is the best word to describe what I felt afterwards.

But of course once is not enough and next week we have to do another session, this time making use of one of the many locations thoughtfully built by Language Lab. This time I am not tied to NLP but I think I may try to teach French instead of English.

My main conclusion so far is that SL has loads of potential but the teacher at least needs to be confident in the technicalities of moving around and operating in the environment.