Meeting on Riverina Island 14 March 2008

Alex Harpoon (Susan) and Scorp Rau (Jacqui) and I met on Riverina Island on Friday. Scorp was kind enough to take us on a tour of Riverina Island.



Scorp introduced us to a whiteboard that allows the user to present slides to other Avatars. We could see the use of such a tool for teachers and immediately started to think about a toolkit for teachers. What would it contain? Are there any other groovy little tools?



Scorp mentioned that we could teach the teachers how to find tools. To paraphrase a well known proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." This sounded like a great idea so we have added it to the list of things to teach teachers in Second Life. We've created a page for our Crash course in Second Life course http://tlie.wikispaces.com/Crash+course+in+Second+Life



Both Alex and I thought that at first the environment for teachers should be familiar, as weird and wonderful is great but might be too distracting whilst teachers are familiarising themselves with SL.



Scorp showed as a holodeck, which allows the user to change the setting from a table and chairs, to a dance floor. Apparently it is a very quick way to change the environment and could potentially be useful to teachers with students.



We agreed to meet next week at the same time.

In world meeting- a newbie's experience

Last Friday's meeting was an exciting one for me, with Alex Harpoon (my avatar) stumbling and floundering about in Second Life. Chris was on hand to help , and I can't yet imagine how Alex could function at all without two people at the computer. Thanks Jacqui for showing us around Riverina Island and beyond. Quite an amazing place with bubbles and lights and even creatures sliding by. And Jacqui's backpack is full of wonderful educational tools as well as bits of fun.

I tried to keep up but moving about at all is still challenging, even looking at things seemed to involve feats of perception and coordination beyond my beginner status. The overall effect was a bit disorienting, and I felt it would take me a while before i could learn much, other than how to get by in SL. I longed for a room with chairs and walls - a recreation of what i'm used to i suppose, just to get oriented. Sitting down felt surprisingly good!

I think SL will be a good place to meet and study, but requires the hard yards (long hours) to become comfortable with the basic functionality and tools for communication and navigation first. For me this means access to a computer capable of keeping Alex above ground - my one at home doesn't cope and SL is blocked at work, on all but one computer.

I don't doubt our project will get some great teaching and learning happening, but I'm trying to capture these early in-world experiences so they can inform our planning for newbies. Overall, i found Second Life full of potential, as well as good places to explore already, and an exciting way to interact with others.

Meeting with Chris re proposal Wed 13 Feb

Chris and I met to progress the project and agreed upon the aim of running a preparatory phase of the project in Semester 1 to provide information and help prepare for the broader project in Semester 2. I will prepare information about the preparatory phase on the project wiki for Chris to include in a submission, but generally we agreed that the preparatory phase would include six teachers. In term one the project team will run activities with the teachers for the purpose of upskilling and in term two the teachers will trial some delivery with learners.

Project Blog - First post!

Jacquie Bates, Chris Froissard, Susan Cornish and I had our second project meeting today.

We used Adobe Connect for the first meeting, videoconferencing for the second meeting and we are proposing Second Life for the third.

By the fourth or fifth meeting we should have teachers joining us for orientation and a series of excursions and workshops everyweek after that.

Jacquie discussed the possibility of accessing someone like Gilly Salmon to workshop a professional development model with the teachers. I will find the link and picture and add that here soon.

In one of the workshops Susan Cornish, our resident filmmaker, will also be giving our teachers tips on how to create and record rich visual sequences in Second Life for demonstrating their work.

Also we agreed to create a roster to man Riverina Island in-world at certain times so they can drop in. Actually thats not a bad teaching model to apply to courses as well as professional development!

We need to set up a space, maybe a new wiki, or pages off the existing wiki for teachers to collaborate on the units of competence or assessment evidence they want to help learners achieve in world. They may also want to store some of the resources they create in the project in this space too.

I think it would be good if the four of us co-author this blog through the life of the project, as a point of reflection and for reporting purposes!