Virtual Community

On this podcast we feature a plenary session from the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. The presenter is Sarah Smith Robbins, PhD Candidate, Ball State University, with a topic entitled, "Virtual Worlds as Web 2.0 Learning Spaces".

Virtual worlds such as Second Life offer powerful teaching and learning opportunities by integrating participatory, social, and immersive media for student-centered learning. Learn about Second Life, its use as a learning space, and its predictive role in the future of learning.

 

In this 15 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Julian Lombardi, Assistant Vice President at Duke University and Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium. Croquet is 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.

Like many people, I received a rather terse email over the Christmas period (Dec. 16) informing me that the EduSpaces services was due to be terminated. I'm still catching up with the story. While I've been on holidays, there's been a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing about the news in the ed tech blogosphere, so I'm pleased to read that the Curverider folks have now reached an agreement with TakingItGlobal.org. EduSpaces is not going to go away!

EDUCAUSE invites subscribers to join two new constituent groups: IT Communications, led by Mur Muchane and Lisa Trubitt, and Virtual Worlds, led by AJ Kelton. Browse the full list of constituent and discussion groups at EDUCAUSE.

In this podcast of the presentation " Cognition, Learning, and Literacy in Virtual Worlds," Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses the intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds (for example, collaborative problem solving, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and digital media literacy) and the way these coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in context of pop culture.

In this podcast of the presentation “ Virtual Learning Environments in 3D,” Phillip D. Long, associate director of MIT’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, looks at the evolution of online interaction from text-based collaboration such as wikis to 3D virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life. He discusses the potential of these immersive 3D VWs to serve as learning spaces and to become persistent new home campuses.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27–28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

"It's been said that there are two types of computer users: Those who get this joke and those who don't."

Taken from the web page of Dot.Tunes, which you can find at http://dotpad.com. This application allows you to publish an iTunes playlist (or lists, or the entire library) to a web page for distribution to any device that can get music from a URL - such as an X Box, PDA, or, hopefully, Second Life.

If this works, it opens up a lot of possibilities for faculty members. The alternative that SL recommends is over $200 and is a full-featured application. It appears that Dot.Tunes does just enough so that it will work for what is needed. The possibilities are as limited as whatever the faculty members can put into iTunes.

There was no manual online (I was told its in the works) but they did have a forum to post questions into. I posted a question only to find that the first time you post, the posting needs to be moderated – a safety precaution I suppose. Within a few hours I got a note back from someone at dot.tunes indicting they would like for this to work and what was SL looking for in the feed. I provided the person with everything I new, or could find on SL, including URLs from services that already stream into SL. That was on Saturday and I’ve heard nothing since. TO be honest, I was surprised to hear anything over the weekend anyway, but I was hoping that they would at least post my request into the forum. Perhaps there are others out there who can help solve the puzzle.

Today there was an article on TechCrunch entitled "Second Life Speaks."  The article outlines a beta development for the world of Second Life in which residents will not only be able to talk with one another using VOIP protocol, but avatar's voices will be adjusted "relative to you based on the distance and direction of the speaker."  Wow!  Now that is getting more real life. 

I have been playing around in Second Life for some time and while my first experience left me intrigued, I kind of dismissed its possible educational use as a virtual classroom.  Relationships were being developed, knowledge was being transferred, but it just took too long to communicate.  With this new development we will have the two most important senses for learning, audio and visual. 

Potential

As I think about my last post about Second Life, I am starting to see the potential here.  If you recall, I was inspired to write because of an article written about Second Life becoming the new internet.  Not just a place to go, but a virtualization of the net. 

This 46 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled The iPod: A Pocket Full of Learning in an iCommunity.
 

This 51 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Building an Online Learning Community for "Blended" Librarians.