Silvertomorrow’s Weblog

I stumbled across a wonderful presentation by Sir Ken Robertson and decided to post it here even though it really has little to do with virutal worlds.

The first day of the BSU EdTech course called “Teaching and Learning in Second Life.” We had some voice issues and I rezzed my voice chat job aids to help the newbies out. I think they helped but mostly relogging seemed to do the trick!

 The first assignment is to create a powerpoint presentation and upload the slides for prim textures and then insert a floating script. I’ve done all but the scripting so it should be simple. I am going to do a “best practices” for orientation of new students presentation. I’m getting pretty familiar with these types of problems so who knows – maybe it will come in handy.

I’m really enjoying the discussion board for this class already and I’m looking forward to many more exciting and educational interactions!

 This is the common area, or “Quad” on NMC Island Teaching 7, the home of UND’s new SL space.

After a conversation with Bill about selling educational support items in SL, I’m thinking about asking Angrybeth to vendor a free set of job aids. My expectation would be that they will be used by educators to help incoming newbies. I would love to be able to contribute something to the c ommunity that has been so good to me!! I will have to think about it a bit more, but I’m leaning toward going for it!

I met Bill thru the SLED list a while back and we became fast friends. Bill is a great and seasoned teacher of the Six Sigma concept of organizational statistics. He is the owner of a company called Value Train which, according to his website, “provides training for professionals seeking to enhance their career or job search.  We provide certification training for Six Sigma Green Belt, Six Sigma Black Belt, Minitab, Sarbanes-Oxley, PMP Exam review and Lean Enterprise.”

Bill came into SL as Silverwing (after his motorcycle) to tap into the immersive quality of the environment for distance education. He has decided to give a free, one-hour training/introduction to Six Sigma. He has over 40 people signed up and ready to go and he has put a tremendous amout of work into preparing orienations for his incoming newbies. On Friday we trained three new people. Sadly, my headset wasn’t working, but I uploaded my voice chat job aids and made them a texture on a prim so he could use them to support the laborious task of getting voice up and running. The orientation went very well, I thought, and he will conduct several more in the next few days. The actual event is Friday (1/19) and I will be there with bells on! It’s been a fun learning experience for both of us – and now i have a private tutor for Stats!! Thanks Silver!

My good friend, Padl (Cathy Walker iRL), presented SL today at Pulaski Technical College as the keynote speaker. I had the honor of attending the presentation. She started out with  Komuso Tokugawa playing some live music as the audience walked in and got settled. The house was full and they ended up having to pull in more seating – good for you Cahty! She did a great job introducing SL (and used my SL PowerPoint presentation template – what an honor), and then TP’d to Second Marketing to talk with Robin Roar. Second Marketing does in-world marketing for Colgate, careerbuilder.com, imax and a few other big names. Robin gave us a tour of the sim and I grabbed the LM to go back there sometime and investigate further. After that we visited with Filthy Fluno, an artist in SL whose real name is Jeff Lipsky. Filthy told us that he can’t seem to sell his art in his local area, but he’s popular enough in SL to quit his RL job because he sells enough work in SL to support himself! Imgaine that! Padl later told me that Filthy’s appearance as a short, fat, black man with a huge afro (he’s a white man iRL) offended someone in the audience; the same man who accused her of working for Linden Lab. I can see his point; the avatar could be offensive to some. Cathy working for LL?? LOL

Next padl took us to ISTE Island (ISTE.org) where Merrick (Scott Merrick to most) gave a quick tour of the blog spot on the island and promoted his own blog (which I enjoy). I thought Cathy’s point that new educators in SL would be well advised to join and become active with other ISTE educators was a great idea. I spoke with Scott later about becoming an ISTE docent. I’m not sure it’s the right choice for me, but I’m keeping it in mind. ISTE is a K-12 organization, and I’m more involved with higher ed. However it could be a great learning and networking experience. Waiting to see how this semester goes.

 Anyway – back to Padl – at the end of the presentation she took her audience to see the NESIM demo, created by VESIM. I did not attend – I needed to do some faculty support for work – but I’m told it went well. John Miller from Tacoma Community College (JS Vavoom in-world) did the demo.

Great job Cathy! I’m glad I got to be there for some of it.