Silvertomorrow’s Weblog

I had the opportunity to join other SL educators in the first introduction of Wonderland. Sun had an introduction in world and then guided participants to download the Wonderland client. They are allowing registered educators in their new virtual world. A Sun employee gave me a one on one tour. The graphics were primitive but the interface with applications was very nice. With one click of the mouse I had control of the white board and other applications.

I tweeted the introduction in that occurred in SL:

The Wonderland servers could be mirrored or backed up at any number of places. Each node is hosted by anacademically oriented institution. Wonderland was done by educators for educators to get this technology in their hands can be bounced around and hosted on any number of servers. Sun isencouraging universities to become a “node” on the grid – let us know if you want your center to be involved and host your own.

It was a new experience tweeting (taking dictation essentially) while someone else was speaking. Keeping it to 140 characters and remembering what was being said while keeping up with the in-world and MSN chat was a real challenge. It was an impromptu thought to begin with and I didn’t do such a great job, but it  was fun experiment.

When I finally finished downloading Wonderland, and logged in, I found that my friends on Macs were having trouble. I asked Nigel from Wonderland to help them, and he immediately logged into gchat and tried to talk them through it. Most of the developers are using Macs and know how to get past the Java issues. It took him and Annie a couple of days to work through the problems but he persisted and I was impressed. Especially when I found out he helped Terran too! Way to go Nigel – thanks!

Like I said, the graphics were very primitive, once they’re upgraded (significantly) I can see that it might be a better alternative to SL for some things, especially for corporations that want to hold collaborative distance meetings. However, I think it will be a long time before Wonderland offers significant competition for SL.

Photos to follow

This week started out with Annie having technical problems because Annie couldn’t get online and then had to spend her time working with her students. I ended up taking her script and posting it to chat. It was really great that we had everything scripted out.

Suzie decided to move into groups before starting the quest, and we have organizational problems with it becuase it wasn’t planned ahead – lesson for the week – don’t change organizational things on the fly!

In Meaningful Learning and The Participatory Web, a web book by Grabe and Grabe, they ask:

“How do the risks match up with the educational potential of applications that may involve a certain element of danger?”:

A couple of data points from this study (The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children):

• Four percent of those surveyed indicated experiencing an “aggressive sexual solicitation” (perpetrator made an effort to take the “experience” offline through phone contact, mail, or face to face meeting).
• Location of computer when experiencing an aggressive sexual solicitation – 79% home, 12% friend home, 9% school, library, or other.
• Age of solicitor associated with “aggressive solicitation – 44% <18, 34% 18-25, 15% >25, 7% – no clue
• Means of access – chat 32%, IM 54%, other 13%
• Reaction – 44% removed self from situation, 23% warned solictor, 7% changed online name, 15% ignored, 2% reported to parent or authorities, 7% met person

It is the combination of these percentages we have to process. Is there a risk to adolescents? Obviously! Are school uses of communication technology involved? Rarely! Do adolescents act responsibly? Mostly!

I’m sorry but I can’t help but liken this unto the politically and religiously hot question of educating children about safe sex or promoting celibacy. Personally I take a middle-of-the-road stance because I believe in promoting celibacy but recognize that not all kids are going to hold out. So why ignore the problem – arm them with the tools they need to be safe no matter what their choice is.

The same idea applies to Internet use and education; according to the studies referred to above, the potential risks to teenagers and younger kids is low and the potential benefits of use of social media is high. To combat the risk, educate them. Why is this so hard?

Work cited:

Grabe, M. and Grabe C. (2008). Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web (registration required). Retrieved on June 17, 2008 from http://learningaloud.com/participatoryweb/

Interesting approach to social media. giving it a try.

Thanks Terran Timeless (Michael Galvin)

Collaborative Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008
Track 1: Community Engagement: From local impact to global influence

Conversations about assessment, transfer of learning using virtual worlds by Lev Gonick, Stacy Williams and Mark Turner from Case Western Reserve University, Ed Lamoureux from Bradley University, Cory Ondrejka from co-founder of Second Life and now at University of Southern California.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-nq1q3FeKk&feature=PlayList&p=A878DF07BE7B51A3&index=78

Cory
15% of people in SL script

Never having taught in a school, I have not had much of a reason to really study national standards. In the Digital Media course I’m taking with Dr. Grabe, we focused on national standards and discussed how they are translated into classroom activities. It was a fascinating discussion for me, in part because I was recently invited to review this website www.advanc-ed.org. As I was reading about standards, benchmarks and frameworks in the book, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning by Grabe and Grabe, I was able to see how alignment in all of these areas would be beneficial.

Here’s something I wrote for class that I wanted to share (and is something that I applied the internalization process to before addressing – see “The Who” post):

Standards are written by national organizations such as ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) and NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education). The standards written at this level are very broad, like the one in the example, Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior. (Standard 5), intended to outline the “general concepts and skills student should acquire” (Grabe and Grabe, p. 23). National standards are then broken down into granular levels called benchmarks and frameworks. Benchmarks which are still quite broad, but more specifically outline what will be required by grade level. A curriculum framework, usually at a state or district level, is even more definitive and organizes the objectives for skills and knowledge to be gained. It is up to the classroom teacher to study the spirit and letter of the standard from the national level to the framework level, and construct activities, learning experiences and assessment for the students which will meet the goals originally intended when written.

Alignment is a term often used in instructional design to describe a tie between the objectives, the content and the assessment in a course; ideally these would be in sync covering the same topics. When thinking about how this ties in with national standards; I see standards as objectives that must be analyzed using a top-down approach. During the process of granulating national standards into benchmarks, frameworks and then into individual lesson plans, educators, textbook manufacturers, and administrators, etc., at each level must align their thinking and their goals to one another using the standards as tools to do so. With regard to the standard in this example, reasonable alignment would mean that a benchmark for this standard would be included for each grade level, such as “students should understand copyright issues with internet publications.” At the framework level, school districts would be more specific in saying “students must understand copyright law with regard to blogs” and a lesson plan might include, “students will be able to generate an essay that outlines three legal and ethical issues related to copyrights and blogs.” In this way objectives, content and assessment are aligned from national to individual classroom levels.

I used to be a singer. Singing – to perform – it’s not easy. It comes from within. You have to dig deep and give it your all. You have to expose yourself, the real you. Each song, each phrase, each word, is studied, memorized, internalized, and then shared. And people critique you. A lot. Especially when you’re doing it as a student; you have to sing in front of other students and other faculty and they have to give you feedback to help you improve. If your confidence isn’t there; wow; it can be painful. In fact it was so painful I quit. I needed something not quite so personal.

Fast forward to yesterday. Teaching in Second Life. The experience stimulated a conversation with a friend about virtual worlds. Why and how is it different than teaching in the real world? Is it different? I think the answer is no. And yes. I told my friend that I think the difference lies in the connection between the avatar and the user and the environment and content. We talked about context. Context is key. Esp in VWs. She told me yes, but that’s not saying much. I thought, “Huh? I just told you my belief and that’s not saying much?? ouch!”

Then she started asking me a series of questions about my own learning preferences. I am a visual and aural learner but suspect that the aural is simply a matter of lack of choice. I’m lectured to, and I like it because I can sit back and listen to ideas and assimilate them into what I know. Now that I have a pretty solid body of knowledge, I love making connections between concepts and sharing my ideas on those connections with others. But, really, that’s not saying much. She’s right.

Because what I don’t know, is the “who.” Who am I really, as a learner, without the constraints put upon me by formal education? No clue. Why not? Because I have refused to experiment. Any time an opporutnity to play with the tools has come along I hide behind “too busy.” Why? Fear. Fear of rejection, failure, lack of perfection. Wow. Big insight.

So now I have to figure that out. Who am I as a learner? AND, I have to STOP intellectualizing/analyzing everything that comes my way. I hold stuff out at a distance and say hmmmmmm what really intelligent and impressive comment can I make about that? It’s only on the occassion when I finally forget about doing that and personalize what I’m writing/talking about do I actually say something meaningful.

Back to singing – I think I’ve learned from this that no matter what I do – it has to come from within before it can truly mean something to me, or anyone else.

Learning who I am as a learner will make me “become” the teacher (instructional designer) I really want to be. Thanks Friend.

I’m such a lucky duck. I get to work with two phenomenal instructors in SL and learn how to teach and how to teach in SL. Not only that, but they are from south carolina and the UK, so I get to be part of this really cool new international organization that we’re forming (more on that when it’s officially formed).

Today we taught our first class together. It was brilliant. We worked soo hard for weeks on our ideas and built a lesson plan that worked really well. There were lessons learned too.

All text – boring (we knew that, didn’t we?)

No toys till the end – or – at least be prepared to include them in class. For example, when playing with bear shooters, use them to teach mouse and cam controls.

incorporate fun preferably interactive activities

It is so interesting to try to apply pedagogy to a virtual world. As I wrote the lessons i was in charge of, i tried to be very concise in the way I broke down each task. I thought it was good. Then I put it up. And it seemed boring, obvious, and too repetitive. I wonder if the students felt that way.

Activities for the next class. No more of this text stuff unless absolutely necessary.

Funny, I feel like I grew today.