David Delgado :: Blog

Eariler today, I was unable get in world, and not surprised as I had noticed a SL server upgrade on the grid status blog //status.secondlifegrid.net/ . After dinner & dishes duty - around 17.30 GMT, I wanted to see if group 2 were still in a meeting at MUVEnation island, but they had left. On the map, I tracked someone and teleported there,he was also from the MUVEnation project; he told me the others had left and we made friends, had a conversation, tried a few things around friendship features and played hide and seek with mini map and teleport, good practice for mentor skills. I need to find out who he was as I forgot to note down his name - but I have several photos of him, close up face only,so that will be an identifier. What we actually did not do, was to try out the six helpful posts of informative exercises, which I took up ather he left

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3175/3046043075_973e98b854.jpg

 I don't know if he had been taklen there by the course leaders Rosie /Shirley and Pat P. they are also developers at the neighbor island Emerge of the JISC project. What I fould was a powerful training camp with all the nice advice you could ever want for the first few weeks in world. For me, the note collection will serve as reminders t helping me to catch up after half a year away, and a lousy memory.

How to change appearance and dress yourself up, where to get useful freebies (in an economy where most beginners are free riders and terribly poor, this comes in very handy!) How to use camera controls, take snapshots - and how to measure your height. This is where I I stumbed into an emergency! I touched the tall talking box, got the expected measure (an am 1.78 meters which is 20 cm taller than in RL ) - and then I touched a second time. Now the box attacked me, and it lookedfun because I am wearing wings these days. I knew I had a note about how to get rid of a box in your face from the helpful Emerge handbook, so I just wanted to send a snapshot to myself before getting out of the box - and then - FREEZE! 

. Sorry if I made a fool of myself  but these things do happen once in a while; I am sure I did not tell the beasty box to become part of my outfit. The picture looks silly. I will have to get back in world and control that I have not really stolen this piece of useful inventory from the Emerge training camp.

I did practise my camera skills again, see my Flickr album for evidence.

Another useful thing that I will remember from today: send a postcard with a snapshot to yourself or another recipient, from in world, and it will have the SLURL on it!

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/sounds-of-the-bazaar-special-in

Next Monday we break new ground with our Sounds of the Bazaar radio show. We are producing a special issue of Emerging Sound of the Bazaar entitled ‘Into the Dragons Den’.  The programme is a fly on the wall special following the progress of a Dragons Den session organised by the Jisc Emerge project. What’s it all about? Emerge supports a range of projects funded by the Jisc Users and Innovation programme. The projects are mainly focused on developing social software for use in education. Part of the support process has been through a four stage development model. As part of that model, at different times during the project development, project developers get invited to a session where they are quizzed by ‘Dragons’ on the progress of their project.

The Dragons Den session featured on Sounds of the Bazaar is the Preview project which is developing and piloting models for Problem Based Learning in Second Life. Maggie Savin-Baden will represent the project. Paul Bailey and Chris Fowler wil be the dragons. It is going to be great fun.

The programme, whih will last about 45 minutes, goes out at 19.00 UK time, 20.00 Central European Time. To listen to the programme just go to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk/Emerge.m3u in your browser. The stream should open in your MP3 player of choice. And if you’d like to chat during the programme Crsitina Costa will be in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/soundschat. Just add your name in the text field (leaving the password field blank) and chat away.

http://www.pontydysgu.org/2008/11/corporate-reinforcing-greed-fee

I reallly like this work by Ambjörn Naeve called A greed upon reality - the real (e)state of the economic system. The screenshot is taken from his Conzilla (www.conzilla.org) systems model, although sadly I can’t get it to open on my Mac.

The work, Ambjörn says, is mainly based on the New(tonian) economics provided by Lisa H. Newton: Permission to Steal - Revealing the Roots of Corporate Scandal.

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/publicphilosophy/newton/default.asp

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/day-1-relive-08-

Keynote 1: Edward Castranova

Looking Economics in SL - and volume of money involved.

Our workshop

Seemed to go well; was well worth the time spent setting up all those training accounts.

Learning to Walk before you Know your name: Ian Truelove & Graham Hibbert

Using OpenSim to let students learn to work within environment - and then start on to the main grid. Also got them to think quite a bit about names - and what your new name might mean in other languages.

Get Real - This isn’t Real this is SecondLife: Margaret de Jong Derrington

Holodecks for language learning! great - can really practice the relevant vocab!.

Fearing your Avatar: Kathy Trinder

Discussing interviews with staff and their experiences of getting an avatar. In particular - one aspect that came out - the difficulties of “lurking” in SecondLife - in the way that you can in forums.

Workshop - Learning together and Learning alone in SecondLife:

Absolutely fascinating set of resources for research skills - though trying to use a shared lift in SL is interesting….

Tags: ReLIVE08, SecondLife,

When I told my husband on the eve of leaving for Oslo that I was going to give a talk without Powerpoint, he told me I was very brave, which is enough to shatter the self-confidence of any forthcoming speaker! I had been invited to speak at the NFF-NADE conference on Lifelong Learning on the topic of what every teacher should know about using Web 2.0 and had decided that I should use a Web 2.0 tool to deliver a session about Web 2.0. So I made a netvibes page and opened the internet pages I wanted to talk about because they don't show up that well in Netvibes and used that as the backbone of my session. The 6 main points I wanted to make were that using Web 2.0 tools is about

1. Low threshold applications

2. Collaborating

3. Joining (in order to preserve artefacts)

4. Sharing

5. Remixing

6. Being careful about privacy, spam avoidance, copyright

I gave the talk in Danish because Danish and Norwegian are mutually understandable but as a non-native speaker I had difficulty in understanding spoken Norwegian (though reading is easy). There was a very important question about the legitemacy of the Mixwit site where you can make tailored digital 'cassette' tapes which made me look more closely at the TOS when I got home. They certainly seem to think that what they are doing is not breaking any copyright law.

NFF-NADE are partners in the VITAE project and so this was also an opportunity to report on how we are doing in our pilots of courses to enable teachers to mentor their colleagues in the use of such tools.

The Netvibes idea worked quite well although some of the lettering was too small even on a big screen. And of course I had a Powerpoint in my back pocket ready in case the Internet did not work! Unfortunately I did not pay as much attention to the Powerpoint knowing that it was a back-up and now it has ended up on the NFF_NADE website as a record of my session which was not the intention.

I was not the only one to eschew Powerpoint with one presenter opting for a mind map as the main resource for his session. But even he had a very short Powerpoint with a complicated diagram as part of the message he wanted to get across so it looks as though Powerpoint is not redundant yet.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SupercoolSchool/~3/375595191/best-of

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SupercoolSchool/~3/374603092/edublog

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008092415

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Sakai working group on authoring about the work we've been doing on Widgets. I'm including it here as its got some more of the technical details.

I think a major implication of widgets is that it challenges the idea of writing tools as plugins just for one platform (e.g. Moodle, or Sakai) rather than as generic widgets usable in any "container", which can include personal as well as institutionally-offered web spaces. For example, a Moodle course can include things like a chat, voting, and forum widget - which you can then drag off into your personal site.

Perhaps make your own personal "dashboard" out of the widgets you've taken from several different courses you are participating in, originally offered in different LMS's by different organisations.

UNder construction - SL downtime

I plan to make a field trip to visit SLeducation UK island II where you can practice many useful skills as group work.

The MUVEnation course that started some weeks ago is what I wish to work on in my free hours these weeks. I am currently brushing up my skills in Second Life. It is very strange to come back after about half a year or more almost inactive, and now again struggling with basic skills, such as building a simple object that consists of two prims, and to place it on a shared whiteeboard for the mentors - those who are accepted in the group 3 for advanced participants.

After a painful failure in a session this Sunday, where I was supposed to perform such building skills in presence of two of the course leaders who really did their best to help me out, but in vain, I felt more confused than comfortable, and decided to brush up this knowledge. I also felt an urge to practise my obviously poor camera control navigation skills.

After a building class 101, and some hours of hard work on my own land, I was able to teleport back to the MUVEnation island and proudly, in solitude, place my little frame with an image of myself, and an edited script that tells when I am noline, or away, which was the easy part of the exercise. I felt so good about having at last aquired a result that I arranged a photo opportunity, with myself floating in the air in front to the board, besides my portrait, on a red chair. Also, I was carrying a poster on a stick with the same frame, to demonstrate my extra effort on fluency in joining more objects. Just for the picture; the extra poster was taken away, and the chair that I forgot to bring with me back home, was automatically returned from the parcel owner.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3063/3041706345_5f7af36149.jpg