Sunday morning i was on that wonderful island of EduNation (22, 118, 29) in Second Life. I met a few people who were assembling for a conference. A big chance though to see a real conference at work and I was eager to get into this nicely build conference room.
Around 15 people attended to the conference with B... as speaker. He loaded a powerpoint into a machine and told us about his plan to build an island within the Teen Grid of Second Life where foreign kids could learn English. It became a nice presentation with good clear slides. After the presentation a discussion was started about this topic.
However i liked the idea of B, I was more interested in how such a virtual presentation would work and develop. Especially the discussion needed some attention. It wasn't specifically clear who was talking
and one of the members proposed that B would become a faciltator. We had to do the command /hey to raise our arms so that B could see who wanted to say something. That helped to structure the discussion. It is clear that this aspect needs a good procedure.
I missed the sound. I didn't find out how it worked, I heard people talk about skype, but also another voip system was used. I have to find out how that works. Sound would help a lot in the chaos of the discussion i guess.
It was very enjoying and promising to see such a conference. Videoconferencing tools are mostly quiet boring and static, while this was lifely. You had the impression that you really were together in one room. Nice is also that you can zoom through the room and look to yourself and the room from different angles.
I realise that if they would have made the decission to do a normal videoconferencing i would have missed out. i wouldn't have been invited in the first place! I happened to be in Edunation at the right time and place and just was invited spontaneously.
Greatest value for me however was that i met three people from the UK. I was able to add them to my network of educators interested in Second Life.
Keywords: Conference, EduNation, Second Life, SL
Comments
Hi
My name is Syusan Kozicki and am an educator from the UK (2ND life name Susan Williams) I attended the same conference as Johann and found it relly interesting and a very valuable experience. Although I am interested in the idea of using 2nd life teen island for teenagers to learn English I have some concerns over the security issues, which I think would need to be addressed fully if this was to work. Like Johann I am much more interested inusing 2nd life as a tool for continuous professional development woth other educators perhaps for virtual conferences.
I need to get a lot more experience however and find out exactly how th presentations are run.
I attended another meeting today and finally found how the sound system (ventrillo) works, but have not as yet discivered how to use the transcrips properly
Next week perhaps
Hi Johan and Susan,
we both met today in the Webheads hut where we had a dancing lesson and swapped clothes, as well as having a more professional stringent conversation, broken up now and then by lag (delay) in the system, in which cases I have to logoff and come back.
You know what, one thing that I have realized myself is that I'm so much in learning mode in here, coming to an understanding of what I'm better at and what need more practise, or not picking up. This is an incredible opportunity for us mature people to ddiscover such things about ourselves and about others, for example, hodo you follow a biref instruction,and can you find alternative strategties when things don't work how you want them to do? As I said in our conversation, before you would know how to teach something in SL (such as language, geometry, architecture, music or dance - you must find out how to learn these skills...
yours, SusNy
Hi Johan,
It was good to meet you last night at EduNation. I'm Vance, coordinator of Webheads, and Webhead Link in SL. I connect to SL from a laptop with limited memory and performance degrades through my sessions to the point where things basically work at warp slow speed. So when you asked how you could join Webheads, I was unable to respond. Having now found your blog, I would like to invite you to join us (myself, Susanne Nyrop, and others) at Webheads in Action:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/
Looking forward to renewing the acquaintance
Vance aka Webhead Link
Thanks for your post on my blog. I have still only visited SL twice as it is quite a lot of new stuff to learn and I have limited access to the computers which can run it. But I will continue to investigate it as I think it may well be that virtual worlds such as this turn into the normal Internet experience of the future. Therefore your fears that our students will resent us for invading their play space surely cannot last. Has anyone expressed this feeling as far as you know?