Shirley Williams :: Blog
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2872.html Next week it is Online Educa in Berlin.
On Thursday 14.00 to 16.00 I am chairing a session called: "MUVEs for the 21st Century" in Schinkel I/II. Our brief description of the event is:
Multi User Virtual Worlds (MUVEs) provide new avenues for teaching and learning. This expert session brings together practitioners engaged in educational research into MUVEs to discuss how to get the most out of MUVEs. Audience participation will be encouraged throughout and interactions will be supported using Twitter, a lightweight social tool and live blogging.
The speakers will be: - Steven Warburton, King's College London, UK
- Margarita Pérez-García, MENON Network, Belgium
- Graham Hibbert, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
- Laura Fedeli, University of Macerata, Italy
If you are at Online Educa do come and join us.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2870.html I'm currently attempting to read We-Think by Charles Leadbetter, and Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain. I'm tempted to give up on the former as I am finding nothing new in what he says. I'm enjoying the latter, but it is a thick book and it takes time to digest. So I have read a couple of works of friction in the meantme. "House at Riverton" by Kate Moreton, I bought this at the Oxfam bookshop, having read another Moreton book earlier in the year. The story is told from the perspective of an elderly lady who had worked as a maid at the house in the title. A good plot and well written. "Hand in Glove" by Robert Goddard, this is that last of the Goddard books lent to me by Terry. It did not disappoint. Although I had read several Goddard books I could not predict what the outcome of this mystery would be. He writes well and the plot twists and turns. Without giving away too much of the plot there is part of the plot which involves Spanish refugees who crossed the boarder into France, and the part of France they went to I visited in the summer and had read some accounts on the memorials there.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2869.html At lunch time I went to a session organised for School e-Learning Coordinators (one of the many roles I have). Three colleagues talked about how and why they use technology in their teaching, what are the benefits and drawbacks. The first speaker was Brian O'Callaghan who talked about using Wikis for in the teaching of Art History. His PowerPoint slides were accompanied by suitable photos of art work, his use of wikis was imaginative and his students had obviously enjoyed the experience. He made an interesting throw away remark, that his students weren't using the Blackboard Discussion Boards but had shown him they were discussing on Facebook. The second was: Marcus Rattray, who talked about some work he used at Kings College London. Essentially someone had developed a set of web pages that could be used for teaching a specific subject. From my point of view I felt that there was little in the approach that could be readily transferred and I was quite worried that it used embedded Excel spreadsheets which didn't work on the machine he was demoing on. Finally Adam Squires talked about two aspects of his work: using Flash animations, and assessments in Blackboard. He had some really good animations, that his students were able to experiment with to better understand the science. His strategy for Blackboard assessments was straight forward but had a pattern that worked well for a practical subject: pre-experiment formative quiz, experiment, post-experiment summative quiz. There were quite a few interesting questions. After the session I was complaining to a couple of the learning support people about the new Blackboard Grade Centre, and one of the other attendees said she had thought it was just her who had problems.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2867.html I organised a trip into Second Life for people from Muvenation Group 2. It was the first time I was organising an event without a helper. We were scheduled to meet at 5.00 pm GMT, and there was quite a crowd, but some of them were Group 3 people early for their meeting. There was quite a lot of chit chat and it was quite difficult to grab everyone's attention, maye I should have tried shouting. After a while it was agreed the Group 2 people would like to know more about maps and finding places. So we played a game of finding a location and all teleporting there. We did a couple of backwards and forward trips between Emerge and Muvenation Islands. I suggested Group members should set Muvenation to their Home location, but apparently they couldn't, I didn't understand why they couldn't, and will need to investigate. I then set them to finding Boracay and we all managed to get there and from the Meeting area we were able to teleport to the Boat House, and from there we went swimming, fortunately no one was eaten by a shark.  I had a really great time, but I was exhausted at the end.
https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2860.html When trying to fix online meetings with people around the world it can be quite difficult to find times that suit everyone. Doodle is a great utility for getting people to agree times for meetings and it has introduced a time zone option, although it is a bit clunky. If on the other hand you have decided to run a session at a particular time then I really like www.timeanddate.com, which has lots of utilities including one where you can fix a time and then send a link to all other attendees to allow them to find the time in their time zone. So the other day I set a meeting and sent this message to other people: We will meet at 13.00 GMT Monday 24th November (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=24&year=2008&hour=13&min=0&sec=0&p1=0 for your time zone) And they all could check their own time zones. Things to watch with fixing meetings across time zones are: - Daylight saving time happens at different times in different places, and some places go forward when others go back, so it is always wise to use the date.
- If a meeting is happening on a Monday evening in Europe, it will be Tuesday in Australia, so be careful when saying see you Monday, otherwise some people may be 24 hours early.
- Try to avoid setting meetings at times that are in the middle of the night for some participants. Consider if it would be better to run the meeting twice, record it, or at least alter the times so everyone is equally inconvenienced.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2860.html When trying to fix online meetings with people around the world it can be quite difficult to find times that suit everyone. Doodle is a great utility for getting people to agree times for meetings and it has introduced a time zone option, although it is a bit clunky. If on the other hand you have decided to run a session at a particular time then I really like www.timeanddate.com, which has lots of utilities including one where you can fix a time and then send a link to all other attendees to allow them to find the time in their time zone. So the other day I set a meeting and sent this message to other people: We will meet at 13.00 GMT Monday 24th November (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=11&day=24&year=2008&hour=13&min=0&sec=0&p1=0 for your time zone) And they all could check their own time zones. Things to watch with fixing meetings across time zones are: - Daylight saving time happens at different times in different places, and some places go forward when others go back, so it is always wise to use the date.
- If a meeting is happening on a Monday evening in Europe, it will be Tuesday in Australia, so be careful when saying see you Monday, otherwise some people may be 24 hours early.
- Try to avoid setting meetings at times that are in the middle of the night for some participants. Consider if it would be better to run the meeting twice, record it, or at least alter the times so everyone is equally inconvenienced.
https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2858.html Today we organised an in-world session for Muvenation Group 2 (post-compulsory education), the timing wasn't ideal as it was 13.00 GMT and many teachers around Europe are involved in classes at that time. But the time was good for Nick Noakes (Corwin Carrilion) who is Hong Kong and Sus Nyrop (SusNy Foss) in Denmark. We initially met at Emerge/Muvenation Islands, and had planned to try out the Shopping activity, but the group that gathered decided that today we would rather explore. So with a bit of help we all teleported to Boracy (an island that was created by Corwin, and now owned by NMC http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boracay/128/128/47). We had a fun time and tried some of the facilities on the island including the winter sports, and the musical instruments in the treetops. 
We will have to go shopping another day.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2858.html Today we organised an in-world session for Muvenation Group 2 (post-compulsory education), the timing wasn't ideal as it was 13.00 GMT and many teachers around Europe are involved in classes at that time. But the time was good for Nick Noakes (Corwin Carrilion) who is Hong Kong and Sus Nyrop (SusNy Foss) in Denmark. We initially met at Emerge/Muvenation Islands, and had planned to try out the Shopping activity, but the group that gathered decided that today we would rather explore. So with a bit of help we all teleported to Boracy (an island that was created by Corwin, and now owned by NMC http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boracay/128/128/47). We had a fun time and tried some of the facilities on the island including the winter sports, and the musical instruments in the treetops. We will have to go shopping another day.
https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2854.html Today we had scheduled a session in Second Life with group 2 (Newbies in Post-compulsory education). Unfortunately Edwin who was due to run it was unwell, so Pat and I decided to stand in for him. The session was about the appearance of avatars. We started off with backing up your avatar. I was grateful for Pat and Luca's help, as the participants arrived at intervals. I had remembered that it was a good idea to type instructions into a text window, and cut n paste them into the SL chat, it made repeating them easy when the latecomers arrived. Once we all had back ups we played at making silly looking avatars. I'm waiting to see all the pictures.
http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2854.html Today we had scheduled a session in Second Life with group 2 (Newbies in Post-compulsory education). Unfortunately Edwin who was due to run it was unwell, so Pat and I decided to stand in for him. The session was about the appearance of avatars. We started off with backing up your avatar. I was grateful for Pat and Luca's help, as the participants arrived at intervals. I had remembered that it was a good idea to type instructions into a text window, and cut n paste them into the SL chat, it made repeating them easy when the latecomers arrived. Once we all had back ups we played at making silly looking avatars. I'm waiting to see all the pictures.
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