TSL Research :: Blog

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,

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/benefits-of-a-vl

There has been an interesting exchange of ideas today, on one of the JISC email lists - re. the benefits of a VLE. I particularly agree with Dave Foord’s post ( Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:37:09 -0000 ) - that good use of the communication tools is what really makes it a learning opportunity - and not just a (rather expensive) document dump. VLE Archives - November 2008

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/social-conferenc

Alt C used Crowdvine to get some social networking going during the conference - it was Ok, though I have seen better Social networks (mind you, I’d far rather Crowdvine than Ning!) I’ve just seen the website for Handheld Learning - which seems to be a very useful site - as it’s got some social tools (fora etc) but also the presentations / photos/ videos all on the same site. Useful info too!

Via Stephen Downes.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/the-auricle-%e2%

The Auricle › eBooks and the e-learning ‘filling station’ revisited Worth reading, but probably easier if printed out.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/visualising-soci

Malinka Ivanova has a list of a number of tools to visualise links in social networking. I see she’s also got a cloud tag powered by Quintura - a search engine that’s interested me for some time.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/edmodo/

I’ve recently started using Twitter more and more; I still find it a little difficult - though I suspect that learning to write in 140 characters is actually quite good for me … and I suppose I ought to lrn to txt wrt.

Several people have pointed out Edmodo recently, I’ve had a bit of a play, though not quite sure how to get friends in it. I think I’ll stick to Twitter for the time being, though I could see uses for Edmodo.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/create-an-animat

Seems a useful tool … xtranormal. I’m sure I can think of a few ideas for it.

From Jane

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/11/twistory-turning

SArah Robbins points out Twistory - (note the correct URL - http://www.twistory.net ) It seems a rather useful tool.

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/10/grading-student-

I tend to query how much we should grade student blogging, or demonstrate a tool that they can use for note taking - in a way that can be more flexible (& searchable!) than a paper note book. However, it’s inevitable that staff will want to grade (that’s one of my reasons for liking Elgg - it’s very easy for students to make only a subset of their posts visible to the grader.

If you’re going to grade them, I like Konrad Glogowski’s grid to encourage students to self grade, and Ryan Bretag has a grading grid for staff.

Via: Free Technology for Teachers

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/2008/10/eats-shoots-leav

Based on Lynne Truss’ book, this Flash game looks useful. You do have to be quite accurate with where you drop the punctuation mark - so not ideal if you’re a little shaky with the mouse.

Via: Free Technology for Teachers