WE/ME in epedagogy design

Owen says “hello”.

He adds: I am running a course on Learning and Second Life for anyone interested in doing it as part of their epedagogy masters. The course will be worth 5 credits.

The course will be entirely online, and will involve chats in Skype; inworld explorations in Second Life (and hopefully Active Worlds by way of comparison); and course timetables, project plans, documentation and discussion on Airset.

The course starts on Tuesday February 5 at 20.30 Helsinki time, with an introductory Skype session. So you know what you will be getting into, I have published the current version of the course description on Zoho, and you can read it here.

If you want to enroll then please email me at owen@owenkelly.net. If you know someone who might want to enroll then please tell them.

Now that the project I was involved in has finished I have (as promised) written it up as my final essay for Jaap’s VLE course. There are in fact two interlinked essays. One describes the events of Semano Semano, and the other describes the pedagogical approaches we adopted to achieve what we did.

The first is here: http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/15/semano-semano/
The second is here: http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/05/25/second-life-a-component-in-a-vle/

Together they form my assignment.

A third bonus essay will follow in time tying our approaches into current pedagogical theory in a more technical way. 

I would be VERY happy if some people would be able to find the time to read them and post comments. I am genuinely excited about what we are doing, and I want to find time to talk to people about it while we are all together in Helsinki.

Have a good weekend!

This is only indirectly related to the epedagogy course in some ways, and it is directly relevant in others.

Last week, as part of the Eurovision Song Contest festivities, Arcada ran a huge mobile tv project and we ran a parallel festival in Rosario in Second Life. We ran ten one-hour long events - one every four hours from 13.00 on Friday to 01.00 on Sunday. Over 700 people attended (which is a lot in SL terms).

I am slowly writing this all up on my site, and it will all be ready within a week - not least because some of it will be my report for Jaap on virtual learning environments.

In the meanwhile you should know that Rosario was banned from the contest - AGAIN - on the spurious grounds that it was “not a real country”. Undeterred we went ahead and found a candidate and recorded the entry. Then we made a video.

The candidate was L’angelot and his MySpace profile is here: http://www.myspace.com/l39angelot

You can also see the official video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18BzfsbVCJA

Final note:

Next week Second Life is due to be upgraded to include full voice chat. Avatars will be able to speak to each other and voice will be distance-based (that is, you will get quieter as you walk away from someone until they cannot hear you). This has profound implications for what we can use it for ourselves. For one thing it allows cross-platform group voice chats for up to 40 people at once. We should add this to the list of things to discuss live in Helsinki

Maintenance in the “second world” interrupt or VLE-date last Wednesday. So we try again 7.3. 20:00 CET

On Wednesday 31 January 2007 20.00 CET the meeting will be in Second Life. A very good and detailed instruction how to join and where we meet you can find here some entries before (VLE Meeting in Rosario).
Hopefully your avatars are looking nice and everybody join this meeting.

At the end of last year the Virtual Learning Environment agreed to have their next meeting in Marinetta, the capital village of Rosario in Second Life.

This is NOT intended to be a session about Second Life, but arose from a Skype discussion in which Jaap said that he found there was not enough information for him to contextualise input unless there was some visual aspect to the input. It seemed interesting to see whether the SL avatars would more or less useful information than the jerky images we get via video conferencing.

To attend the session you will need a computer capable of running Second Life; a Second Life account (which is now completely free); the client downloaded on your computer; some time playing inside SL; the coordinates of Rosario.

This is how you can get these:

1. Most computers that are less than 2 years old will run SL, including laptops with reasonable graphics cards.

2. You get a Second Life account from the SL website at www.secondlife.com and specifically from https://secure-web7.secondlife.com/join/  You have to choose from a list of available last names but the first name can be anything you want. You then get to choose a basic avatar. Once you are in the world you can customise this as much as you want - it is just a convenient starting point.

3. The joining sequence will finish by offering you the chance to download the software you need (Mac, Windows or Linux). Then you install it like any other software. (On Windows this will mean that you need administrator rights to your computer. If you haven’t then your IT department is living in the eighties.

4. Before you go into SL download a free Unofficial Users Guide in pdf format from here: http://www.sldrama.com/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item7 The interface in SL is not the most intuitive in the world and this will be an invaluable help. Then go into SL and go through the induction procedure, which is a step by step 30 minute guide to moving around and using the controls.

5. Since the purpose of this is to convey visual information it will be useful to spend some time making your avatar appear like something that expresses something about you - or the character you are playing. (This difference - is my avatar me or is it a character in a game? - is a large debate for a session somewhere…)

6. Once you are hapy with the interface you can get to Rosario at any time by clicking on Map and then searching for Rosario. Make sure the map is showing at maximum or almost maximum scale and the island should almost fill the map. Click somewhere and choose teleport and you will arrive…

If anyone has any difficulties with any of these steps, please leave comments here and I will try to solve any problems. Please spend at least an hour or so in SL before the session because otherwise you will be stuck on Intro Island on your own for much of the session.

Cheers

Owen

When we were talking in Hamburg Wey asked me for the urls to some of the more interesting blogs about life in Second Life, and I promised to send some to him.

I am now happy to say that my blog/wiki thing is now almost working correctly: it has tags and tag clouds and rss feeds all over the place (including, at Ralf’s request, rss feeds for the tags). It also has a blog roll on almost every page, and there are seven SL blogs listed there, as well as some more general ones like Clickable Culture.

It seems sensible to tell everyone about it, rather than send some private emails; and then invite any comments, criticisms, suggestions concerning owenkelly.net

By the way, some of the individual entries need reformatting, and some of the links in individual entries may not work yet, because I ported them all over from WikkaWiki and the formatting and links need re-doing post by post, by hand. Since this only needs doing once then I *will* get round to it, but I haven’t had time yet.

:)

Owen arrived already tonight and Alex and me picked him up at the airport and had already very interesting discussions concerning several eped-related topics.
Later that evening we met Christina and Owen introduced secondlife to us.
All eped-students and others as well all over the world are invited to follow the international seminar starting tomorrow (officially) by contributing and reading this blog. We will try to post contents regularly.
Everybody tagging digital bits about this seminar is asked to tag it with epedagogyhh2006 and epedagogy.
Lets have a great time!