VECoP

Nick Noakes Corwin Carillon

I work as a faculty/educational developer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where I'm Director of the Center for Enhanced Learning and Teaching or CELT for short!

I have been working with a couple of educational non-profits, Educause and the New Media Consortium, in my out-of-work time for the past 4 years. I played around with graphical virtual worlds, Active Worlds, in 1995/96 when it first came out but it was so laggy and resource intensive that my PC couldn't really cope with it. Last June I was brought into Second Life by NMC colleagues and am the co-founder/facilitator, with the NMC's Alan Levine, of an in-world group (emerging CoP) called Teachers Buzz that meets fortnightly. For more on this see the NMC Campus blog and the NMC Campus wiki.

My passion is transformational change with teachers, learners and organizations, which has taken me from online learning to online facilitation to communities of practice to appreciative inquiry and back again.

I've stayed in Second Life, despite it's myriad issues, because of these interests and because these environments/platforms seem to engage people and their identities in new learning trajectories (see Etienne Wenger's Learning for a small planet).

Labels: introduction, nmccampus, secondlife, vecop