VECoP

Game 2

I'm not sure what happened to Baba ... lost in the ether?

Anyway, are you all up for another group game/collaborative task?

From Borcay to Las Vegas

This afternoon I met up with an informal panel discussion at the IA Summit in Las Vegas. I dropped in from Boston into Second Life. Met them at the IA Office on Information Island and then teleported over to Borcay to show another place. I ran into Sus. This was a cheap way to do remote mixed reality panel. Had some issues, of course, with the audio/video fading ....

Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007

Virtual worlds, real learning?

Thursday 10th May 2007
Congress Centre, London

for more details of this free event see: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/

Labels: game-based learning, Second Life, SL

Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?

RU Sirius, who is a colleague at PajamaNation interviews Virtual Reality developer Jaron Lanier who was generally accepted as the public face of VR during the heady period that lasted from about 1989-91:

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/09/whatever-happened-to-virtual-reality/

Second Life is a timid sampling of what was then envisioned.

There were dozens of conferences about VR and lots of national media coverage in every major outlet. There were movies and TV shows that revolved around VR and there was even one arcade game. But VR quickly disappeared from public consciousness.

In VR, at some point, you would be able to be inside this place with other people where you were making it up as you went along. What people really wanted was a kind of intimacy where you’re making up a dream together with other people. You’re all experiencing it. I was calling it post-symbolic communication. The basic idea is that people thought that with VR they would be able to experience a kind of intense contact with imagination, some sort of fusion of the kind of extremes of aesthetics and emotional experience you might have when you open up the constraints of reality.

All in all it's an interesting and wide ranging interview which I would recommend.

Two Shirley's

While I was in Singapore I met another Shirley Williams., she is the Director of Teaching and Learning at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. She is investigating how they can incorporate use of MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) into their teaching. Which leaves me the opportunity of meeting a second me in Second Life.
I have invited her to join us here - so be prepared for double doses of Shirley.

Campfire talk.

I quite enjoyed the session around the campfire on Boracay Island last Friday. It took a while to settle down with the inevitable problems of movement, some people finding it hard just to sit down, others including myself needing to quit the program and reload. It took maybe half an hour at least before we could properly relax and converse, but in the end I do feel that it is just about possible that the simulation does really work. It generates an atmospheric stimulus which might get people into the mood, and then exchange more open and speculative ideas. You can do that in a purely text chat as well, if you keep at it for long enough, but the visual and simulated kinesthetic cues from the 3d world perhaps accelerate or at least change the process.



If this is true, then the advantages of using Secondlife for business meetings or education sessions might be that the time wasted in beating about the bush and worrying about appearances and protocol may be reduced, and a deeper level of learning and interaction achieved more quickly. Compared with other forms of distributed multi-way media channels, that is.

Margarita Pérez-García / Paz Lorenz introduction





Hi everybody, in RL, i am Margarita Pérez-García, a researcher in education science, working with MENON Network in Brussels, Belgium and SCIENTER in Bologna, Italy. I have bee working in the field of education for 15 years in all levels from primary through secondary to higher education. I am currently coordinating several projects on digital identity and reputation, user-centric implementation of Europass ePortfolio, online job search user behaviour, social directories, social sectoral libraries, social technologies in education and ePortfolios. I also work in the field of learning difficulties, in particular school performance and early school leaving. I promote the use of open source technologies and i am an activist in the field of citizens' digital rights and gender equality. My current research interests are focussed on the gap between epistemological conceptions and pedagogical practices and design of educational artifacts in massive multi-user virtual environments.

in SL, i am Paz Lorenz, educator, technoprogressive and hypernomade. Free spirit, free-thinker, free will, wild and rebel. Feminist, believe in and fight for gender equality in-world. Concerned by freedom and rights of our digital personas. Dream of an interoperable and open source grid. Wish to break barriers against inclusiveness and help disadvantaged people to access learning thanks to SL.

Labels: Feminism, Inclusiveness, introduction, Learning difficulties, Paz Lorenz, Second Life

Just a quick introduction ... I am an e-Learning manager at King's College London and a Fellow of the Centre for Distance Education at the University of London where I chair the research strategy group. I am currently working on a number of projects that include: a study of social software in distance education settings; developing a virtual library space (bibliospace) using social referencing software; and as part of the EMERGE project team supporting a UK wide community of practice in user innovation and development in the area of Web 2.0 and emerging technologies. My research interests are focussed on questions of identity in online learning, the dimensions of space and time in multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life, social presence, social networking and the changing notion of community.

Steven
StevenW Bohm

Labels: introduction, secondlife, stevenw