VECoP

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

Hi everyone!

I am Christina aka Tina.

In my “first life” I have a background in translation studies, communities of practice and editing. My (research) interests are primarily in the areas of eLearning, intercultural communication, knowledge sharing processes, diversity, advertising and lifestyle. I have been self-employed since 2000 and work with a number of profit and non-profit organisations. My mission is to create learning environments across cultural, language and geographic boundaries. I am convinced that communication processes within and across organisations as well as within and across first and second lifes encourage individuals to reflect on their shared interests and trigger knowledge sharing and innovation processes.

My “second life” is very young – I logged on as Tina T. for the first time three weeks ago. At first, it was a culture shock but it was good and comforting to find friends “in-world” that I knew from a different context, i.e., CP2. What struck me was the similarity of their avatars with their real life appearance as well as the specific lingo they used – for example, “k” for “OK” and other such “strange” abbreviations.

I’m here because I want to learn more about virtual worlds and the possibilities they offer for online collaboration. What worries me a little is the time factor. You should know that I’m more into mountain hiking, skating, dancing and cocktail-drinking in real life than online…

Labels: introduction

Introduction - Andy Roberts - DARnet

I had my first 3d avatar made for me in year 2000, using a photo booth camera which took a full length portrait from 3 sides and then converted the images into a 3d digital model. The claim was this would soon be used all the time to represent myself everywhere on the internet. The result was recognisable, just, though a little creepy in appearance. The idea was way ahead of its time though, because there weren't any virtual worlds or games it could be used with at the time.

AT about the same era my internet activity consited of email, pure text newsgroups and cheesy homepages. So not a great deal has changed since then! That's not true, now we can add flickr photos and youTubes to our text based blogs and wikis.

I'll be trying to keep up with the group excursions into Secondlife, other virtual worlds and the various experiments which are being planned, and I'll write up some reflections here. The last one was published on my own blog - How I would like to use SecondLife


For more about me, please see my LinkedIn profile

Labels: andyroberts, introduction, vecop

Sus Nyrop - my intro






*Sus 1955 *Sus 1960* Sus 2001*Sus 2003 *Sus 2005 *SusNy 2007

As 2007 is said to be the year of the ME, I'd better follow up with my current intro version.
Sus Nyrop in Farum, Denmark, SusNy Foss in SL since October 06 where I joined just before the first million inhabitants: by now I think more than 3.5 million have opened accounts.
I'm currently involved in several web 2.0 teacher training projects in Denmark. I'm a free agent and independent researcher with a cyber anthropologist focus on teachers' virtual community practices, using social tools and strategies for their lifelong self directed professional development For a living, I'm doing occasional service as a state appointed external examiner (in Danish language and pedagogy) - for social pedagog colleges all over Denmark. This used to be my professional field, until I decided for a major change in my career. In 1993 I took an intensive beginner class of computer science, very traditional and outdated, but a solid foundation. I fell in love with my Macintosh computer, and did my bachelor in communication and multimedia at the Danish University of Education, Copenhagen in 1995. Since then I've been working slowly towards a masters (candidate) in general education, with a focus on edtech and online learning community processes. . Since 2001, I got together with Webheads, in 2002 I joined the Electronic Village Online and in 2003 I joined CPsquare, the community of communities of practice. I'm currently enjoying being a senior mentor in the traditional Foundations of CoP workshop - where Nick Noakes will be one of our virtual guests in a few weeks. I've found out that so many different paths lead me towards SL as I meet more people in world that I already knew from other contexts.

In my off line private life, I enjoy being a granny, and a loving partner with Bernt, a retired school librarian and sportsman. We share an interest in gardening, film, literature, art and music, and we have travelled in Europe and China.



secondlifedk.blogspot.com - a co-blog with four Danish colleagues (in Danish)

www.xanga.com/susnyrop (my first blog from 2002 onwards that I still keep for nostalgic reasons)
worldofwebheads.blogspot.com (a more recent blog - I need to update or abandon it one of these days)
teachingculture.wikispaces.com ( my portfolio wiki that I used for an international EU funded diploma course in teaching intercultural, 2006)

The Nordic Voice project (2005-06) was a community oriented experiment, targeting Nordic language educators with a special interest in voide enabled digital and online learning. I was a cordinator and facilitator in this context. We hosted asuccesful all online conference, and invited guest speakers, posted a newsletter, and found new collaboration partners in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. We were funded by the Nordic Council. ns05.wikispaces.com/

Labels: introduction, vecop

Labels: introduction

Introduction

I am Shirley Williams (aka Rosie Luna). I am a lecturer at the University of Reading, UK. I am in charge of the group teaching in the area of Information Systems, but my own teaching is primarily in Programming. Both Karsten and Rob in the past were members of my programming classes; I hesitate to say I taught them to program, as they are both much better programmers than me!

My research interests are primarily in the areas of knowledge transfer, communities and eLearning. I am involved in a number of projects, some funded and some not. The interest in Multi User Virtual Environments and Educational Communities is currently unfunded, my aim is to get some funding so we can do more work in the area.

PS I tried to post this from IE7; and the text failed to appear.

Labels: introduction

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

First off I'd like to encourage you all to use labels (tags) when you post here. I've registered the blog at technorati, so if we make good use of labels, then that can become a powerful tool for us later.

On a personal note. I'm a Research Assistant at University of Reading in Computer Science, where I also do my PhD. on the side. I've got many interests in CS, I especially look at knowledge representation (ontology) and what can be done with automation of semantics. At the moment I do this in the domains of eLearning and competency description, which also is somewhat connected to eLearning and lifelong learning.

MUVE's is a bit of a "pet" interest, and I can see many areas which could benefit from use of knowledge representation and semantic automation tools, especially in learning situations, however that is probably further down the road, because at the moment there are definitely many other areas that need attention before these kind of tools become neccesary...

Labels: introduction, ontology

Me?

I'm Rob Ashton.

I graduated last year from the University of Reading and I'm currently working for a design automation company in the north of England.

While I have left university officially, I never really left in spirit, still staying involved in a number of university projects.


That's me after skiiing in Austria last year. I'm the smarty-man in Second Life - I don't think he needs another picture.

I'm really interested in the use of virtual worlds to assist in the learning process, and while Second Life may not be the most appropriate place for this, it seems to serve as a useful testing ground for researching the potential pitfalls and benefits of this kind of teaching.

I guess that explains why I'm here - I hope to be of some help during this project :)

Labels: introduction