virtual playspaces

http://www.zoomlab.org/

According to the website above (last accessed today): "Zoom Lab = kids creating + kids connecting" or otherwise communicated "creating virtual playspaces while connecting with other cultures". This is a US initiated project expresses interest creating opportunities for cultural connections between US children and children from other nations.

You can read more about this here http://www.zoomlab.org/what.htm and if you work out what the symbol on Australia is referring to (or if you contact Josephine Dorado to ask) then you might let me know because it sounds like a great opportunity.

young aussie web presence on youtube

I am delighted to say that I've found some things on youtube that have been produced locally. All I can say is that there needs to be a lot more and it shouldn't only be within the context of a "media class". I sincerely hope more young people and educators produce more and more multimedia on the web so that there is an accurate representation for the rest of the world of the diversity that exists.

more on virtual classrooms

For some reason, many law schools have jumped the opportunity to create virtual learning spaces (or maybe funding has been strategically devoted to law schools). Either way there is some amazing stuff going on and I would recommend to anyone in education that you have a look at what it's all about. Although I'm not convinced that this is as good as it gets or that the concepts employed in these environments have fully taken advantage of blended learning, I understand that it's a start and a very good one. Maybe we're easing ourselves into it... I'm not quite sure yet.

Anyway, take a look at the State of Play Academy of the New York Law School:
http://stateofplayacademy.com/

Here is their description (accessed today from the above website):
"The State of Play Academy is the first law and technology academy built in a virtual world. Its purpose is to challenge the traditional means of imparting a legal education—in time, place and manner-- by experimenting with opportunities offered by the virtual space. It is funded by a grant awarded to New York Law School by There.com"

Of course, you have to download the software from there.com but that's not too bad considering it's free.

Similarly, I've already considered at length what's going on with Harvard Law School with the CyberOne project. Amongst all the marking and my attempts to reconnect with my thesis I've actually tried to keep up with some of the things they're doing. It's good stuff and if nothing else they have some good readings (also a reminder for me that I miss the New York Times). In case you haven't been there yet:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/

11 year olds singing

another elearning reference and accessing everyday information

eLearn Magazine: Education and Technology in Perspective
http://elearnmag.org/

I thought some of you might like to read some more about elearning and there are some pretty good articles there. A colleague of mine emailed me an article from there and I decided to visit the site. It's decent.

On a very different note, I looked up the weather today as I do most days when I wake up and I refer to one or both of these sites usually:
http://www.bom.gov.au/ (the government site for the bureau of meteorology)
http://www.weatherchannel.com.au/ (these guys get their info from bom.gov.au anyway)


The Weather Channel said:
Sunday
Areas of rain at first with strong gusty north to northwest wind, locally reaching gale force. A colder, squally west to southwesterly change by the afternoon. Scattered showers with local hail and thunder to follow then snowfalls developing down to 600m later in the day and evening.

I looked out the window and it was sunny, birds were chirping and it felt like it was really warm. Now in Melbourne, for those of you who don't know, this is quite a common experience and we all know to anticipate any kind of change within a matter of minutes. Anyway, so I went to the bureau's website to look at some maps. Look at this one:


I knew what was coming. Now I'm not saying all of this because there's anything special about what I was doing or necessarily about the weather (although that weather patch is kind of cool). I'm saying it because it got me thinking about all the texts and discourses I needed to have access to in order to work through all of this information. I wonder how many of our students in schools have access to these discourses and can interpret these texts in multiple ways. I wonder how this set of short but complex actions relates to all of the work we have been looking at this semester in our subject.

online word-processing

I'm not sure if anyone is really aware of this but google has launched an online word-processor which at this point is still in its beta phases, however, from playing around with it I think it can do the basics quite reliably. It also had the added benefit of collaboration, which as you can imagine is much easier done online. It is also capable of exporting/importing a wide range of file formats (very beneficial if you want to save stuff as pdf's for example). Anyway, I anticipate this will take off in a big way really soon:
http://www.writely.com/

If you have a google account you can use the beta right away.

metaphors of the mind

For all of you who thought the whole metaphors thing was bullshit, I suggest you take a look at someone's thesis project from the Annennberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California that's about metaphors for the human mind in 18th century literature:
http://mind-metaphor.stanford.edu/

cyberschools

This is very much a product of US media, however, it's interesting that the whole school has gone digital:
http://blip.tv/file/1864

Some really interesting boundaries issues (i.e. swimming in the pool vs. swimming in the ocean), suveilance issues (i.e. everything can be seen by the principal and all records kept on servers) but also some interesting responses by the students themselves.

If the school has enrolled in a recycling program for their computer products this is clearly a more sustainable practice as far as "paperless and bookless" goes.

continuing thoughts on virtual worlds and education

I made it my goal today to create three assessment rubrics and although it took a ridiculous amount of time I actually managed. Being ahead of myself is a good thing because it allows me to pretend like I have permission to do things other than addressing the massive pile of other things not listed in this morning's to-do list that still need to get done. That being said, I move on to the topic of this post: virtual worlds. I've been thinking a lot more about 'the virtual' because the pace at which things are changing and the extent to which the virtual is being introduced in educational contexts is moving at an increasing pace. I feel like I'm behind and all of this is my attempt to catch up, so to speak.

Anyway, here are some more things I've discovered that have been adding to my thoughts:


Read here what Whyville.net has to say to teachers: http://b.whyville.net/smmk/top/whyville_for_teachers

They make some great points and I would be telling a lie if I said I'm not curious of the potential for this as a learning tool in the classroom. If anyone has used it or knows more about it than the promotional stuff then by all means, do tell. This statement from the above link (accessed 20th Sept. 2006) suggests possibilities: "We launched Whyville as a virtual city, which engages young people in constructive educational activities while promoting socially responsible behavior. It is an outgrowth of the company's extensive research and practical experience related to learner-centered, hands-on, inquiry-based education".

Obviously, if this is designed to deal with "art history, science, journalism, civics, economics, and really so, so much more" from a US perspective then it does much less for students in an Australian context (unless of course they are analysing the whole thing as a "text" from a critical perspective). Our own version is this and it is conceptually quite different:

Kahootz is claimed to be more of a set of 3D multimedia tools. Quite different indeed.

Moving on, as I work through my thoughts on using "the virtual" for educational purposes, here are the sources I'm consulting:

I begin by referring you to this Second Life Education Wiki.
I'm in the midst of working through it as I think about the above. What is the place of all of this within what we do?

www.seriousgamessummit.com is going to be happening in Washington, DC, on Oct 30-31 2006 which should be quite interesting indeed. A few highlights for me are the participation of Blackboard Inc. (maybe an LMS system with virtual worlds isn't too far away after all), Duke University, Rice University and Teachers College, Columbia University (which I almost enrolled in to get my masters a while back). Amongst the list are also Price Waterhouse Coopers, Shell Global Solutions and you get the idea. Games, as the title of this summit suggests are serious (business?). I was excited to hear that Henry Jenkins is giving the keynote (even though I'm sad I won't be there to hear it). His keynote will be based on his new book which is about how all of this stuff is a meeting point for certain groups and their interests which have never met (collaborated) before.

Here's something else you can read about the summit and Linden Labs: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060320/carless_01.shtml

For those of you that are reading this that happen to be my students from the Wednesday and Friday Curriculum and Assessment workshops dealing with the concept of space, consider this quite closely:

'The popular online gaming magazine Gamasutra has an article on a keynote for the Serious Games Summit, which deals with game development in the areas of education, government, health, military, science, and corporate training. In it, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in a talk named 'You Can (Not) Be Serious' offered some fascinating opinions, both on the future of virtual worlds and the way in which his own company's efforts are helping to stretch boundaries. Interesting comment on the value of VR as interface to information: "if you were trying to recall the latest three files accessed in your 'My Documents' directory, you probably can't remember them, but you can remember a list of the items in your kitchen, most likely. This is because you've been building a space in your mind three dimensionally, and storing information in it"'. (http://futuretag.net/index.php/Slgp1, Accessed 20th September 2006)

If you're thinking about making money from all this then you might want to read the Wired article from way back in early February 2006 called "Making a Living in Second Life": http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70153-0.html

Ali Andrews Virtual Environments for Online Education... blog:
http://aliandrews.blogspot.com/

If you're actually a user of secondlife then you might consider the following "Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life":
http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Top_20_Educational_Locations_in_Second_Life

inconceivably rapid changes

Exploratory Learning Through Educational Simulation & Games at San Diego State University
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC670/

CyberOne: Harvard's first course being offered in a virtual world and open to the public
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/videos/CyberOne.mp4

METTLE 2006 Forum and Showcase: e-Learning and the Student of the Future at the University of Melbourne:
http://mettleweb.unimelb.edu.au/mettle/2006/Mettle268kbs.mov

edublogs and more

Some things I ran into doing some online searching:

http://edu.blogs.com/

Apparently there is a class called KLA's and Literacies at the University of Western Sydney and I'm guessing Abbie is a student in that class:
http://abbiepollock.blogspot.com/
Perhaps the following are doing something similar:
http://rennibee.blogspot.com/
http://wwwquestaconcomau.blogspot.com/

It's worth taking a look at TE 302, a class at Michigan State University called Learners and Learning in Context:
http://freidhof.fts.educ.msu.edu/TE_302/TE_302_Index.htm

i-Anya has some pretty interesting things to say:
http://anya.blogsome.com/

kylieann seems to be studying early childhood and with her own children working through some of the ideas she is encountering... If she continues to post here, some of what goes up might be quite interesting
http://kylieann.blogs.com/