Arwenna Stardust’s Second Life Blog

Koru has been the busiest yet as the venue for Zotarah Shepherd’s fascinating build on Multiple Intelligences. Zotarah has been an active and long standing member of the Kiwi Educators group and although not a New Zealander has always been keen to help out. In return, we were happy to make some land available for her to place her ‘build’ so that it could be seen and graded by her Professor (she is in the final stages of her master’s degree). A big thank you to Isa Goodman who arranged for her to use some of his land (and prims!).

Beth Ritter-Guth was an early visitor and encouraged the members of the SL Education list-serve to visit and little did we appreciate the interest and traffic that Zotarah’s build would bring to the island (145 in just a few days, many staying half an hour or longer) and it has been wonderful to meet some of those visitors and to know that they are also enjoying the ambience of Koru - one visitor said to me ” if NZ is really like this I better put it on my holiday list!” Perhaps we should be asking for support from the NZ Tourist Board too!

I won’t try to tell you too much about the work underlying Zotarah’s build as Zotarah does that herself very well in the notecards that you receive when you visit and also through the interactivity of the exhibits. Let me just say that her work is an interactive explanation of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. She has build a number of ’stations’ to represent the different ‘intelligences’ and then provided relevant activities to illustrate them. The stations are :

The red circle represents Kinesthetic intelligence.
The orange circle represents Interpersonal/Social Intelligence
The yellow circle represents the Literary/Linguistic Intelligence.
The green circle represents the Naturalistic Intelligence.
The teal circle represents the Spatial/Artistic Intelligence.
The blue circle represents the Mathematical Logical Intelligence.
The purple circle represents the Musical Intelligence.
The white circle represents the Intrapersonal Intelligence.

Can I encourage you all to come and see Zotarah’s build - as I think it is going to be known!

Well what an exciting couple of days! I heard about 7.45am yesterday that our consortium’s application for funding from the NZ government’s Encouraging and Supporting Innovation fund had been successful! With around NZ$500,000, it will allow us to devote some real resource to exploring and developing education and education resources in Second Life.  The consortium is made up of Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, Otago Polytechnic, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Wellington Institute of Technology and IBM are giving us their support too.

Our current plans include a research report looking at the pedagogy of immersive environments, the identification and building of two learning activities designed to take best advantage of SL, the introduction of educators to Second Life and assistance for them to effectively teach there, the piloting and evaluation of the learning activities with students by these educators. Ambitious? You bet! It’s going to be a busy 18 months I think but hopefully we should learn a huge amount and be able to pass on a number of tips on what to do (and what not to do!).

Part of the project too is to extend and maintain a community of practice for NZ educators and both Koru and the Kiwi Educators group will be big players in that. Watch out for news of events happening soon.

One of the things that has puzzled me for sometime is how people with little knowledge of SL can contemplate bringing students into SL and doing anything useful with them.  I found that it took me some time to ‘learn the world’ before I felt I was ready to start coping with helping others!  I wrote about this (and other early impressions of Second Life) in an invited paper for the Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology (BACIT) last year.   So it always amazes me when someone posts a request for basic assistance on the SLED list,  for example how to open a box in SL, and yet believes that they will be able to function as a teacher in SL.  (I don’t mean that there is anything wrong with not knowing how to open a box or move an object around, we all have to learn these things, - only that you HAVE to know those things before you even think about teaching there!).

So when I came across the Second Life Core Competencies Framework being put together by Chris Eggplant over at EducationUK (RL Chris Swaine), I got quite excited and I have been using it as a an informal list of things that people need to know at different times.  The framework has three levels and is described in the document like this (for practitioner read educator, as that is the context):

  “Education in Second Life requires the acquisition of three sets of skills:

1. A set of core skills / competencies to become an effective SL resident.

1. To be an effective learner requires the resident core skills, plus a further set of skills / competencies which would enable the use of tools and functionality to support their learning within Second Life.

1. To become an effective practitioner requires both resident and learner core skills, plus a further set of skills to enable them to identify and setup tools, as well as using appropriate and pedagogically sound approaches to learning and teaching, which support the personalisation of learning. “
   

A group of interested educators who felt this was a worthwhile project have helped to create a list of the required skills which can be found here (I hope! You may need to register with the EducationUK site to access the pdf.)

I have found this to be a very useful list and I would love to hear what others think.  Unfortunately I can’t find any further work that has been done on this but I will keep looking.  It is a framework that I think we could usefully adopt in our BIG Second Life project that might happen next semester (if we are successful in getting our funding! more later!).

I became aware today of a conference being hosted by the University of Otago in June 2008 which I thought might be of interest to a number of people.  It is the International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking  (more details here) and in the call for papers they say this (among other things!)….

“An important new platform technology where all these developments come together and which has inspired many expert observers is that of the new virtual environments, such as Second Life and There, which enable people to meet and engage in virtual, three-dimensional social interactions. The future of SNS will certainly be played out on these platforms, and their scalability can only be tested presently on high speed networks.”

Unfortunately paper submission closes on March 9th and I don’t think I will have anything ready in time for that, but nevertheless I am going to try to attend, if only to network with another (mainly university I expect) community that is interested in virtual environments for education.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, for a conference in this area there doesn’t appear to be any intention to use Web2.o to broadcast the conference out beyond those who are physically attending! But maybe I’ve missed the information *grins*.

A number of people who attended the meeting have blogged about the experience and have photos and even a short screencast from Petal (aka Sarah Stewart).  It is good to see that it is inspiring others to think about how they could potentially use Second Life in their own areas too - and Koru Bracken (aka Merrolee Perriman) has suggested that perhaps people in her own area of  Occupational Therapy might think about its potential for them too.

Great stuff!!

During the last few months of 2007 I spent too much time beating myself up about the fact that I really should be blogging about Second Life in particular our experiences with the NMIT Island, Koru. Somehow real life constantly got in the way so with a new year comes the mandatory new year resolution and another new blog is born.

This one is specifically dedicated to Arwenna Stardust’s SL existence and is intended to both keep others abreast of the news of Koru, the Kiwi Educators group and NZ SL education initiatives and also to provide a forum for exchanging thoughts and facilitating discussion on Second Life in general and, more specifically, on SL as an educational tool or medium.

Koru has been fairly quiet over the summer holidays as you might imagine but Isa Goodman has taken the opportunity to do some further landscaping work and the island is beginning to take shape and look wonderful. A visitor today commented ” This is BEAUTIFUL”.

Our regular renters have been joined by two new arrivals, UCOL Library services and Massey University at Albany. More details of their work in a later post.

Toddles Lightworker (Todd Cochrane) of Weltec organised what we believe is the first NZ live performance in Second Life last week and several Kiwi Ed members came along to watch and listen. We hope to make this a regular feature this year so watch out for invitations!