I was lucky to attend two meetings in SL this week. The first was informal and short where I explored The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop space in SL. The interesting idea implemented by the team developing this space was through mixing the real and virtual worlds together by broadcasting a ‘real video’ stream in their SL room. It is amazing how this overlap happens where the two worlds are integrated. It also opens doors and shows great potentials for future use in conferences or educational events. Their plan is to give the opportunity to people to design, explore, and showcase educational exhibits and galleries in their museum.

The second meeting was held in webheads space in edunation where the hosts kindly gave free and thorough tutorials on the use of SL for teaching and presenting. The presented some of the tools and the way they are designed or modified for different purposes. Two of these were the agenda tool for upcoming meetings and the “speakout” tool which allows users to prepare a scripted presentation and show it in text format while presenting with voice. It helps a lot as a supporting tool and also for users who don’t have access to voice in SL as in some countries now. During the meeting, SL “Inside the Lab” podcast was suggested. It is a space used by SL staff for training purposes. Their sessions are recorded to this podcast and there are also video tutorials and text scripts of each topic.

Tags: communities, cop, life, second, training, workshop

As hardware and Internet connections enhance more and more in the recent years, virtual worlds emerge as ‘reliable’ tools for interaction, communication, and conferencing. Lots of organizations, universities, and schools have decided to create their presence on these environments. Second Life is one of these environments with an increasing popularity and millions of daily users!

I got to realize their practicality and potentials for both learning and for teachers after attending Gavin Duddeny’s SL conference held last month, May 2008. With all the virtual crowds, I started to realize the importance and role it could play in teacher education programs and other professional gatherings in CoP.

Later, I started to question the role it could play for me as a teacher. With other teachers presenting about the ways the plan/ use it for teaching, I realized that it could be used in two different forms.

The first, and direct one, is for teaching in virtual classrooms or accompanying students into virtual trips to several remarkable places in SL. A good resource for preparing and picking or adding your SL lesson plans was started in this wiki: SL Experiments by Nergiz Kern, founder of Edurizon training and consultancy firm. There are lots of members interested in implemented it in their teaching or curious, like in my case, to find out about its potentials who joined that wiki and started adding their ideas, resources and lesson plans.

The second is for teacher education and sharing all types of skills, information, and socialization among professionals. Upcoming conferences and meetings or events could find alternative venues now with less resources, preparation, and expenses. SL conference was a good example and there are hundreds or thousands other examples available on this expanding environment.

Tags: communities, cop, practice, virtual, worlds

In the following posts, I am going to shed some light on this relatively old concept of CoP. I would like to think about it from the perspective of users who have been contributing to CoP for several years. My main interest would be examining their performance, structure, impact, and possible further adaptation in wider scales or programs. As a member in some of these communities myself, I find lots of potentials and opportunities for progress, sharing knowledge and skills, interacting in a semi-organized manner, and helping each other. The social element is another important element, especially with the emergence of many network-based technologies. I also have my personal worries about some of its aspects.

There are many teachers who are not bothered at all about these concepts, or perhaps, they have their own different visions. There are many others who would be cautious about sharing their experiences or ideas with others for a reason or another. May be their schools or institutions don’t support such kind of practices, etc.. All of these elements pushe me to think thoroughly about the whole process with all the elements I mentioned above. I would love to know if that is the ideal practice for learning and empowerment of a teacher, or are we in a transitional phase before a new ambitious and unpredictable era?

Perhaps you could help give some answers to any of these questions..

Tags: communities, cop, education, practice, teacher