I came across some online articles and reports on virtual worlds for learning. The first two articles, “How To Spark Remote Learning” - 2006 and “ESL campus promotes team language learning” - 2008, report Boahn’s or ‘Kip Yellowjacket’ as called in SL where he managed to implement and initiate a virtual English Language space for teachers and learners. His approach is considered ‘nontraditional’ but interesting to students. It looks like a good initiative, but I wonder how many teachers have to pay for their own islands or sim. As far as I know, these ‘virtual’ places could be very expensive for a standard teacher. A good idea might be starting a scholar world or an academic alternative where organizations and governments might sponsor their teaching experiments and pilot projects.

An interesting building tool which I learned about through the second article is called claroline. It is used as an authorware e-learning platform. The good news is that It’s an open source. The bad news is that it’s another new tool I need to spend time learning and investigating its potentials for further use and development. Luckily, there is a tutorial here to easily understand about it. An initial impression made me feel that it is similar to moodle, but I still need to know how to use it for building objects..

The third article is by Stevens (2006) who reports on the ‘huge potentials’ of using SL for language learning and educators. He describes the nature of these new environments. Regardless of the potentials or concerns discussed in the article, I was interesting in the educators’ networking aspect in this environment. Where these teacher can take the decision to safely join gatherings or educational events organized in this free environment. Stevens sheds some light on this aspect through a collaborative wiki page. It is an early initiative to reflect and compare this new world to other earlier initiatives like ‘active world’ as he reports. His second recent ‘wiki sl2ndchance‘ has more updates and reports with nice screenshots from that vague new world.

Tags: environments, games, LAN-Based, life, second, Teaching, video, virtual, worlds

After class, I just realized that my students are interested in playing games. Using a LAN network, they were able to interact together using audio and graphics in a shooting simulation game. They were all connected together either as police or criminals as part of this game.

The collaborative aspect was totally new to me and encouraged me to ask myself if I can find a similar reliable, interactive, and interesting environment for my students to use instead of online-based equivalents. The reason I thought about this is first to provide a safe learning environment for students. It is also to be able to manage their interaction and communication. Finally, to avoid any concerns that may arise from schools or administrations on that regard.

I have shared this same questions with teachers in the IATEFL conference forum, but still waiting for more responses..

Tags: environments, games, LAN-Based, life, second, Teaching, video, virtual, worlds

Last week I was able to build my first SL objects. The two objects I experimented were the speak easy hud and the note projector. The first is used to prepare a presentation-script ahead of time prior to a meeting or presentation and then be able to use it as a support of what you present/say during a meeting. It helps a lot, especially for users who don’t have access to voice in this environment. The second object was the note projector which is a nice easy tool for showing some content or simple text. It helps in providing a meeting agenda or class objectives prior to a class. This experience helped me feel more confident about building and experiementing the process of interaction and use of SL for facilitating a class or building a connected community like in this case.

I was later able to find a list of some good other tools and free scripted objects for use and integration in lessons or classes if you have a space in SL. You may download some from here.

Tags: environments, games, LAN-Based, life, second, Teaching, video, virtual, worlds

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