Classes will start on Wednesday 27th September at 3:00 pm for two hours. We meet online every week at TU Dublin in Second Life. Please note: you will need a Mac or PC desktop or laptop to access Second Life – you cannot do so with a mobile device.
Full details about the module are available to eligible registered students on the university VLE, Brightspace, where you may self-enrol. Read the Introduction unit carefully where you will find instructions on how to access Second Life and set up your personal avatar. Learning how to get around the virtual world and familiarising yourself with the environment and how to control your avatar will take a few hours so give yourself plenty of time before class starts.
Please read pages 1 to 9 in the column on the right also. If you would like to find out more about what to expect during the semester read the posts in this blog: all class since 2009 have been summarised.
If you have any problems email John O’Connor at TU Dublin.
Each of the four student groups presented their final Team Projects in the final class of the semester. The work was excellent and very well presented. Each of the students spoke during their team’s presentation and everything went off without a hitch. Many of the guest speakers during the semester were in the audience, along with many others who have an interest in online and virtual education.
Video courtesy of Sitearm Madonna.
Francisco Koohaven from Whole Brain Health made a video of the Student builds supporting their presentations. This video fly-through of each project shows the amount of thought and effort the students put into the supporting work for their presentations.
The practice run for the Team Project was led-out by Sitearm Madonna who put the student teams through their paces. The exercise provided an excellent opportunity to identify exactly what had been achieved by the teams so far and what yet needed to be done. Sitearm also recorded the class for later review.
Next week is a public holiday in Ireland so there won’t be a formal class. The final presentation of the students’ Team Projects will be hosted by Whole Brain Health the following week, 8th May 2023.
There was poor attendance from TU Dublin students at this class so here is a link to the transcript of proceedings. It will give you a sense of the presentation. Tooyaa, Fran and Cats, along with Wisdom, covered a range of useful tools such as making and saving notecards, building, communications options and so on.
Sitearm Madonna presented on the theory of teamwork at today’s class. This was followed by a briefing on the Team Project No One is too Small to Make a Difference by John / Tae.
Our friends from Çağ University joined us for the first time today and Sitearm Madonna gave us a gentle introduction on how to work together in teams in a virtual environment. The Turkish students and their facilitators joined in seamlessly as if they had been working in Second Life since the beginning of the semester.
Video courtesy of Sitearm Madonna.
After the talk Sitearm gave the class an immersive collaborative experience through music. It was tremendous fun and we were sorry not to have more time to engage with his brilliant instruments.
This is the brief for this semester’s Team Project – ‘No One is too Small to Make a Difference’.
Photograph by John O’Connor.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action in the face of global poverty and the impact of climate change on our planet. Seventeen goals were agreed by all member states in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable Development. We have seven years left to achieve success and secure the future of humanity on Earth.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggests that the excesses of the consumerist model are responsible for driving the world rapidly towards a dead end. Speaking in London at the Work Marathon event in 2018 he argued that a radically new approach to shaping our society is required. Rather than allowing capital and technology to dictate we need to bring epistemological, technological, artistic, judicial, social and economic questions together in order to shape the future.
This calls for a rethink of our way of life are growing more persistent as evidenced by activists such as Oğuz Ergen from Türkiye and Greta Thunberg from Sweden.
Thunberg, speaking at Davos in 2019 said ‘our house is on fire’ and implored world leaders to extinguish the fire before it gets out of control. Later that year she published her talks in a little book titled No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. If one small Swedish schoolgirl can make a difference in the world then it follows that we can all do so.
What difference can you make?
The Brief
Meet in your teams and discuss this text. Read the referenced texts and look at the videos to inform and expand your understanding. Find additional sources to deepen your knowledge and share these with your team members.
· Discuss your response to the issues.
· How does this make you feel?
· What might you be able to do about it?
Develop your ideas into a collective response and design an action plan in response to the crisis. Decide what you can do individually in your families, local communities or university. Agree on a joint approach and select a single action or a change that you think will lead to a specific outcome.
Develop a strategy to achieve your goal and an approach to communicating it to others in your community so they will join you in achieving greater success.
Submission
Build an installation in Second Life that explains your project to visitors and devise a guided tour that you will give to residents encouraging them to do something similar. Each team member should have a specific role in the tour.
Write a reflective review of the team project and how it progressed. Refer to team building theory and describe how it played out in your experience of the project. In particular, describe your own contribution to the project and to the team.
Following the talk Val invited us to the Virtual Community Library where Sitearm hosted a debrief session with the students and led a discussion about defining what is meant by the metaverse in a collision of ideas.
John / Tae explores the thinking of Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) whose work is central to an understanding of media theory and provides a useful framework for examining digital social media and online collaborative tools.
Virtual Environments: Is one life enough? 