Virtual Environments: Is one life enough?

CLASS SUMMARY:

Class started with a quick review of last week and activities. And then students did their elevator pitches. The guests: Inish and Dudley from last year’s group gave feedback to the students.

Panel discussion on group working. Panel members: Site, Inish and Dudley. Site has kindly put up notes used here.

Details of the assessment are outlined here.

The theme is “changing tides.”

You have now been assigned to your groups.

ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT CLASS:

1. Explore: SL with your group. You are to visit at least 3 locations that are new to you. Find them in search, or ask other residents for recommendations or select them at random.
2. Discuss: with your group how you are going to develop the project.  You might start by trying to determine how to interpret the theme “changing tides”
3. Write the second post: on your blog reviewing the locations you visited. Explain how and why you chose them and what relevance they might have for your group.

CLASS SUMMARY:

1. Put a face to your avatar (personalise it by ‘Editing Appearances’ and/or buying clothes and accessories.) Remember, for the duration of the module you ARE your avatar! and will be identified by your Second Life name. Complete your SL profile, including some information about your real identity (while remaining anonymous, if you wish).
2. Each participant will get L$300 seed money to get started – you must earn your own money after that. Don’t spend it all as you will need money for your project work.
3. The format of the class is interactive discussion based on reading material provided prior to the class. You need to have read the material posted in advance (or else next class will be longer to allow for catch-up).
4. You will need to spend time in SL outside the normal class time to complete tasks and activities.
5. Check this blog regularly for updates on the module. Information will also be posted to Twittter using the hashtag #iole13. When you post to Twitter don’t forget to include this hashtag. You should also set up a Facebook account for your avatar.
6. After each class you will be given a topic to write about in your blog. It is important to keep your blog up to date as this will ensure you don’t have an excessive amount of work to do at the end of the module. The blogs will be graded using the rubrics found here.
7. Academic writing standards must be adhered to always.
8. Every week, visit a new location in SL and refer to it in your blogpost.

Academic writing

Part of the methodology for this module is to use writing as a mechanism for learning and as a goal in itself. We hope that by the end of this module you are confident in writing as well as being familiar with conventions around accountable writing. the following points were addressed:

• Forms of writing to use include: Narrative, Descriptive, Reflective, Critical.
• Sourcing reliable information is essential: where to find it, deciding what it okay to use (judging sources)
• Correct referencing is essential. We use the Chicago style (see link below).
• Writing to topic – don’t go off the point. Use headings as anchors.

References

DIT’s Study & IT Skills Survival Guide for Academic Writing
Purdue Online Writing Lab page on Academic Writing

Here is a guide to the Chicago referencing style

ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT CLASS:

1. Set up your blog: using blogger, wordpress or any other blog site. Complete the ‘About Me’ page (read some of those page on other blogs first) and remember it is different from the first post on your blog. Write from the perspective of your avatar, the persona you will be using to explore in this module.  Post a link to your blog in your SL, facebook and twitter profiles. 
2. Write the first post: to your blog about your expectations for this module – what you hope to get out of it, what you think you might contribute, etc. Address the relevance of  module objectives from your perspective, ie, justify why you think they are important to you, all the while applying the conventions of academic writing given in the class.
3. Look at: http://www.johnoconnor.org and bearing in mind what you learned today compare your own blog writing to this.
4. Visit the following:
   Deviant Art
   Dolce Merda
   Yumiko Froehlich
   Illustration Friday
   Joanna Kafka
   Style Pantry
   Think about how you would identify these blog authors…what impression do you get of the person behind the blog?
5. Set up: your twitter and facebook accounts in your avatar’s name. When posting to twitter don’t forget to use the hashtag #iole13.
6. Read: The First Steps to Building Your Personal Brand
7. Do: Based on your ‘About Me’ blog page prepare a 30-second ‘elevator pitch’ about yourself and the identity you want to portray online for the next class. Think about yourself (your avatar). Who are you? What is your online identity? (who you are and what you are about).

Our regular module “Is one life enough” has just ended andrather thanstaying quiet all summer, we are now running a module on Teaching in Virtual worlds.
We will be using this space to document the path of this module as well.

Last night, Thursday the 24th o fMay , we had the second session of our new module: Teaching in Virtual worlds.
The module is being offered to teaching and training staff and run at 8pm GMT on thursdays and will hold for 7weeks….5wereks more.
Last night’s class was on virtual environments in general, how they function, conventions governing behaviours, communities, etc.
Here a snapshot of the discussion group sitting around the table. we were missing two participants.

After weeks of preparation, the students pulled togther all they had learned in their final projects in which they had to work in groups.  They had to  navigate the challenges of working in a virtual team to create an artefact which represented the theme “Virtuality”

Guest judeges were Sitearm Madonna and Lisa Elfay. We also had 2 special guests Jaynine Scarborough who had been of immense support to the students from when we visited her “thousand rooms” on a field trip

As they say a picture is more than a thousand words and video…..

*Pictures are courtesy of Sitearm Madonna

Given that students have now been split into groups to work on their ideas for end of term showcase, we spend this session discussing the dynamics of group working particularly in an online context.

Our guests from the MSc in Applied elearning made it to this week’s  class and also took part in the conversation. Second-life life as a bit laggy today but it didn’t stop the class from having a good conversation around the topic.

It was concluded that working collaboratively online could be successful if managed right. To manage it right, key things such as communication, clarification of agreements and goals, using appropriate tools which can track work such as Google docs or wikis(pbworks) were all deemed as important. It was also determined that a project coordinator was required and not so much to lead but more to ensure things stayed on track . The students also felt that is was important to be able to “contain” both people who had a tendency to dominate and those who had a tendency to hide behind others.

All in all, we hope to see evidence of good teamwork in students end of term presentations!

Next week’s class will hold on the Friday instead of the Thursday and students will be presenting what they propose to do for the showcase and also explain how it meets the module objectives from their perspective.

On the 19th of April, students will hear from a graduate of this module: Sitearm Madonna  on how to tighten their work as a group and he will also suggest some approaches and tools to consider.  Apart from being a graduate of this module, Site works online on various SL projects.

Class started with a reflection on last week’s class led by Elfay and the class visit to Thousand rooms where we were hosted by Jaynie and met with a number of very interesting people who had build up significantly large communities within  second-life with some even expanding into real life.

For class 5 we focused on the creation of content for online. That is digital content.

Digital content in our context refers to images, sounds, videos, text,etc. As art an design professionals, a lot of work is created for the online medium and even work that isn’t can end up in an online space.(e.g real life sculptures). In this class we discussed the relevance of being able to responsibly share work created by  others and what to consider when making our own work available.

Discussions then touched on the use of the web as both consumers and producers referring to Axel Bruns and hs concept of produsage .

Students have now been split into their groups for the end of term  assessment showcase

The concepts of copyright and creative commons were introduced and students were given an assignment to blog about their perspectives on how to handle theft or misuse of their work as had been experienced by one student.

8pm GMT: Class will begin at the regular virtual DIT classroom with Lisa for an hour.

Second hour will move to J9’s SIM Thousand Rooms (make sure you already have the SLURL for that SIM ahead of class time)

She (and I) will have invited our regular friends/guests from both our shows to participate in this portion of the class.  J9 will likely perform (she’s a professional musician in both worlds) and then talk about her own experience with the issues covered in beginning of class.

Interact with us and our guests throughout the hour.

There will be time for Q & A before class ends.

The Show Links:

Coffee & Pajamas Jazz Show networking:

1. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/elfay lots of posters in the photos section here as well
2. Google+: https://plus.google.com/101611317878800691310/about
3. Show Voice Sampler: http://www.wix.com/xxelfayxx/jammies
4. Deviant Art; http://elfay.deviantart.com/gallery/
5. Neil Delaney; Show Poster Designer: http://vandalhandle.deviantart.com/gallery/27585645
6. His own Site: http://vandalhandle.com/

“The Frequent Asides:

There is also my own life/”private” networking on Flickr, Tumblr, Linkedin, Artbistro, and Mandys as well as my own portal site.  But they can all be found by starting at one or more of the above.  So nothing is private. So in other words…nothing is private.”

My personal favorite Blogs:

1. http://thebloggess.com/
2. http://maddox.xmission.com/
3. http://bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com/