I am reposting a message I posted to the discussion board on October 13, since I feel it went largely unnoticed while I was trying to make a fundamental point.
What is the learning goal for this week and how does it fit in the bigger picture of the course?
Yesterday night I attended the SL orientation. It was about getting used to SL but much time got lost in stupid technical details due to the fact that we have people on Macs and PCs with either Viewer 1 or 2 (4 different worlds already). I would never recommend such a tool to practitioning teachers. But for the sake of the course, I will of course play along, and hey, I am generally curious as well.
But, on a more fundamental level, there are two other issues that worry me.
The first core article, Warburton, is mostly technical, but only very, very briefly mentions a set of categories of current educational activities of SL (p. 421) without going any deeper into any of these.
The second core reading, Boellstorff, weaves together lots and lots of micro narratives. Not sure what too make of it other than that SL means a lot of different things to different people (just as RL), but I can see really no reference to e-learning at all here (other than maybe the frequent use of the term embodiment echoing last week, but now we also have 'virtual embodiment' to add to the confusion).
See? I'm lost, and have no sense of direction this week.
Yesterday night I attended the SL orientation. It was about getting used to SL but much time got lost in stupid technical details due to the fact that we have people on Macs and PCs with either Viewer 1 or 2 (4 different worlds already). I would never recommend such a tool to practitioning teachers. But for the sake of the course, I will of course play along, and hey, I am generally curious as well.
But, on a more fundamental level, there are two other issues that worry me.
The first core article, Warburton, is mostly technical, but only very, very briefly mentions a set of categories of current educational activities of SL (p. 421) without going any deeper into any of these.
The second core reading, Boellstorff, weaves together lots and lots of micro narratives. Not sure what too make of it other than that SL means a lot of different things to different people (just as RL), but I can see really no reference to e-learning at all here (other than maybe the frequent use of the term embodiment echoing last week, but now we also have 'virtual embodiment' to add to the confusion).
See? I'm lost, and have no sense of direction this week.
Keywords: IDEL10
Comments
Thanks for letting me know you’re feeling lost.
To me, the goals for this two-week section are to consider what it means to ‘be’ online, to have a specific identity, how you might create and experience that, what it means to be and experience virtual worlds and how that relates to learning in immersive environments.
This course is about exploring different digital environment and considering the opportunities and challenges they might present for learning. SL is a particularly challenging environment to step into – a tad harder to get to grips with than Skype or Twitter – so we allow more time for students to orient themselves and learn to navigate the world. That process in itself and then the experience of learning in SL are both intended to stimulate thought about what that might mean for learners. We also think this is a chance to think a bit wider about identity – a key issue in exploring digital environments, and worthy of a wide ranging thought for learning also.
You could take this beyond the SL avatar idea to thinking about what it means to select particular representations of yourself on this blog, twitter, how you perform a particular identity, how you see self etc and how that all might relate to learning.
The Boellstorff reading gives an excellent introduction to SL generally and points to interesting issues around identity and social practices that you can then draw on when thinking about learning in immersive environments. The Warburton article gives a useful overview of immersive worlds a bit more generally and points to ways it can be used for educational activities. Fi’s put up a links on the db for educational uses of SL, one that comes to my mind is https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/VueWiki/Resources
I hope that helps – if not, let me know!
C.