UELconnect Blog

I have spent a huge amount of time and effort on Second Life developments in the last twelve months or so. Only time will tell whether it’s been worth it or not. 

See post on the HaB blog.

I think we need  to let it bed down, gradually introduce more students, talk to more academics inside and outside the institution and most importantly evaluate the learner experience. Plans for a formal evaluation of the physiotherapy virtual patient are a step in the right direction. Let’s hope we get the necessary funding for this.

At the recent JISC online conference Second Life and VWs got an extensive airing attracting the full gamut of opinion. I am puzzled as to why things seem to get so polarised when VWs are discussed. There’s a lot of uninformed opinion in there of course but amongst some opponents it goes deeper. People seem less content to keep an open mind than they might with other technologies.

Most of the academics and students I’m working with seem oblivious to the mood out there contenting themselves with exploring the potential of Second Life in their context. And for now, that’s good enough for me – while they’re interested so am I.

Had an interesting day at FOTE09 last Friday as much because of the people there as the speakers.  Generous breaks and a very convivial drinks reception at the end made for some useful conversation. The morning sessions on the Cloud were dominated by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Huddle  and didn’t go down terribly well with the twittering masses in the audience, though one relatively high spot was hearing about Leeds Met experience of providing google apps for all students.

The afternoon was much more relevant to the educationally inclined with presentations from a wide range of people and organisations (possibly too many), new faces for me including Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes who gave a very stimulating (and worrying)  view of our networked, constantly changing future and School of everything co-founder Dougald Hine who not surprisingly threw out a few challenges to the qualification bound culture of HE.  Others included the ubiquitous James Clay of Gloucestershire College, Nick Shelton of Bristol, Peter Robinson of Oxford university on their experience of  iTunes U , Lindsay Jordan (Bath/University of the Arts) on the need for a social dimension to any learning experience and Shirley Williams of Reading on the thisisme digial identity project that some of us first heard about at the Plymouth conference earlier this year.

The final session was an extremely polarised debate on Second Life which served little purpose other than to suggest a better way of doing this in future would be to find a different panel. Two SL consultants on the pro side, and one very negatively inclined academic and someone from RSC playing devil’s advocate on the other didn’t really cut it. One highlight though was the sucessful streaming of the whole day’s proceedings in Second Life.

Others have blogged in more detail about the event already so I’ll be lazy and link you to a couple, both of which were written as the event proceeded – quite an impressive form of blogging if you can do it:

LSE http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/?s=fote09

Goldsmith’s http://celtrecord.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/jots-from-the-future-of-technology-in-education-2009-p-m/

Presentations will be available in a week or so from FOTE09

When do we make time for blogging – really need to get some posts up?

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