In September, I’ll be kicking off a new PD course in SL. Participants will be teachers from The Computing School at Universidad Nacional (UNA) in Heredia, Costa Rica. The main objective of the course is to provide the participants with a combination of conceptual, theoretical, and practical (in-world) strategies with regard to designing, implementing, and teaching/learning courses of different duration using SL as main medium/approach. Unlike most of my previous courses in SL, I will not work alone in this course, but will be joined by an amazing group of co-facilitators;
- Inge Qunhua – Danish Instructional designer and teacher in SL since 2007
- Heilyn Abbot – Costa Rican colleague, Post Doc at e-Learning Lab, Aalborg University (AAU), co-facilitator in the COMBLE course
- Wica Sorbet & Ena Adjani – new Costa Rican colleagues from UNA
In-world the majority of the teaching activities will be taking place in a region with 3 Danish islands; Region Denmark, Innovative Learning, and Danish Visions.
In designing this course, I’ve naturally been drawing on my experience from previous SL courses. However, our Costa Rican colleagues are also interested in learning more about the particular PBL model we have implemented at AAU, the so-called Aalborg PBL-model. Further, during my PhD-research in SL, I’ve found the “Communities of Practice” (CoP) ideas from Wenger, 1998 to be particularly useful when teaching new technologies/media. The goal of the design is to try to establish a pedagogical Community of Practice, wherein the teaching and learning processes will be situated. Core principles in this design strategy therefore are:
- A strong and ongoing focus on learning as transformation of identity and negotiation of meaning
- Focus on Legitimate Peripheral Participation
- A socio-cultural, constructivist perspective on learning
- Learning is participant-centred
- Focus on problem orientation where learning combines theory and practice
- Learning is usually realized in pairs/groups
- Responsibility of the learning process is mutual – both between learners and learners/facilitators
- Self- and peer assessment through reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action is central
An important part of this strategy is to respect the newbie experience of the participants. The ontological challenge that is to become an avatar should be acknowledged and designed for. In practice, this means that Inge and I, who will be the main in-world facilitators, will focus on creating a safe learning environment where the newbie participants will be able to learn some of the most important basic SL skills before we actually proceed to focus on the subject matter. Today, Inge invited me in-world to see the sky sandbox, she has designed for the initial stage of the course:
Overview of the sky sandbox
The participants will learn how to navigate their avatars in trying to get their teams across the board that includes invisible holes.
For the building exercise the participants also will have to work in teams.
In the presentation and discussion area all sorts of media can be used; Slide shows, Type-with-Me, videos, and websites are included.
And so, now that Inge has done all the hard work, all I need to do is to take some time in front of the fire to reflect on more fun, engaging, and interesting activities :-)
The dubbed UNA-AAU course starts in-world on September 12th, and I’m sure it will generate some future posts …
/Mariis
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