April Blog-o-the-Month nominee :-)

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During the night I received the following message from fellow SL resident, Scottmerrick Oh:

Hey Mariis, congrats on your nomination for the April Blog-o-the-Month at the ISTE Island Blogger’s Hut! There’s voting all the merry month of March there so encourage all your virtual pals to go vote! Also feel free to grab the “Nominated” graphic at Oh!VirtualLearning! (http://scottsecondlife.blogspot.com) and post it if you will, or just sit back and see how the masses vote! Cheers, and thanks for the wonderful blog!

I’ve absolutely no idea who nominated my blog, but I think it’s a honor to be nominated by peers, and whoever it is; TY – at this point in time this kind of appreciation was really welcome :-)

You can check out April month’s other nominees at Scott’s blog – and if you wish to participate in the vote follow this link to The Blogger’s Hut on ISTE Island.

iste-blog-hut

/Mariis

SLoodle hands-on workshop

Mariis4 Comments

Yesterday I attended a hands-on workshop on SLoodle led by Josmas Flores as part of the weekly meetings of the Virtual Worlds Research Group Discussions. SLoodle (Simulation Linked Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is an Open Source project which integrates SL with Moodle.

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SLoodle figure from the SLoodle wiki

According to the SLoodle website, some of the key features of SLoodle are:

  • Web-intercom. A chat-room that brings Moodle chatroom and Second Life chats together. Students can participate in chats in Second Life using the accessible Moodle chatroom. Discussions can be archived securely in a Moodle database.
  • Registration booth. Identity management for Second Life and Moodle. Link students’ avatars to their Moodle user accounts.
  • Quiz tool and 3D Drop Box. Assess in Second Life – grade in Moodle. Set quizzes or 3D modelling tasks in an engaging 3D environment. Review grades quickly and easily in the standard Moodle gradebook.
  • Choice tool. Allow students to vote (and see results) in Second Life as well as in Moodle.
  • Multi-function SLOODLE Toolbar. Enhances the Second Life user interface. Use a range of classroom gestures, quickly get a list of the Moodle user names of the avatars around or write notes directly into to your Moodle blog from Second Life.
  • Presenter (in development). Quickly author Second Life presentations of slides and/or web-pages on Moodle. Present in Second Life without having go through lengthy processes to convert or upload images.
  • … and more. More tools are being prototyped on a regular basis.

In the workshop we tried – quite successfully I might add (Thx, Josmas!) – most of the features, and it is for sure something I will look further into. In the COMBLE course my colleagues and I will run in April/May we will be using both SL and Moodle, so I’m hoping we can find the resources to experiment with SLoodle.

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Watching Josmas demonstrating some of the features …

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Checking chat feature in both sites …

I don’t think all of the above mentioned features would be relevant in my courses – we never vote and I find it hard to see how I could use such a tool in assessing the students (I wouldn’t use this feature in Moodle either), but I do see potential in both the chat and the blog features. As one of the participants, Grog Waydelich, said an interesting question could also be what kind of gestures are needed for classroom attendance?

One of the MIL students from my 1. MIL research cycle in 2007 experimented with SLoodle and attended some of the in-world SLoodle meetings, and he was very positive about the possibilities and especially the helpful community surrounding the project.

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Kryger meeting with other SLoodlers in 2007

The SLoodle project was founded by Daniel Livingstone & Jeremy Kemp with fundation from EduServ. In this paper Livingstone & Kemp (2008) describe the project and the importance of the SLoodle community.

UPDATE March 6th – from Willow Shenlin:

This coming week’s meeting is hosted by Jeremy Kemp at 1400SLT. He will discuss the research and issues behind the SLoodle Project.

We will meet him directly at SJSU SLIS 128/128/0, in the new student orientation site.

Also, as usual, I am asking for educators and/or developers who have an in-world tool that they wish to demonstrate and promote to the research, teaching and learning community. Let me know and I’ll schedule you on http://socialpresence3d.wikispaces.com/SpeakerSchedule

Cheers,
Willow

UPDATE March 10th
In yesterdays session Kemp told us how Linden Lab had forced them to change the project’s name from Second Life Object Oriented Learning Environment to Simulation Linked Object Oriented Learning Environment.

/Mariis

Theoretical bricolage

Mariis2 Comments

This week a vicious feverish flu has influenced my research stay at The Danish School of Education. Nonetheless – or perhaps because of the fever ! – I’ve been able to make some important decisions regarding the use of theory in my PhD. Yesterday I presented my PhD project and SL (hands-on) to a bunch of colleagues from the Research Programme, Media and ICT in a Learning Perspective. It was really nice to be among colleagues who were interested in my findings and had fun exploring SL :-)

In my presentation I focused mainly on theory of remediation, PBL , Experiential learning and the Community of Inquiry-model.  However, I’ve also decided to investigate another meta-theory (or Didactic theory as we would say in Northern Europe); The Theory of Interactive Constructivism. This theory stems from Germany and the work of especially Kersten Reich. Reich founded his thoughts back in the 1990’ies when he called this particular branch of constructivism Systemisch-konstruktivistische Didaktik.  It’s not a theory that I’m particularly familiar with but from readings this week it shows potentials!

Reich and his colleagues at the Cologne Dewey Center have published most of their ideas in German, but have recently started to write in English too (luckily, since my German is a bit rusty!).  Reich and colleague Stephan Neubert have set up a site for their work on Interactive Constructivism, and from a text by Neubert (2008) I quote these theoretical perspectives that demonstrate the foundations of the theory:

  • observers-participants-agents in cultural practices, routines, and institutions
  • processes of communication with particular focus on the dimension of lived relationships
  • the interplay between the symbolic resources of a life-world, the imaginative desire of subjects, and the occurrence of real events
  • the connections between processes of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction in the cultural production of realities,
  • involvements of discourse and power,
  • cultural diversity, otherness, and incommensurability in multicultural contexts. (p.1)

There seems to be many interesting and relevant perspectives for my PhD work, but what I found especially interesting is their thoughts on reality de-/re-/construction.  Since my object of study embrace 3D virtuality I’m always on the lookout for theories that might be able to include what I call a mixed reality perspective. I don’t think Reich and Neubert have 3D virtuality in mind, when they discuss “the limits of reality constructions”, but I have a feeling that it might be possible to expand their ideas.

I was also delighted to learn that they speak of “imaginative desire” and the social aspect;

According to interactive constructivism, furthermore, these imaginative constructions cannot be separated from contexts of social interaction. That is to say, imaginative desire is always involved in mutual mirror experiences between self and others (…). (p. 9)

By bringing in this theory, I’m hoping to be able to focus more explicitly on the social aspect of teaching and learning – an aspect which Kolb often has been (wrongly in my opinion though!) criticized of neglecting.

In any case, what lies ahead of me is extensive reading and work on trying to create a coherent and relevant theory bricolage, and I’m quite positive, since all of the above theories claim to have found their inspiration in the great work of John Dewey.

More on this will follow for sure …

/Mariis

Research stay at the Danish School of Education

Mariis1 Comment

Next week I’ll be visiting Professor, PhD Birgitte Holm Sørensen, Director of the Research Programme, Media and ICT in a Learning Perspective at the Danish School of Education.

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Both Birgitte  and I are members of the steering committee of The Masterprogramme in ICT and Learning (MIL), and we’ve known each other for years now. Birgitte’s areas of expertise include;  ICT/New media in combination with children, young people, teaching and learning and curriculum/ educational design. Birgitte is also responsible for the 4th module in the MIL education – the module where my SL course (my primary PhD case) is based.

Besides giving a presentation on the teaching and learning potential of SL to the members of Birgitte’s research programme, I intend to use this opportunity to discuss and further develop some of the central findings and concepts in my PhD, so I’m really looking forward to this stay :-)

/Mariis

CCK08 continues in 2009

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From Stephen Downes’ weekly newsletter I learned that he has posted a description of the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge (also known as CCK08) course on the Access to Open Educational Resources (a UNESCO community) – and if you’re interested in course design the description is well worth a read.  The CCK08 ran for 12 weeks during the fall 2008, butI only found time to participate by lurking, nonetheless it was very inspirational, and I still return to many of the course resources on a regular basis:

In his newsletter Downes also reveals that he and George Siemens will run the course again this fall, and from the cross posting of the course description on Downes’ own blog I saw that one of the course participants, Sui Fai John Mak, has created a Ning to continue networked explorations of connectivism, technology, web 2.0, education and research. As far as I can tell, anyone interested in these topics can join the network – participation in the CCK08 is not a requirement. Since I still don’t have sufficient time to devote to those topics, I’m reluctant to join, but I will try to follow their endeavors …

Via another partcipant’s blogpost, Jenny Mackness, I found this video created by three other participants, Viplav Baxi, Carlos Casares and Maru del Campo as part of their final CCK08 project.

I appreciate the humor and the Cat vs. Dog learning style, but what really struck me as intersting was their PLE’s – especially when these were merged, I think they illustrated very well the complexity of learning via connected technology and people – great job :-)

/Mariis