Soon the in-world group NoEL will start visiting interesting locations in SL again in order to both explore and evaluate potential educational design.

As a phd-student I have to document all my activities, so I’ve been working on developing a log that I can use when we have these meetings – also I hope that others will find the documentation inspirational, since I plan to publish it here on the blog.

Today I presented my draft for the log at an action learning meeting with my supervisor, Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld and my fellow phd-students Heilyn Camacho and Mayela Coto.

The challenge of documenting the meetings is to do this while participating in the actual meeting. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to document some of the meetings via Camtasia, but I anticipate that Camtasia will not always be an option, and also I want the textual documentation just in case ..

Lone, Heilyn and Mayela were positive but also concerned that I want too much information – that I’m moving away from the focus in my phd-project. Below are the chunks of information I would like to document for each meeting;

• Date, duration
• Presenter(s), typically Island/location owners, incl. SL and RL contact data
• Location, incl. landmark
• Short description of presenter(s) and location
• Potential subject matter and target group

Questions for the presenter(s):

1. When did you start in SL?
2. What is your interest in SL – personal/professional?
3. What do you use SL objects/location for – and how do you do it in practice?
4. What is your pedagogical (learning theoretical) foundations?
5. What is your experience with the usage? (preferably also something about duration and individual vs. group usage)
6. If students – what is their experiences? (how many, why, when and for how long)
7. What is in our own opinion the educational potential of your objects/location?
8. What is special about SL compared to other platforms?
9. What challenges should one be aware of in using your objects/location – SL in general?
10. Is your location open for public use? (details for usage)

Not all locations we will visit have been build explicitly for educational use, so some of the above questions will be for me to figure out afterwards ..

Based on the meetings we had before the summer holiday, I’m sure that most of the questions will be answered quite naturally during the meetings.

I would very much appriciate feedback on both interesting places to visit and comments on the information chuncks – what else do you as an educator want to know??

I’ll continue working on questions more directly related to avatar and context mediation, but since these NoEL meetings will serve as a way of exploring the field and not necessarily end up in my final dissertation, I’m keeping the questions for now …

/Mariis