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Teachers Without Borders

Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 1 views

connect.educause.edu/...47221

life second sleducation virtual worlds

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08 - Cached
  • I continue the orientation with highlights of accomplishments from teenage students at Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s campus in Second Life, hosted by Peggy Sheehy (http://ramapoislands.edublogs.org/about/). Their learning experiences are inspiring and help my students visualize projects modeled in a virtual world. During one session, a student reflected: “If teens can do it, I can do it.” Student ownership grows as students visualize the class workspace as a place where they meet, attend class sessions, work on projects, play, and relax with friends.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      Yes, I understand that university students can be inspired by the work of middle schoolers, but let's look at some examples of what university students have done in SL.
  • Virtual world learning experiences are fun
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      So are fieldtrips.
  • A few may feel disengaged and go into “cruise control,” expecting the instructor to entertain them. Shifting students from the passive roles of survivors and castaways to the active roles of researchers and explorers requires a change in their perception of themselves and their willingness to participate.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      Very good point. Not sure yet why SL is the best way to do this ...
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Class can be held on the beach, in another country, in outer space, or in any simulated setting. Students do not need to be confined to a traditional class setting, with chairs facing forward, but can instead move within the learning environment, communicate via text or voice, offer information or ask questions whenever they like (without being impolite), and correspond with classmates and friends via private messaging.
  • learning stations can be designed that offer content to students who miss class or who need more time to study and reflect. Students can touch these 3D objects to get notecards, listen to podcasts, or see streaming video that covers this course content. Although this capability is also available in online course management systems and websites, the shared nature of an avatar interacting with an object, being part of the content that is being studied, and seeing 3D simulations of the content come to life is powerful. Since a student’s understanding of complex content may be hazy, offering information in a variety of ways allows students to use the information to solve problems and create solutions for their projects.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      There's got to be more to this. Still noyt sure why I need a virtual world for this. I need to download the client, open an account, create an avatar, just to click a box? I'd like to see a SL example of how "powerful" this can be. I'd like to hear from the students.
  • Class participants are often not anonymous, despite the use of virtual world aliases for avatar names. One reason is that students want information, education, feedback, and grades from their instructor, and they want to know who is responding to them. In addition, students share a sense of community in these environments, and they mentor one another as they discover how to use the tool to complete their individual and team course activities. This sense of identity differs from the social use of virtual worlds for entertainment purposes, where anonymity is often favored.
  • Students shift from being passive listeners to engaging in group interaction and activities and demonstrating that they understand the course content via the completion of projects, papers, labs, and case studies. Many classes that include case studies use role-play, putting learners in roles and contexts in which they explore the content and make decisions based on the forces and constraints placed on them.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      That shift can happen without 3D environments.
  • In addition to learning user-interface design and testing principles, the class goal was to reflect on new ways to design and evaluate user interfaces. With this goal in mind, the students elected to study problems related to accessibility, perception, and interaction. Instead of focusing solely on the software interfaces, they created 3D linked objects with behaviors that simulated real-world systems. In their “lessons learned” papers, the students noted that the virtual world classes enhanced their learning experience and their perceptions of self and gave them new skills to demonstrate their mastery of the course content. The sense of presence and the customization of their avatars were high on their list of priorities for learning and participating in virtual world classes. In contrast, they noted that it took time for them to customize their avatars and to learn to communicate, gesture, and emote. They also learned to create 3D objects and to texture, link, and program the objects into testable, scripted projects that responded when touched.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      Excellent example. Would be interesting to hear from the students, though.
  • In virtual worlds, we can leverage a mix of content and activity to support all learners: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 19 Sep 08
       
      We can also do it in a Kenyan classroom, for example, where there are only desks and a blackboard. A good teacher can accomplish this anywhere.
Paz Villar

Kenn Fisher opts for Archi-Me 3D interactive design - 0 views

www.agent4change.net/index.php

secondlife 3D

shared by Paz Villar on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Australian school design expert Dr Kenn Fisher is working with the Institute of Education, London, using a new 3D interactive sevive to model immersive learning spaces for school capital projects like Building Schools for the Future and the Primary Capital Programme.
Eloise Pasteur

SL-LandscapesforEducation » home - 0 views

sl-landscapesforeducation.wikispaces.com

education research second life terraforming

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 07 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Eloise Pasteur on 07 Jul 08
     
    Wiki page for discussing design features of terraforming for education
Teachers Without Borders

Virtual classroom project coming to a close « Learn Online - 0 views

learnonline.wordpress.com/...room-project-coming-to-a-close

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 03 May 08 - Cached
  • It doesn’t matter if the ideas I had - or the way I was trying to express them were any good or not.. what I’m talking about is the need we all have for encouragement and motivation to improve on and further our own learning. I could have enrolled in a course and paid a teacher to give me that … attention, but even then it would have felt disingenuous and limited by what that one teacher could muster after 20 years of putting up with it.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 03 May 08
       
      This is important: teachers are paid to care ... but informal learning in a supportive community is based on and revolves around individuals who are genuinely interested in the topic and who further their own learning by teaching and engaging with others.
  • This amazing project that Konrad has taken me on boils down to is this: I have drawn a concept for a building I want to one day build, using Second Life and its communities to draw and develop the model. I have used numerous online networks to research and inform the model, and this drawing is only one step in many for this long term plan I have. That network has given me the motivation to take it all further. In the process I have learned a lot about sustainable building, drawing in SL, communicating with online networks beyond my normal peers, and in that I have gained new confidence. Now I am coming to an end with the VirtualClassroomProject, having reached the limitations of the model in SL Jokaydia, and want to take it further. I have made numerous attempts to connect with a local group who are developing sustainable building designs, but what was that I said about powering down? I think it will turn out that I will install the model somewhere more permanently in SL and continue to tweak the model, make variations and details, do a costing analysis for a real build, develop a website for it, and continue to try and find useful contacts who I can work with and possibly take something like this further - no doubt I will find them online… I already have one lead in Melbourne!
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 03 May 08
       
      example of an educator empowered through informal learning AND the potential of that learning to cross over into his local community and real life.
  • this project has helped me to render my private and two dimensional ideas into a public and socially supportive domain.
    • Teachers Without Borders
      Teachers Without Borders on 03 May 08
       
      and, yes, the experience was virtual, but the potential to continue to build upon the new knowledge and expand networks in real life are, as Leigh suggests, quite real!
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