Coolest places in Second Life from KoiNUP

Let's see if these spaces live up to the billing!

<a href="http://www.koinup.com/places/">Second Life Places</a>

Humanity - the lows

There are days when humanity gives me hope and there are days when I despair. Unfortunately, today is one of the latter as I read Kathy Sierra's blog ... go read it and then act!

http://tinyurl.com/2awwow

Bronwyn Stuckey on Virtual Worlds & Social Learning Contexts

Friend and colleague, Bronwyn Stuckey, is an invited guest blogger over at the 21st Century organization blog on this topic. Bron has a wealth of experience in this area with her work with Indiana University on Quest Atlantis, plus her doctoral research work on internet-mediated communities of practice.

Hop on over and take a read! It is engaging and covers some very salient points, very quickly.

Bronwyn talks in part about the differences between digital games and virtual environments and in the third post she gives Jim Gee's list of game features:

1. Empathy for a complex system
2. Simulations of experience and preparations for action
3. Distributed intelligence via the creation of smart tools
4. Cross-functional teamwork
5. Situated meaning
6. Open-endedness: melding the personal and the social

What seems to be missing from Gee's list, but maybe it is embedded in one of these features, is personal (and group) narrative, and multi-membership and identity (from Etienne Wenger's ideas in Learning for a small planet) that I think flows from the narrative.

I have watched videos by Joi Ito on Goggle about World of Warcraft, and have talked with one long term WoW player, and this certainly seems to be a feature of MMORPGs and MMOGs - and also seems to be from my short experience of Second Life. I am building up an identity there that has a relationship to, overlap with, my online identity - which also has it's own narrative and history that can be partially seen by Googling my RL name. My avatar in Second Life, Corwin Carillon, also appears to be developing a narrative of sorts that can be Googled.

So what is the role of narrative and identity in virtual worlds? How does it fit in to a learner's, or teacher's, or community's, learning and identity development?

What do you think?

Digital Gaming & Language Learning EVO begins!

Yesterday, we started the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshops. With over a 100 participants signed up, this is going to be a fantastic six weeks using Yahoo! Groups, Wikispaces and Second Life! In the pic is the welcome message for evogaming members taking up the optional participation in Second Life. From Corwin Carillon via blogHUD

Blogging from inside Second Life

This is a blog post from within the online 3D environment called Second Life. I've been investigating this in my evenings and weekends for the last few months. Thanks to colleague Cyprien Lomas at UBC in Vancouver for getting me in here, and NMC colleagues (Larry, Alan, Danielle, Heidi) for continually firing my enthusiasm. :-)

My experiences so far have been exhilirating - seeing what teachers and students have done and how it empowers them - and also frustrating - both with Second Life being in perpetual beta and its associated technical problems and with some of the current constraints of the scripting language.

I hope this gets through. If it does, it's all thanks to Kosso (Koz Farina in Second Life). Thanks Koz!




posted by Corwin Carillon on Boracay using a blogHUD : [permalink]

NMC 2006 - Cleveland

I'm at the airport in Hong Kong on my way to the New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference in Cleveland. I attended my first NMC conference last year and it was great, so I'm really looking forward to this one. A highlight for me will be attending the two-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with Joe Lambert from the Digital Storytelling Center at Berkeley.

Speculating: Blogs as .......

I've been reading discussions over the past few weeks about blogs as personal learning environments. This got me thinking a lot about the personal development planning and eportfolio system I developed in 2001 and which never got to take off in my institution for a variety of reasons. Systems like ELGG came close to what I did and did a bit more on social networking/FOAF side with the metaphor of personal learning landscape. But the metaphor I had at the time I started was more of learning journey. But in the system I created there was the element of Etienne Wenger's "learning trajectory" - past, present and future all together. In Etienne's research agenda, the notion of identities also figures strongly and this I believe is an important element too. So right now I'm thinking of Blog as a combination and/or aggregation of ...

.... learning journey
.... learning trajectory
.... (learning) identities

In the system I built, the learner could connect different areas (knowledge, skills and attributes) of their learning together - cross-hyperlink them. I never did manage to display this visually in the way I wanted (as per the Brain software) but I still think all of these elements are important. The system is still missing important elements like showing connections to people, and the possibility of providing a genealogical view ... i.e. multiple ways of looking at the journey.

Now with our online identities being spread all over the net, in comments in various blogs, flickr, del.icio.us, etc., and at various events, we need a way to bring these together simply and quickly. And we need to visually show (semantically, socially and genealogically) our journey, trajectory and identities all in one ... something that aggregates and connects our learning into one visual interface for our lifelong personal portal (side track: I think this means we would need to be able to tag our own comments, not just our posts).

In Europe a year or so ago, eportfolio people were talking about an eportfolio for life. The notion of whatever we system we use being fir life is key if the ownership is really going to be, as it needs to be, with the individual (and not any one course or institution).

Blogs weren't ever designed for this purpose and, as they are now, aren't ready to do this. But the world has moved on a long way since the time when blogs were first developed. We need something now that will aggregate all of our 'selves' and visually display our journey, trajectory, and identities, in multiple ways. Maybe the front end is something like a personal portal/aggregator in (building out from the likes of protopage and netvibes) with an interface that allows for multiple representations of our aggregated selves.

The EduGlu project that D'Arcy and others are just starting to get going one element of this jigsaw - although maybe we need personalGlu, rather than EduGlu. But what are the other elements that are key? How do we connect them together? How can we display them in multiple ways? How do we tie this to the individual for their life (or as long as they want) and not a single course, or a single institution, or a single organization or a single community?

Tags:cny chinesenewyear chinese_new_year

• communitiesofpractice
• eportfolios
• personaldevelopmentplanning
• personallearningenvironment
• ple
• pdp
• cop
• eduglu
• personalglu