November 17 Week's Blog

I didn’t accomplish as much this week in SL since I had the ACBSP Board of Commissioners meeting and a lot of reports to read and forms to complete. However, here are some of my accomplishments:

First, our Island is being redone so I had to select a new office and refurnish and redecorate my office. That took some time. I now have an office with quite a view--even better than my face-to-face office that overlooks a courtyard.

Attended SL Class: Groups and Group Management. Groups may be used to mange a business or land. Additionally, this is an important topic because an instructor may want to set up a class as a group so one can distribute materials, slurls, etc. However, Linden Lab does limit an avatar's group memberships to 25 groups. Assigning roles to the group is also important because the group officer may not want the group members to have the ability to redo a parcel. There is a lot of information about groups, and I need to read more about it in my reference books. Since I’m not an officer of our island, my knowledge of the advanced features of groups is not necessary. When you meet someone new in SL, right-click their avatar, select Profile, and read the profile to learn about the avatar. One can tell a lot about someone by looking at the Groups the avatar is a member. For example, if you check my Profile, you’ll know I’m involved in higher education. I enjoy beading so I might consider creating a group. This is somewhat similar to groups in Facebook.

Watched Videos. Torley Linden creates wonderful videos posted in YouTube and at the Second Life website. I watched one on textures and while I’m not using Photoshop, I wanted to take one of my vacation photos of Neuschwanstein Castle, a royal palace in the Bavarian Alps of Fussen, Germany, and make it a wall photo. Yeh! Success—I was able to complete this task by creating a PowerPoint slide, insert picture, save as PNG file, upload to SL for $10L. Then I created a prim and applied the texture. I also placed my Ph.D. diploma on the wall. So I was able to do this without using Photoshop, but Photoshop and Gimp are programs that many SL users use for creating objects.

Survey results. My survey results are coming in from the Owens faculty, librarians, and instructional designers. Last count I had about 175 responses. A reminder was sent on the 21st. These results will provide information on the use and interest of Second Life.

OAD recruitment podcast. I've been working with one of our OAD graduates creating a script about her experience with the program. She talks about some of the student learning objectives and what she did to accomplish them. We are meeting on Monday, the 24th, to finalize her podcast.

Continued to read daily the Educator’s Digest (SLED) and Slrl Digest (Research) but it was a challenge with my travels. As I peruse these digests, I normally take away something valuable whether it’s a contact, website, slrl, or just ideas. This week, I learned about the use of the “Activity Theory.” Everyone asks about “pedagogy in virtual environments.” Yet, pedagogy historically refers to teaching young people; andragogy refers to teaching adults. So which theory to use? The Digest discussed the “activity theory” along with the well-know Connectivity and Connective Knowledge theory as areas to research. Andrew Churches has done an interesting analysis of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy called Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy v. 2.12: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8000050/Blooms-Digital-Taxonomy-v212. This might assist anyone in the formulation of an approach to learning in SL.

The OSU Buckeye fans are happy today! I'm one of them!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!