NMC Campus Observer

Symposium Sessions Oct 18

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Oct 18, 2006 08:58pm

It is getting repetitive, but wow, another jam packed day of discussions and interations as part of the Impact of Digital Media Symposium.

At noon, we had more than 45 avatars in Woolsey Hall classroom for the Second Life Educators (SLED) panel session on “Are We Playing Games? Finding Legitimacy in the Academy”. As was noted by moderator Jeremy Kabumpo (Jeremy Kemp RL), it was almost ironic we chose to hold this session in this place that looks much like a traditional classroom– prompting Jeremy to show up in his ‘professor avatar’. We’ve not had tremendous use of this space on NCM Campus, but as it turns out today, it was very comfortable and suitable for our panel discussion.

This topic is what many pioneering educators deal with in their use of SL, having to endless justify what can get passed off as “play” or simply “games”:

Second Life is filled with brilliant proof-of-concept trials by educators working alone, unfunded and often after hours. Only a few academic efforts are official, integrated and well funded. Why is that? What keeps the mainstream IT folks at bay and banishes early adopters to the fringe of “game studies?” This panel will define the legitimacy gap, explore how it might be breached and go on to discuss what teaching in Second Life could look like with broad acceptance. How will students use streaming 3D when navigating an avatar is as common as logging in to MySpace?

SLED panel session, Oct 18, 2006

And our panel are ones that have all found ways (not necessarily easy) to reach the “legitimacy” level- each shared their path responded to the many questions peppered by the audience. We had on hand:

• Terry Beaubois of Montana State taught architecture in SL last Fall
• Aline Click at NIU has taught in world and presents on SL regularly
• Josephine Dorado and Dan Winckler, co-directors of Kids Connect
• Jeremy Kemp moderator, keeps Second Life’s official education wiki, working on SLoodle hybrid LMS
• Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins from Ball State is teaching a rhetoric class
• Sharon Tettegah with UIUC is running an AERA symposium on SL in April in Chicago

Audience listens to panelists (audio was treamed to the music channel

Our panelists had called in on our teleconference bridge which we then streamed into the SL music channel. Audeince questions and presenters URLs flew across the chat channel.

We have available (below) the entire audio portion of this session— as requested, we broke up the 90 minute session into 3 smaller chunks. Also available is the transcript from the chat.

This was one of the most lively, information packed, energetic sessions we have seen here on NMC Campus– our thanks go out to Jeremy for helping organize, and to the panelists for sharing their experiences.

Later in the day, we had another live presentation– Adrienne Haik and Haik from Metaversatility talked about “Second Life in the Classroom: Making the most of it”, highlighting the potential of virtual worlds as well as the possibilities for research opportunities.

We also have audio recorded from this session as well.

SLED Discussion Panel (part 1 of 3)
SLED Discussion Panel (part 2 of 3)
SLED Discussion Panel (part 3 of 3)

So two powerful discussions today related to teaching in Second Life. What is on tap for tomorrow? It is yet another media form deployed during the Syposium. At 7:00 AM SLT/PST tomorrow, the MacArthur Foundation will be holding a public launch in New York City for the Foundation Series on Digital Media, with the video being streamed live into NMC Campus (Gonick Ampitheater) and Global Kids’ on the Teen Grid.

Panelists at the RL event include:

• Dr. Mizuko Ito, Research Scientist, Annenberg Center for Communication, University of
• Southern California, studying new media.
• Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
• Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Dr. Nichole Pinkard, Director of Technology and Research Associate, Center for School Improvement, University of Chicago, working to expand after-school media literacy programs
• Eric Zimmerman, CEO and founder, gameLab, working to develop new games to support media literacy and design skills in young people

And we understand there will be opportunity for questions being communicated from the Second Life locations. Look for some exciting announcements about new programs!

Story filed under: Audio / Video, Teaching and Learning, What's Happening

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)