NMC Campus Observer

EDUCAUSE Immersive Learning Environments Day 2

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Mar 30, 2007 01:47pm

It’s taken some time and travel to regroup after the high level energy of the EDUCAUSE Immersive Learning Environments Focus session in Raleigh. As proven many times before it was great to meet F2F a number of people I’ve only known as avatars.

Sarah Robbins and Intellagirl Tully, one and the same?

The experimental effort to stream audio into SL form this event was moderately successful, judging from chat feedback from some of the avatars that showed up on NMC Campus to listen in, like “this is very helpful - We have no travel budget here so it makes this possible!” A few shortcomings:

• This was a last minute idea (a week before the event) so there was not anything built in to create interaction between the 2 audiences. Preferably, we like to project a SL image so the people at the real event can “see” the other audience. It also help to have dedicate people who are the RL event and can be in SL at the same time to broker communication. JS Saltwater (Joe Clark) stepped in graciously to help out.
• Another consequence was the audio quality was mixed. It faded and sometimes got distorted. We Because of the lateness of planning and little time to test, our set up was getting a wireless microphone signal from the mixer to my laptop. I think we were n with some interference. Hence the gaps in the recorded bits below and some 10-30 second lapses for the listening audience. Keep your eye on the EDUCAUSE program site, as they will edit a better quality podcast version of the audio recorded with the A/V crew that was on hand

You can find a collection of photos from folks that were there in a flickr pool set up for this event.

For the events of a Second Life focus, we are in awe of how Sarah Robbins in a hands on computer session, took a group of 30 educators new to Second Life in a crash course on movement, communication, avatar modifications, even a little quick building!

Tweaking my avatar in Sarah Robbins’ workshop

And Phil Long of MIT gave a stellar overview of his organizations entry into SL, dealing with aversions to the Terms of Service, issues of branding in SL, and highlighting their efforts to create builds of student residences and a student design competition.

Photo of Phil Long at opening of his session was uploaded into SL for our remote audience to see

For more see the Second Life at MIT web site.

Below you can find some of the audio recordings we managed to save.

Virtual Learning Environments in 3D (Phil Long)

Online Time Consuming Real Time (Whil Piavis, student)

Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Learning Environments for Gen-Z (Gary Bertoline)

Cognition, Learning, and Literacy in Virtual Worlds (Constance Steinkuehler)

Day 1 Recap (Diana Oblinger)

Story filed under: What's Happening

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)