NMC Campus Observer

Two For One Buzz Sessions

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Apr 16, 2007 11:28pm

Due to some internal mixups on announcing times, we ended up posting a meeting time for today’s Teacher Buzz session as both 9am and 6pm. Fortunately, we had enough people showup at both to have two rounds of great conversations.

Both took place at the Dreams Community, where currently there is a fair going on with all kinds of booths from educators and people working with helping agencies. It is well worth a visit!

In the morning a group of maybe 10-12 shared a wide ranging set of discussions on teaching in SL - including the pitfalls of building replicas of RL, sharing favorite locations in SL. communities, impact of voice for communcation… a few quotes:

One of my challenges with talking about SL to colleagues is in explaining its value in terms of the traditional work environment - it seems like most of the online meetings and conferences I attend in SL are “about SL” - do you know what I mean - it can be elusive. smoke and mirror stuff.

One interesting thing about people’s conceptions of what is possible in sl - is that sl can be used as some magic pill that will transform the structure of community/learning/teaching….

I think that’s interesting as my experience of SL so far is that it can accentuate RL experiences and emotions. Most students I kow are stressed about school - so why add more stress in a virtual environ! This is our challenge - how to make the experiences new…

See the full session transcript.

Then at 6pm PDT, Desideria Stockton arrived to lead a discussion on learning communities in SL — she started off with a great activity of people jotting ideas on notecards and sharing them (sounds like on of the tried and true Classroom Assessment Techniques!).

With more discussion, she challenged us :

We also need it to hold feedback from teachers who are using the tools we are just a bunch of professors playing a game. Conference meetings like this connect us and establish community similar to that which we have in real life by virtue of assocations. I belong to the MLA and NCTW and those are “valid”. What we do here isn’t “valid” yet because it is so new and some of us have a hard time convicing our people back home that this is worth it.

So if our college buys us an islands we have to show it is used through data and assessment that is the bottom line. So… those of us with land get caught is a trap we want all the people to come to our land so we can show our bosses, “Look… see… people come.” But then we never leave our land because we dont want to get caught having fun somewhere else.

There was quite a lot of active discussion here too- be sure to check the full meeting transcript.

Two for one meetings at the Buzz today!

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz

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