NMC Campus Observer

An Overactive Teachers Buzz!

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jun 27, 2007 11:05am

Sometimes at our NMC Campus Teachers Buzz meetings we talk a lot about teaching and learning in Second Life– it was a nice change to actually be part of the action last Monday night.

We owe a big thanks to Desideria Stockton and her DeSales University students who on Monday night allowed our NMC Teachers Buzz group to take part in a class activity over at the Women of Brewster Place classroom. Plus another thanks to Eloise Pasteur, builder and scripter on this sim, who was there to help and guide our group– a bunch of educators charged with acting like students.

Again this session was highly active (see the event chat log) with Professor Desi deftly coordinating us through two activities related to understanding and explaining literary terms.

The point of the lesson was to teach students that technology can not minimize content (quality, depth, etc.). This was done by using two activities geared toward the learning of terminology used to assess literature.

In the first part, participants were charged with looking up definitions of said terms, writing them as notecards, and hiding them around the sim. In the second part, we were to work as teams to find questions and gather definitions as answers, aiming to get the right match, by dropping them in our team barrel.

Perhaps we all got up in the competition part, but the real purpose was not in getting “ther most correct” but researching, avoiding plagiarism, and providing citations. I think our participants can use some remediation!

In the end, we were guided to an assessment tool (a giant apple), ore or less an SL scripted quiz, and Desi has shared the results for our group.

This was a fabulous format for our group, and hopefully we can mix this mode of meeting into future Buzz sessions.

Eloise Pasteur and Desideria Stockton

Thanks again to Desi and Eloise for inviting us to this session, which was “overactive” in a good sense! To learn more about Professor Stockton’s classes and amny shared resources, see the Literature Alive wiki.

And remember, we are fishing for ideas for future sessions- thanks to those who have stepped forward, as in August we have confirmed a visit to one of the best Sl education resources, form Sean McDunnough and Jokay Wollingong in Australia and a chance to see a student built Timeline of Earth History from the University of Arizona.

Story filed under: Teacher's Buzz,Teaching and Learning

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)