Pandæmonium

Last night I attended the first Teachers' Buzz Session on the NMC Campus in Second Life.  The group's focus is on teaching and learning in Second Life.  While NMC is sponsoring the meetings, they're not setting the agenda.  As a result we all spent a bit of time during last night's one-hour session quietly waiting for someone to steer the cnversation.

Eventually we decided to share ideas for future conversations.  The group is going to meet every other Monday at 6 PM SLT (there is some talk of finding a time that's easier for people in the European Union to attend).

The idea of holding a class in a virtual world is interesting but I need something specific to really appreciate it.  Last week Gardner told me how he'd like to someday assign the creation of a performance of Shakespeare's plays in the Globe.  What would students build?  Where would they focus – on the environment, the action, or something else?  What could they teach him?  It's a compelling vision but the tools to make something like this happen need to be much easier to use before a project like this could happen.

These days it's hard for me to imagine much more than using virtual space as a way to bring students together outside of the classroom or to bring people who are geographically separated.  Listening in to the Teachers' Buzz will hopefully give me more ideas.

You can see a transcript of the conversation here, and photos from the event are here.

Next meeting is September 4.

Technorati Tags: buzz, nmc, nmc-campus, Second Life

Here's an interesting new service: Tourist Remover will take the tourists out of your pictures.  If you've got a series of sequential images of essentially the same shot, you can submit them all to the Tourist Remover service and they'll compare the images and take out the transient features.

It's free, but they're willing to take your money if you want better service.  Might be worth a look.

Kudos to Boing Boing for mentioning this.

Technorati Tags: digital images

If you haven't had the chance to watch any of the videos yet, be sure to take a look at TEDTalks.  TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design.  It seems to be a very exclusive conference, but this year they're sharing some of their content on the internet.  So far I've watched Al Gore, David Pogue and Tony Robbins and they've all been great.

Al Gore is doing a follow up to an earlier presentation at the conference.  I think that presentation is much like the one I've heard about in An Inconvenient Truth.  In the presentation he discusses what each of us can do to make things better while we're waiting for the government to catch on.  David Pogue talks about software design.  My favor

ite part is when he explains the difference between Microsoft and Apple in software design.  Tony Robbins was surprisingly interesting, even if he didn't have enough time to cover his material.

Next I'm going to watch Sir Ken Robinson on education.  If it's anything like the first three presentations, I'm sure it will be great.

I've tried to get involved in Second Life. The NMC Campus is great – I enjoyed being a virtual participant during the NMC Summer Conference. But there have been bumps in the road and the most recent one is sufficient for me to cancel my account.

• The first thing I didn't like about NMC was that they require some hook by which they can charge you just to create the free account. I appreciate the desire to keep bots from populating the world with spam, but they could have done it some other way. Certainly Google did. But Second Life is at its heart a money making venture for Linden Labs. The beautiful world they have created was simply a means to that end. I appreciate their desire to make money but they've focused too much on that for me to be comfortable with them.
• When I created my account I logged in, crashed, logged in again, and found myself in a porn district. I had to create my account before I could be added to the NMC Campus group, but while I was waiting for that, I ended up in an environment that's unacceptable for teaching and learning. I'm not going to ask UR students to get an account if that's what they're going to see when they log in. I hope the NMC can find a way to address this issue someday.
• Today the final straw: the application now allows everyone to know if you've got a credit card behind your account. Just right-click, choose Profile, and you can see if it's a credit card, PayPal or a cell phone that makes their account work. What's the point of that? Were so many people defrauding each other that now you have to know how each player is funded?

I'm sure Linden Labs has some logic behind their decision to implement this feature. I can't think of any reason I'd accept.

So I'm gone.

Goodbye, Second Life. Bon chance, NMC Campus.

Technorati Tags: nmc2006

Mary Alice Ball, from the School of Library and Information Science at the Indiana University at Indianapolis presented. She teaches information policy there, which includes issues, stakeholders and influences. She wanted future librarians to understand that technology is a catalyst for change. The nature of content is changing. Content is moving away from text, for example. Our roles are changing. Librarians have been intermediaries between content creators and consumers. Not anymore. And policy always lags behind the technology.

Students have had a passive approach to their education and she wanted to change this. She wanted students to experience content creation as well as consumption. She wants students to take risks, and to be open to the unexpected.

There was a good mix of students, and the class met half-online and half in the classroom. They used Breeze and their course management system. There were two teams, into which students self-selected. Policy team and technology team. Students felt safe to risk joining the technology team even if they felt it was their weakness.

She added podcasts and streaming media. She'd been promised iPods for the class, but it ended up not working out in time (death by committee). There were traditional readings and non-tradiitonal readings. Lots of discussion online and in the classroom. Guest speakers in person and online (MSN Messenger)

A student proposed a podcast project, and she turned it into a vodcast (keeping up with Purdue). Collaboration was also key to the course's success. One student had real problems collaborating, and left the class. The remaining students created a web site (Joomla CMS, discussion forums & IM, papers, abstracts and weblinks). Close interplay took place between the technology team and the policy team.

Students were challenged with limited contact and limited structure for the class overall. By having students create information content while learning, the class was recursive. Students opted to restrict access to their content. They also learned that technology rules over policy – the code determines what can happen, not the policy. They also learned that consumers are overwhelmed by the amount of content to be consumed. Consumers also feel intimidated by the lack of control. They learned that authority is unclear and that librarians need to assume more responsibility to educate themselves and others.

Question: did you use wikis or blogs? No. The students didn't feel that wikis would give them the type of control and structure they wanted (while our presenter said they understood wikis, I seriously doubt this is the case based on this comment). As for blogs, she thought the students would put a blog up, but the technology team was overwhelmed with the amount of work they had, and it didn't happen. Mary Alice has decided not to try using wikis or blogs this next time she teaches the class.

I followed up on the reasons not to use a wiki, and without explicitly discussing the matter, she felt that it was too much for them to learn. Videos were captured and edited by Mary as well, so the student work for the course essentially was content in the Joomla CMS.

Technorati Tags: nmc2006