Second Life Best Practices in Education 2007

Last Friday I attended a session of the Second Life Best Practices in Education conference in world. I had just sat my avatar down 5 minutes before the start time when the dreaded mandatory log-off in 5 minutes message came through. Once that little hiccup was resolved, and my avatar was re-seated, the presentation started. It was very interesting in that the speaker's voice was piped through as well, adding to the unearthly experience. It was also my first time seeing a whiteboard in action, and I was taking notes. One little quirk was the fact that it took a couple of seconds to for each new screen to rez. It wasn't terribly bad, just a bit odd--I wonder how a real student would react to that.

The gist of the session was profiling a professor's experiences with her three class sections using SL assignments and also meeting them in world with online office hours. Her classes are more like systems engineering and such, but I can see where it could go with information literacy classes. I had wanted to "go" to the action learning session, but the timing was weird.

I also had a chance to check out the poster sessions and also the exhibitors, which was pretty cool. Still haven't gone through my virtual swag though.

So far I can see a few ways of adding IL into a virtual class.

• have a librarian embedded in with a class taking place in SL (and the librarian would embed library resources as much as possible)
• have a "game" like that one sim (I can't remember the name just now) that is set up like myst (scattered clues and very self directed discovery type game)
  
• have real life IL sessions in a second life classroom.
  

I've read in other places that people are discussing what IL means in second life--it strikes me that this ties in with maybe expanding IL instruction in libraries to include teaching students how to use Second Life (and other software).

SL buzz meeting

So, I went to my first SL meeting in-world last week. Apart from the disorienting feeling of coming into a meeting cold and having to catch up, there were some unique hazards that don't normally come up during a meeting--like having your avatar slump as if asleep (I've never fallen asleep in a meeting) and also interesting animal avatars lurking nearby and other avatars flying around. I was merely "listening" and so read the conversation intently, although about half of it was somewhat incomprehensible for me.

It's a pretty mindblowing experience though. Information literacy got mentioned fleetingly, though from what I remember it was in the context of finding information on Second Life, in world. (that is how I understood it at least--I don't have the transcript in front of me.) Which, to this mind at least, is a huge jump.

Back from Spring Break! Upcoming Workshop!

And I hope everyone had a very good spring break this year. We're all back to our classes, as the high season for papers approaches.

It also appears to be high season for conferences. It should be quite exciting. I myself am going to Computers in Libraries 2007, and am planning to post while I'm gone. Yours truly also intends to post commentary on some of the Second life happenings for librarians. (What's Second Life?)

So why this sudden surge of interest? As usual, while reading another blog I came across this article: INFORMATION LITERACY IN THE AGE OF AMATEURS How Google and Web 2.0 affect librarians’ support of Information Literacy...........which is a new angle on everything. I am not going to rehash and enumerate every single item in this article--there's plenty of commentary on Web 2.0 and libraries (just go and google it and you'll see). But I will point out that the paper discusses extending IL instruction to include showing students how to access and evaluate information from Blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 content. This ties into yet another cool ebook that talks about new literacies.

Where am I going with all this? Well..........all this good stuff (and more) is going to end up in some form or another in the upcoming workshop Using Blogs and RSS Feeds for Research April 5 at 10-11am, in room 101.