EF-ODL workshop? Err… Play again please?
October 8th, 2008 • MUVEs
I’ve attended the EF-ODL Seminar last Thursday, in Charleroi and (tried to) animate a workshop on the use of MUVEs for teaching and learning. The experience made me reflect about forgetting public events for a while and to stay in my comfort zone, near to the school, where no babysitters and their last minute problems, can ruin my day: my 1st painting class, my tête-à-tête diner or my presentation in a conference. So I was absent the first day. But managed to be present the second day, and arrived just in time for a tweet and 3 glasses of wine with the friendly people of the Koning Willem I College.
Rush, sunny day in Brussels, train, cold, rainy day in Charleroi. On the up side of the seminar, we had open wifi everywhere and good wine. On the down side, a part from the very slow connection, I missed socialisation spaces with chairs and tables for people just to sit, tweet and exchange with peers. Also the diet buffet, up or down side? Up, as the few carrots on the table were a successful carrot for conversation around the table!
For this workshop, I haven’t prepared a plan B and just intended to run the first part of the session based in basic skills development through a cooperative game and then an open discussion about the MUVEs affordances for education. Without a decent Internet connection, I decided to drop the in-world session, opened my computer and started to pull some resources from my Flickr photos of educational spaces, tools I have developed for the macro and micro analysis of teaching within MUVEs and bit of research articles in preparation about good practices. I knew it wasn’t great and prepared at all. But that was my rabbit in the hat for that session with awful Internet connection. And some participants, like Faraday van der Linden, Wilfred Rubens and Ruben Bellens were generous enough to help me with questions, comments and engage with the discussion.
During the session, I promised to the participants, with two different skills level (newbies and more experienced), to run two distance workshops so they wouldn’t lose their time and I will not waist my efforts of preparation. Here we are then!
First, the tools that I presented in the workshop:
- Assessing factors towards the successful intregration of ICT . There is also a blog post from Steve on the subject, with insightful comments from Ray Tolley, Steven and myself: Assessing factors in the introduction of ICT in formal settings
- The list of affordances of teaching and learning in Second life. Please watch this presentation we prepared for the OCC 2007: Making the right MUVE (p.12):
- Facilitating social interaction ( including the notion of the death of distance), social presence and cooperation;
- Visualisation;
- Contextualisation;
- Exploring the relation with ‘doing’ in the physical world (e.g. designing, building and scripting);
- Informal learning opportunities e.g. language based communities;
- Affective nature of immersion, empathy and related motivational aspects;
- Simulation and experiential learning;
- Roleplay or taking on ‘new’ roles;
- Strong virtual communities and identity formation (coherence around groups, sub-cultures and geography);
- Identity play;
- Ownership of learning – opportunities for content production that are both individual and owned.
- Teachers perceptions about good and bad practices in Second Life. Here I used fragments of a research paper that I’ll present in Online Educa this year. I’ll post about this soon. Promised!
- Analysis grid for hands-on workshops in SL (annexed here). I discovered how awful is to present this material to people. Although we have carried out an in-depth analysis of hands on workshops, each criterion of the grid needs to be illustrated with pictures, detailed explanations and examples. A series of posts to come?!
- Disaster stories about teaching and learning in Second Life. Again another piece of work in progress. I’ve started a process of collection of teaching stories in virtual worlds, is all about narrative research: my main centre of interest at the present. Here you can find one disaster story by me: A teaching nightmare and its comments: A comment to ‘When it all goes wrong!’ by Eloise Pasteur. Others will be published later. If you have your own disaster story to tell, please contact me directly. I also accept anonymous stories. I am working on a formal publication of this material.
“Discovering SL without pain”, a distance workshop for newbies!
“Educators can also have some fun”:
“Educators can also have some fun” is a distance workshop for more experienced users who want to discover via a cooperative game some teaching tools in SL.
Interested by teaching and learning within MUVEs? Why don’t consider participating in the MUVEnation peer to peer learning programme? The programme is open to European teachers willing to explore the potentialities of virtual worlds for education. Here nobody is “The tutor”. This is an emerging field. And MUVEnation will offer a collective experience where we, practitioners and researchers, will think together about education, rethink the use of technology, share good practices, exchange expertise and build solutions (learning patterns) that address our own educational challenges.
Fil des billets
Dear Marga,
don’t be to harsh on yourself. allthough not sufficient internet connexion, the workshop (or better, the demon you held) was very convincing.
I particulary like the didactical reflections and fundation you have on using SL.
Most educators would jump in without the nessecary relection.
So you convinced me that it is worth exploring for future use.
keep on the good work and don’t hesitate to give other workshops !