Category Archives: 3D Worlds

Virtual Learning and Teen Second Life Project

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Skoolaborate is a place for teens to create and be part of a global educational community. The Skoolaborate islands are a private education project on the Teen Grid in Second Life, having been established in 2007. Teens are the primary builders of the island while teachers and students together run, host, and organize learning and social events.

Our boys at St Joseph’s College have been invited to consider joining a small co-curricular program which will allow them to create an avatar and join the students from other schools around the world learning to work and play in this immersive 3D virtual environment. This program will integrate curriculum and digital technologies into unique collaborative learning experiences in a virtual 3D environment. This is cutting-edge technology, and represents an important development in learning technologies for the 21st century.

Several universities in Australia and around the world have established or are working to develop learning programs within the Second Life environment, and there are also a number of Teen Life projects in the education sector in the UK and the USA. Skoolaborate is the first Australia Teen Life project with partner schools from USA, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan.

I believe that our boys will have a tremendous opportunity to explore and learn to manipulate 3D virtual environments. They will develop programming and visual design skills. They will have the opportunity to collaborate on global curriculum projects, and interact with students in different cultures and different environments. Finally, our boys will also learn to create machinima – taking established techniques from traditional film-making and applying them to the virtual environment of Skoolaborate.

Creativity, technology and innovation is at the heart of Skoolaborate – providing a technology rich and very 21st century learning experience for my students.

Here is a video that is a machinima production about the creation of virtual environments, and which demonstrates the blend of technology, music and art, showing the technical scripting and 3D techniques, which makes learning so exciting and different in virtual environments.

Watch the World at Youtube, or for those who have YouTube blocked at school I have loaded the video here – let it begin to load, then play and enjoy the magic!

Virtual sanity online?

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British children are spending more than 20 hours a week online, most of it at social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and are in effect being “raised online”, according to research from the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Read the Guardian’s Warning to parents over children ‘being raised online’ for more information about the report and the recommendations for government intervention.

I stopped to think. What are global educators doing then? Uhmmm ….. spending rather a lot of time online as well. We have a lot of commentary about various online tools, and the pros and cons for teachers. The blogosphere is full of it.

In my case I can confess to spending a huge amount of time in Second Life this last Easter break catching up with Australian and international colleagues, talking about professional learning issues that are central to our daily work.

St Joseph’s College has a professional base on the island of Jokaydia, and our Convention centre is something of a conversation hub for newbies and experienced Second Life educators alike. This spills over to Heyjude Hall – a space created for the same purpose when I was working with the Catholic Education Office last year.

The collaboration takes the cake for ingenuity and flexibility in Second Life. The boundaries are unlimited, and don’t require special skype conferences, ustreamTV events or flashmeeting setups. Just drop in, and see who’s around! We’re very lucky to have such a creative space as Jokaydia to gather – not affiliated with any particular insitution, and therefore a gathering place for many organisations and individuals alike. You are welcome to visit the Island of jokaydia where you can engage in videos and podcasts, slideshows, virtual books, drums and balloon rides. Visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/jokaydia/113/150/23

During the weekend some of us gathered on Jokaydia I near Heyjude Hall (SLURL) and talked with Al Upton about the Mini Legends. Australians and international educators made up the group.Reports and blog posts have been running hot over the Department of Education Order for Closure of Al’s mini-Legends blogs – one of the best global grass-roots initiatives around. It is embarrassing to have such things happening in Australia. We must all lend our support to Al who is as dedicated and as energetic as any teacher I know.

Join us at TALO’s sypmposium online “Learning in the 21st century” on May 2nd, either physically or virtually, and listen to Al Upton, and discuss these issues in more depth.

Last evening saw me again talking with some colleagues at St Joseph’s Convention Centre on Jokaydia II (SLURL). We soon teleported to talk ‘conferences’ and content for presentations.

Here are the three muskateers – from the left, Tempest Nitely (Melanie Hughes, AIS); Slammed Aaybe (ICT co-ordinator, Marist High School) and Heyjude Jenns (me!) talking with Lernys Reino (Fernando Santamaria) Universidad de León, Spain, as Lernys prepared for his conference presentation on “Introduction to Second Life and possibilities for education”. Learnys asked us to line up for a photo shoot. Nice one.

I first met Learnys at the Edublog awards last year – on Jokaydia of course!

Virtual collaboration – with a little help from CISCO

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Recently I have spent a great deal of time exploring and building in virtual environments in preparation for taking a group of our boys into Teen Life in the world of Skoolaborate. We’re gearing up for this to begin in Term 2.

In case you don’t know, Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS, wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students. By providing a common place to learn and share ideas, educators can leverage the power of new media to engage students and provide opportunities that might otherwise not exist. Using a group of islands in SecondLife, Skoolaborate helps students to collaborate on social action projects that benefit students who are less privileged than themselves. These projects integrate curriculum and digital technologies into collaborative global actions.

So it was with much pleasure that I attended a Cisco Live event this morning (6am Sydney time) at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage. It was Time for a (Tech) Chat!

My wise colleague and friend John presented his talk on Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World. John says that the slides he used in the Second Life presentation are very basic – text-only – slides (actually they were great in SL!). Full versions of the presentation are available for download- one in Keynote (17.5mb), and one in Powerpoint (15mb). Also Cisco Live: Networkers Online will also have something available. I highly recommend downloading them and absorbing the content, or listening to John’s presentation when it becomes available at Cicso Live.

John very kindly let me come up on stage for a photo shoot! 🙂

Visuwords – online graphical dictionary

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Visuwords is a very pretty, very interesting dictionary and thesaurus!

Use the random button, or type in the word that you are searching for. Watch the swirl as the words and meanings emerge. A very nice tool to catch kids interest – and to show the connections and interlacing relationships of words in our English language.

  • Magic carpet ride …. to NECC!

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    If you’ve noticed the new by-line on my blog header then let me fill you in on the source of this. This comes from my guest column “Learning is a Multimodal Conversation,” appearing in the Blogger’s Cafè section of ISTE’s December-January issue of Leading & Learning with Technology.

    I know some international colleagues won’t have access to download this short column so I’m providing a copy of the article here.

    So it seems that ISTE is a bit of theme for me this year…..or more correctly, the NECC conference in San Antonio. I’ve visited ISTE HQ quite a few times, and have enjoyed a warm welcome each time. magiccarpet.jpgI really enjoyed meeting up with Docent KJ Hax (Kevin Jarrett) who took Sue Waters and myself on a fabulous magic carpet ride around ISTE island and beyond. Kevin blogged about this adventure at When Virtual Worlds Collide!

    Today I chatted with Clare Lane (Lisa Linn), first on twitter, then a bit of skype chat, and then ended up dropping into ISTE HQ to ‘meet’ her. I stayed at the ISTE social, and had a great campfire chat led by KJHax and his friends.

    Meanwhile, I’m busy planning my trip to San Antonio, and am really looking forward to meeting so many of the people from my read/write world.

    OH, and I’ll be joining a fabulous group of teacher librarians to present a panel session at the conference. I’m joining with Joyce Valenza, Cathy Nelson, Carolyn Foote, Diane Cordell and Anita Beaman – which will be a bit of magic for me for sure!

    That’s what I love about the holidays! When I am back at school I won’t be able to stop in the middle of my day and go and relax ‘in world’ or just launch skye for a quick chat before diving off to the real world shops for some fun and mischief or wandering off to the terrace to do a bit more reading.

  • Hejude Jenns fashion preview

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    As we’re not travelling or going away anywhere these summer holidays, I’ve had lots of excuses for mucking around online instead.  That’s still having holiday fun isn’t it?

    Do you like my Vogue magazine cover? sporting my latest skin and ‘look’ for my avatar Heyjude Jenns? She’s a fashionable gal, and has been doing a lot of shopping in the SL Christmas New Year sales!

    You can make you own fake magazine covers at MagMyPic – and they don’t have to be fashion mags either 🙂 as there are 12 different magazine covers to choose from.

    Introduction to Second Life – Edublog awards

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    I’d like to share this great overview of Second Life from Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald once again, and recommend their wiki Second Life in Education. Both Jokaydia Island and the wiki have been nominated for an Edublog award.

    I have joined Jokaydia in this great Second Life adventure – how else can I develop my understandings so as to nurture the learning opportunities for my students in classroom and library learning environments? 🙂

    Thanks to Jo and Sean for their great mentorship in this field!

    Introduction to Second Life

  • Celebrate Edna’s 10th birthday in Second Life

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    Recently Kerry Lorette Johnson from EducationAU.limited sent me an alert via Facebook about a big birthday event! My avatar, Heyjude Jenns will be dropping by!

    Education Network Australia (Edna) has been providing free online resource collections and collaborative networks for the education and training community in Australia for 10 years! This is worth celebrating – and the celebration includes holding an event in Second Life on Tuesday 27 November — and they’d love for us all to be there!

    Here are the details:

    “Official” start time is 2:45pm Adelaide, South Australia time – or check this time for your time zone in World clock time.

    The birthday event will be on the island of Terra Icognita: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/157/107/33

    They’ll have free tedna -shirts, virtual cake and champagne and, after a live broadcast of speeches including the launch of myedna. Afterwards your avatar can rock out to popular Second Life band Space Junky.

    When you teleport over, there will be a glowing poster on the floor of the gazebo with the edna logo and an arrow, and there will be helpers to guide you on your way. Kerry’s avatar is Pandora Kurrajong, but she’ll be busy channeling the audio from the presentations so you might not get too chat with her.

    So look for Spotters Square – the name of the island quadrant they’ll be using. They’re promising a decent size stage!

    Kerry has created a Twitter channel for the edna 10th birthday celebrations. The address is: http://twitter.com/edna10

    The RSS feed subscription link is:
    http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10456232.rss

     More about Edna

    For educators, the most visible products of  edna are the web site and the services available through edna Groups, edna Sandpit Groups and edna Lists as well as the workshops delivered by the staff of education.au, the ministerially owned company that manages the edna web sites.

    As part of the 10 year celebration you can catch up with a talk with current education.au CEO Greg Black, former CEO Gerry White, General Manager of Business Development Garry Putland and edna Communications Officer Kerrie Smith about the past, present and future of edna and e-learning.

     Good stuff aussies!

  • Teacher as Learner

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    Konrad Glogowski (Konrad March) put together a short video of his virtual meet-up in Second Life with pre-service teachers from Brigham Young University. November 19, 2007. Amongst many ideas, Konrad shows us how we have to redefine our “teacherly voice”. He writes a great deal more about his Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers, and student-teacher relationships and technology.

    You will agree with his statement that –

    Needless to say, as the new technologies open up new vistas for exploration and personal engagement, educators struggle with how they can best meet these traditional expectations and adapt their practice to suit the new reality of a more conversational and participatory approach to learning brought about by the new tools of web 2.0.

    We can learn a great deal from the work that Konrad is doing. Though I haven’t had much time to exchange ideas with Konrad, he is a fellow resident on the island of Jokaydia, where Heyjude Jenns (me) and Slammed Aayeb ( Dean Groom ) from Parramatta Marist High School are testing the future possibilities.  Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald were involved in Konrad’s session too!  Learn more about there work at the Second Life in Education wiki.  (Good on you aussie educators!)

    It is our aim to investivate just how these future environments will shape (or is it re-shape?) our ‘teacherly voice’ and learning environments – a clear and exciting focus for 2008.

     

    This video was originally shared on blip.tv by K.Glogowski with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

    CNN enters Second Life

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    Just as CNN asks its real-life audience to submit I-Reports — user-generated content submitted from cell phones, computers, cameras and other equipment for broadcast and online reports — the network is encouraging residents of Second Life to share their own “SL I-Reports” about events occurring within the virtual world.

    CNN citizen journalism everywhere you turn! It is interesting to speculate how many teachers are abreast of citizen journalism trends, and the impact of these types of initiatives.

    Read the report or watch this introductory video from CNN.