So I arrived at Tampa today around noon and was able to attend the keynote session, but I think the discussions that I had with people individually today proved to be the most beneficial thing I’ve done so far, and I have no doubt that over the course of the weekend that will continue to be the case.

Just based on the few conversations I’ve had today with folks from other universities and businesses using Second Life, I really feel like all of us.. and I mean *ALL* of us need to spend some quality time together. Talking. Listening. Learning.

My position is unique in that while I’m the social networks adviser for the online campus of a large public university, I am not tasked with figuring out how those tools would work in a classroom setting. I don’t have to base decisions on pedagogy, curriculum, or evaluations. I have the freedom to use and explore new technologies with the goal of learning if and how they can be used to build a stronger community of online students, faculty and staff.  While this freedom is something I certainly am beyond thankful for, it does make conferences like SLCC a bit challenging because I feel as though I am here representing an educational institution and therefore the educational track is where I should be, but at the same time so much of what is being talked about in the educational track is based on instruction and courses and getting buy-in to teach courses in SL that I really don’t feel it’s solely where I belong.  Don’t get me wrong, I am so thrilled that so many people are using SL in education and that so many more keep learning about it and making efforts to pave those roads and start using this really powerful tool to help us rethink what a classroom might be – I applaud each and every person taking that step. It’s not easy to be the first person on a campus trying a new technology, learning how to use it and making it happen with limited resources and even more limited support from administrators.  Having workshops and sessions related to getting started and ‘best practices’ are invaluable and providing them is something we have to do.  In my position, though, I’m not sure I get the most benefit from these sessions and so I find myself perusing the scheduled sessions for this weekend and thinking that perhaps the session in the community track on Open Source would be a better fit, or perhaps a session on how to create machinima to better promote our Second Life projects might be something I could learn a lot from.  So I think that this weekend I will pick and choose from all three tracks and meet some new people, learn some new things, and have a different perspective when I return.

I think that’s what I’ve gained so far in just the few short hours I’ve been here: the realization that we all need to communicate more. Business needs to sit down with education and talk.. REALLY talk about what’s going on with education these days.  Education needs to sit down and talk about how to create community and what that entails and education also needs to listen to business and think about what we can learn from them. I’m not just talking Second Life here, I’m talking big picture.

Big topics in education now are the ideas of open educational resources and the sharing of information. Openness, Innovation, Collaboration – all hot topics and yet I sat here today and listened to corporate people ask me if we’re keeping social networking internal and how we’re going to ‘authenticate’ and basically control the discussion and keep things amongst ourselves.  To me, that’s completely missing the point.  The point is not to keep the discussion among ourselves but to open up our community, discussions and content to the world so that everyone can participate, learn, and contribute.

Our world is changing, slowly.. but it’s getting there. It’s not about keeping things closed, and guarding our secrets. It’s about opening up, sharing, and trusting that doing so will make us a better stronger community with new and creative ideas of how to collaborate.  I heard some doubt and negativity today in discussions of interoperability and the idea of combining virtual worlds with each other and having one truly connected metaverse, but I also sensed hope. People want to dream, but they’re afraid.  We need to stop guarding our secrets and start opening up and dreaming a bit.

Today was the wrap-up of Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State and as I sit here now, about a half an hour after the end, I’m starting to reflect on the day. Others have blogged about the day and have talked about the amazing energy that was in the room and I agree (except for that post-lunch slump, but I’ll blame that on the carbs).

One of the people are our lunch discussion mentioned that he was enjoying Summer Camp more than he enjoys the Symposium but he wasn’t sure why. I was thinking about that comment this afternoon and I think I figured out why (for me, at least).

Summer Camp felt like an informational “general session” of a conference, but with the informality and intimacy of a breakout session.

People were participating, sharing experiences, connecting, joining twitter to take part in the ‘backchannel discussion’, voting on questions, submitting questions, taking notes, blogging… all at once, in the same session – BUT… were also participating in a face-to-face environment. All of these things combined really allowed discussion and learning to happen.

This was a large group – we’re not talking 10 people – we’re talking 75-100 people at Summer Camp, but I truly felt like everyone was heard, and that everyone learned something.

Thank you, Allan for taking the lead on this and for allowing the entire community to be a part of the planning, discussion and learning. I am so proud to be a part of things here.

Read a fantastic post this morning about videoconferencing and virtual worlds – which is better for education? Seems virtual is. (surprise, surprise)

This blog post from Campus Technology talks about Sun’s Project Wonderland and the Media Grid. I was in Boston in January for a summit about the Media Grid and posted about that initiative at the time.  It’s a great project and certainly has some exciting potential for education in the coming years.

It’s certainly not time for everyone to abandon all other virtual worlds and run to Project Wonderland and the Media Grid, but it’s exciting to think about what changes lie in the future and how virtual worlds will really start to shape how we learn, interact, and build communities.  With Vivaty’s public beta, Google’s “Lively”, and the announcement that avatars were able to move from one virtual world (Second Life) into another (Open Sim), this is a crazy exciting week for people working with virtual worlds.  So glad to be part of it.

While I appreciate your obvious concern for the well-being of the children of America, and I’m certain that running for re-election in your suburban Chicago district must put an extreme amount of pressure on you, allow me to point out that your newfound disdain for Second Life is a bit puzzling.

I do realize that your campaign managers likely felt that taking a stance against a relatively new, exciting, immersive technology that allows for experiential learning and gives children the opportunity to explore and experience learning in new, creative, and engaging ways was a good idea to aid your re-election campaign. It’s good, sometimes, to be the person standing up and defending our children – pointing out the evils of technology and keeping them safe from all of the bad people on the internet. I would imagine that in your view, places of learning like schools and libraries would definitely not want to use these sorts of things. For all we know, children might learn to work together and solve problems and goodness knows we don’t want that, do we Representative Kirk.

I’m sure that all of the children who have used Second Life in libraries and schools would be really pleased to know that you no longer want that to be available to them. I’m sure that the children involved in programs all over the United States that are interacting with other students would agree that this is a terrible, scary place and they’ve just been waiting for a hero like you to come along and slam those doors of opportunity shut.

I am also intrigued by your comment that we should “take action to warn parents of the similar dangers and sexually explicit content found on Second Life.”. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, Representative Kirk so you may want to have a seat… there is sexually explicit content all over the internet. If you don’t want to see it, you don’t look at it. Shocking, I know. Maybe it’s best if we just cut off our children from the internet completely. We wouldn’t want them to see anything inappropriate and God forbid they might receive a spam email from someone rife with these aforementioned ‘dangers’.

In conclusion, Mark (I can call you Mark, I hope) while I can definitely appreciate the fact that you’re under a lot of stress and pressure in your re-election campaign and I’m SURE that you’re  proposing this legislation  out of the goodness of your heart and your inherent need to stand up and protect our children, but…. you’re way off base here.

I would be more than happy to meet you in Second Life and show you some of this explicit ‘dangerous’ content that you’re so focused on, but I’d also very much appreciate the time and opportunity to show you the incredible, amazing things being done in Second Life – many of which are from libraries and schools all over the world.

Sincerely,
Shannon

P.S. You should really not make such a big deal about this sort of legislation, you kind of look like a dork.

A discussion took place yesterday on the Second Life Educator’s mailing list that quickly turned into a fairly heated argument with each side stating their positions. I truly got to the point where I just didn’t even read the emails anymore and deleted them immediately upon their arrival in my inbox.

The discussion began when a fairly new educator to Second Life asked how she might go about giving her students a quiz in-world.  Someone responded back to her fairly quickly in what was, in my opinion, a judgmental tone asking why she’d want to do that in Second Life vs. just on the web.  He talked about the use of the virtual space and how we should really just use the best tool for the job and maybe that’s the web instead of Second Life if you’re wanting to give a quiz.

In response, another educator called him out on that and referred to several comments he’d made before about these same things and who was he to judge what would be best?

Fast forward about 4 hours and about 30 emails later with an awful lot of unnecessary back-and-forth and now I’m deleting emails on the subject.

I see the point that it really is important to use the best tool for the job and maybe that means that giving a quiz inside Second Life is not the ‘best’ way to do something. However, things like Sloodle (from what I understand) were developed for this purpose. Believe me, I’m all about using the best tool for the job and I’m a firm believer in the fact that what might be the best thing for me to use, might very well NOT be the best tool for you.  That being said, I also completely value the immersiveness of Second Life and virtual worlds and if we’re teaching students in that environment, then I think that sometimes it’s also beneficial to assess their learning in the same space without removing them and testing them on the web.

My frustration with the discussion stems from this – Why are we so quick to judge and tell people what they should be doing because *we* think that’s the best way. Why are we not recognizing that every person has different methods and goals they want to accomplish and why are we not helping them, unconditionally, to reach those goals?

The first week of September is shaping up to be a really interesting and exciting time.  Not only is the Second Life Community Convention being held from September 5-7 in Tampa, FL with a track dedicated to education, but the Virtual Worlds Conference being held in Los Angeles, CA on September 3,4 is also now featuring education as one of the focuses.

It’ll be a busy week with some pretty fantastic ideas, inspiration and connections. I can’t wait.

Today’s my post-TLT recovery day and I’m feeling like there’s so much I want to say about it, but I’m having trouble finding the words to express it.

The keynote from the event was delivered by Lawrence Lessig and was something I was really looking forward to. I did not come away disappointed as it was even more than I’d hoped it would be. The one thing that did surprise me, however, was how emotional his words were for me. I’ve found myself overcome with emotions at other times in my job.. typically when I’m trying to express something that I’m very passionate about, and I think my emotions at the keynote yesterday reflected those same things. I could hear and feel the passion in Lessig’s voice as he talked about creativity and expression and how desperately important it is that we truly *rethink* the way we look at things and create policy. I could feel the energy in the room as we all sat there, and I felt it carry through the day as we broke into our sessions and met, learned from and connected with people from all over our university.

If I had to pick one thing that I will take with me from this symposium, it’s the feeling that I now belong to a community that values the same things Lessig spoke about. People that are energized, connected, and wanting to make changes. Many of the people I connected with at the symposium were people I’d never met face-to-face, but had come to know on twitter in the weeks prior to yesterday’s event. Having met this group online, through a social networking tool added such amazing value to the symposium for me because I was immediately welcomed as part of that group when I arrived and I spent the whole day strengthening my ties with that group and connecting with others that I didn’t previously know.

In my first session, we talked about encouraging social networking for our students to allow them to make connections online, outside the classroom. As a social networks adviser, I obviously believe in the power of online connections and I have a little different perspective than a faculty member who’s considering using these tools in the classroom. There was a woman sitting in front of me who truly did not understand how using social networking in her classroom would benefit her students. She also felt that it was rude for us to sit there using twitter and text and chat to connect with others and share what was going on with our session while we were there. She felt it was more important for us to listen and pay attention to the speaker and not use these technologies during the session. It made for some very interesting discussion and that carried throughout the day. I met that same woman again in the afternoon, and she said “So if I were going to sign up for this twitter thing.. how would I go about doing that?”. I laughed, and several people around explained to her how to do that, and we all shared cupcakes and laughter and connected again. I love to think that after a day at TLT, seeing how all of the ‘twitter’ peeps were connected, conversing, and learning.. she felt that perhaps indeed there might be some value to using it. I truly hope to see her on twitter soon. I’d love to connect with her.

Online communities built through social networking are synergistic, powerful, amazing groups that have the power to change lives, policy, and perspectives. Sometimes we just have to build these communities one person at a time.. and that’s fine with me.

This Saturday I’ll be attending the TLT Symposium here at Penn State.  I’ll be presenting a poster on social networking and community building for online students and I’m psyched about meeting so many Penn State colleagues that are doing amazing and interesting things. This isn’t a symposium, it’s a party!