Sloan-C SL-NET Brown Bag – Jan. 9

I’m hoping to revive SL-NET this spring.  I haven’t had time or energy to do much with it the last year because of my mother’s illness and death.

Our first activity for 2009 will be a brown bag discussion on Fri., Jan. 9, at 11:00 a.m. SLT (PST) at my castle.  We’ll plan to end at noon.

I thought we could discuss Twitter and other microblogging tools:  what they are, how they work, and how they can be used for classes and professional development.  If you have other ideas, let me know.  We can certainly pick another topic that day.

Presenting at Conferences

I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to try presenting at a conference or two next year. There are a few scheduled that I should be able to attend:

• Colorado TELECOOP, April 16-18, Breckenridge (proposals due January 26)
• Colorado Community College Conference on Composition, April 18, Greeley (proposals due January 31)
• Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange 2008, June 5-6, Orem, Utah (proposals due Feburary 1)

Obviously, I’ll have to choose between the TELECOOP Conference and the 5Cs. Why did they have to schedule them at the same time?

Sloan-C Second Life Initiative

I’ve with working with the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) on a new initiative to hold networking sessions in Second Life so folks in higher ed can get to know each other better, exchange information and, at the same time, discuss some of the issues that have been raised in the SLED listserv.

Anyone who would like to participate should complete the questionnaire at http://www.sloanconsortium.org/networking_discussion/.

Sloan-C Workshop

From June 20 through yesterday, June 29, I’ve been participating in an online workshop offered by the Sloan Consortium titled “Learning Online 2.0: Engaging, Interacting and Syndicating Applications.” I was actually surprised at how much I already know about web 2.0 applications.

As part of the workshop, each participant had to review a web 2.0 application and post the review in a wiki. I reviewed Second Life since I’ve been spending a lot of time there lately.

I’m going to include part of my review here because these are things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

Educational Potential

As many people are realizing, SL has a lot of potential for educational uses. (Dozens of colleges, universities, libraries, and professional organizations are currently using SL.) Some of the ways SL can be used have been documented on the SLEducation (Second Life in Education) wiki. For me the greatest potential of SL is for networking and my own professional development.


Cautions

The lack of web access is a definite disadvantage for students who do not own computers and depend on a school’s computer labs, even if the institution is fully supporting the educational use of SL and permits the software to be downloaded to all computers on campus. The software is also frequently updated, which would make maintenance on campus more time consuming.

. . . As I mentioned, SL has a lot of potential, but we need to be careful not to try to do things in SL that can be done better with other tools or in other venues.

SL Memberships

In addition to CCC SLED, of which I’m the only member right now, and SLolar Central, I’ve also joined the following profession-related groups in Second Life:

• Best Practices in Education
• Early Music Group
• ISTE: Educational Technology Association
• Literature Alive!
• NMC Guests
• NMC Teachers Buzz
• Parish of Reading Primley (Renaissance Island residents)
• Renaissance Island Dancers
• Sloan-C

Sloan-C Workshop

I joined the Sloan Consortium as an individual member so I could get a discount on a workshop they’re offering this summer. The title of the workshop is Learning 2.0: 20 Engaging, Interacting and Syndicating Applications. I’ve been interested in Web 2.0 applications, and this sounds really interesting. In addition to the workshop content, I’ll be using Elluminate Live! and Moodle, so I’ll have a good opportunity to become familiar with them.