This week felt very comfortable and familiar to me… as we were experimenting in Second Life and Virtual Worlds.
I took the introduction seriously, and attended the full session… and did the exercises. I tried not to appear too much as a smart alex when Frank Lassard and Pancha Enzyme were helping new users. Everyone did very well, as I know its really tricky when people first start.. and the last thing they want is someone showing off too much.
I looked at the EduNation regions Second Life and commented on those areas and how they are set up as part of the set work for IDEL11. There was time to read the core papers and one of the secondary readings ahead of a tutorial to discuss the content. the session, not surprisingly, was mostly taken up with help to people still getting to grips with Second Life. But some points about the paper were made, and I transferred the relevant points to the discussion forum on WebCT to archive.
ULOE11 was a cerebral week with lots of philosophy and cognitive psychology readings… I am getting through them gradually. Hundreds of discussion forum items need thought before responses. I am using my ideas on a essay topioc to focus my interest in these readings, makign notes as I go along.
Digital Cultures EDC11 was fun as usual… this week we were creating a digital artifact… and I went to town again… spending most of last weekend doing the backstop programming of new non-player character (NPC) and avatar cloning facilities in OpenSim to get a background for the artifact. Its a live “show” on the OpenSim-based Openvue grid. It has multiple layers of meaning for me and uses my usual mix of type and layout as well as imagery to convey my interests. I crated a wide variety of re-usable assets, e.g. portraits of my avatars in the various outfits I have used over the last 6 years, as part of the work. I created a rationale section and “in progress build” section to show how the artifact was created. the full information is at http://atate.org/ai/ai/ Commenting on the artifacts created by classmates is now ongoing for the rest of the week and weekend.
Background work on setting up a Moodle 2.x Virtual learning Environment at a server in AIAI has continued… as we needed to do background work to update our Apache/PHP/MySQL setup; Now that is done, we have a working up to date Moodle to try out ourselves and with a new PhD student whose interests are in Intelligent Virtual learning Environments (a project we call I-LE).