King’s Corner
It’s not just academic.

Aliza Sherman notes the cycle of Second Life hype, followed by SL bashing, followed by more hype, followed by declarations that SL is dead. Not so, she says, in “Second Life Is Social Media.” It’s not about education, but it is about the nature of the medium, and much of it has implications for education and other activities in SL, including the downsides. Take a look.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday featured Michael Demers, a geography professor at New Mexico State University, talking about how he uses Second Life to help his students learn more effectively. You can listen to the segment online.

Of course, so far I haven’t been able to get it to play myself. [sigh] Your luck may be better.

Update: I managed to get it to play. Worth listening to!

One of our own will be conducting a workshop for faculty across all of Second Life interested in using SL for teaching. This notice went out yesterday from the Community Colleges in SL group to all its members:

Group Notice From: Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks

Hi Everyone,
We are canceling this Wedneday’s meeting in favor of a teachshop on Monday 12/8/08 by Travis Willsmere of Pellissippi State Community College. Travis has wide experience in-world and will be sharing some of his knowledge with us. Landmark will be sent soon so watch for it. I hope you all are well and surviving finals! Pip

I will post a link to the site, along with the exact time, when it becomes available.

You know, I can find more in the first five minutes I’m awake every day that needs doing than I have time to get done all day.

Without going into all the links involved in finding this (thanks, Greg, for getting me started!), I want to share with you a great resource especially for the community college faculty who read this blog. If you have Second Life installed on the machine you’re sitting at, you should be able to go to the CCSL presence by following this link:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%203/81/151/25

You need to also find the group and join it for free.

They have a lot of resources for teaching in SL, and as nearly as I can tell, they are somehow connected with the EduIsland folks who can provide space for teachers who want to use SL, but whose institutions do not yet have Island or other space for them. I am way behind on how this works, but I will post more information when I get it.

In the meantime, you probably also want to check out their Web site, a Wiki with tons of useful information.

I sometimes miss the obvious. The SL wiki has been under development for quite some time, but I forget to refer to it. As with most wikis, it is useful because it is a single place for users to pool their experience and expertise. It includes some basic “help” sort of pages, but also include reference pages to things like the LSL scripting code (the language scripters use in SL).

Jumping right onto the vibe that existed right after the SL Workshop at IPC, we have started a Facebook group for Tennessee educators interested in using Second Life. I have linked to it from the “Links” list in the navigation bar, and you can also get to it from this post.

Update: the link in the navbar and in this post has been updated.

If you haven’t joined Facebook yet–it’s easy, and it seems to be a better way to keep all of us in touch without adding to the glut of email. Yes, if you set your settings that way, you still get an email notification. The thing is, later when you try to find that email buried among the ads for Viagra and Swiss watches, you won’t be able to, whereas you can always find Tennessee SL info in Facebook, and can even add a feed to your RSS reader.

Plus, it’s a good place to be able to link back to this blog, and to the others that have already sprung up around SL and education.

I just came back from helping do a workshop on Second Life for educators, and of course today I would find a good resource. If you don’t already have an account in SL, or you’re getting another one, rather than use the orange button on the main SL site I recommend you use the Educator Programs page on the SecondLifeGrid.net site instead. The reasons are twofold:

1. Instead of getting dumped on the wide-open, griefer-strewn Orientation Island, you will go to the orientation island for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), complete with docents, tools, and tutorials to help you get started as an educator in SL.
2. You will find at this Web page a very clear and useful listing of resources for educators, as well as a succinct explanation for how SL can help educators.

Even if you already have your account (as do all of the people who took part in yesterday’s workshop), it’s worthwhile going to this page.