education building

I received an interesting announcement today via an email, regarding an upcoming presentation on using Second Life as a learning environment. I havent thought about 3D multi user environments since I was working at techbc back in the day, and one of the first projects we undertook was a VRML learning space. Remember VRML? This was waaay back before blogs (so there are no links), when virtual reality was all the rage. There is a video however that I should go dig up and repost on this site. I’m sure it would be good for a few laughs seems as it would be almost a decade old! (gad is that how long I’ve been in this business?)
The announcement for this latest incarnation of 3D collaboration was listed on the elearning forum and described by them as…

Since opening to the public in 2003, Second Life has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 560,000 people from around the globe. Almost every week, articles are appearing in the press or the blogosphere exploring various aspects of Second Life. However, relatively little analysis and discussion has so far taken place regarding the future potential of Second Life to transform corporate learning and training as we know it.

So this is going to be from a corporate angle, but if you are thinking that 3D animated gaming environments have no place in a university setting, think again. I haven’t looked into this much myself, but Alan Levine, began a project with the nmc back in april using secondlife, which I have been meaning to find out more about.

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.

An interesting sidenote. Alan ended up having a slight disagreement with flickr about the terms of use, since screenshots from the seckr grouondlife playing environment do not technically count as “photographs”. THis must have sorted itself out because I see the special user account he set is still operational and the flickr group is choke full of “photos” of people learning in second life. I wonder what they are learning in there anyway?

If you are really interested in the potential uses of Second Life, you could do worse than checking out Eric Rice and his extensive use of the site for doing interviews, podcasting vlogging, and whatever other technology he is forging ahead showing others the potential of. He often gets in the news for such things, and also takes photos of his exploits on second life.

Thanks to Clarence Fisher of Remote Access for leading me to a new open media resource, The Webcast Academy. Two actually. Teachers Teaching Teachers produces their webcasts at the Academy on the topics of…

Skyping, Webcasting, and Podcasting By and For Teachers

They leverage the academies’ rich portal which serves as a both a forum for the media, and at the same time as an indepth training resource for anyone interested in doing webcasts. It even has an apprenticeship program which I’ll have to take a closer look at.

Overview
The goals of the Webcast Academy include

• increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
• applying the open source community approach to skill development
• creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills

This looks to be a really amazing and open resource for teachers, learners and the general public alike to learn about and experience webcasting. I’d be very interested in hearing any experiences people have had with the Academy.

Of course these days there are always more than one way to skin a, err… to produce fine, useful media and distribute it to your audience. Doug has done nice video on Getting Started with Blogger, using the amazing YouTube as a publishing mechanism, which by all accounts is currently the leading video tool of choice.

I intended this to be a 5 min. presentation, but it ballooned to just over 11. I’ll likely be going to back to edit it down, and/or ’shoot’ it over to make i a bit more concise. I’m told these should actually be about 2- 3 minutes, because of users low attention spans, so I might even do it in smaller chunks.

Another caveat, this was my first attempt at using Camtasia, so I dont think I have figured out the best way to optimize/present this file. For now, you will have to stream it off a webpage using the Flash format, as it was the smallest file I could generate.

http://www.sfu.ca/~jtoal/presentations/g_reader/googlereader.html

I am gathering some google related resources with follow up links on this presentation on a wiki page. This is just getting started, but I intend to keep building this up and punctuate interesting tools with screencasts. Then, on to Yahoo!, Microsoft and a bunch of the other “big players” in the software business. You can tell they are watching the open source/social software movement closley, but we’ll see if their implentatons ring as true as many of the tools we present in Social Learning.