Blog

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password:


Read More

For those who missed the Virtual Worlds MOOC following the VWBPE conference, we’re not through yet!  Due to requests to keep going, we’ll be rolling out two more MOOCs shortly.  One will be a more indepth focus on machinima making and participants should come out of it with their own completed machinima project.  The other will be a group exploration and building of an ARG (Alternative Reality Game) which uses a mystery that needs to be solved as a means to help participants learn about a certain period of history. We’re still building the MOOCs at this time–I’ll...


Read More

As I said in the last post, it’s been a whirlwind few weeks.  I’m still visiting multiple grids/rpgs per day–I’m just not doing multiples at a time anymore!  I’ve been amazed at the people I’ve met in the Cognitive Dissonance and Inevitable Betrayal guilds in World of Warcraft (they’re educators’ guilds on the US Sisters of Elune server, if anyone wants to check them out).  Chat with these folks can shift from goofy and light, to serious discussion about gaming related educational theory to commiserating and advice on everyday work issues, all within...


Read More

I’ve been really lax in posting of late. The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference was AMAZING.  As exploration stream lead, I used the conference to fulfill my internship hours for the IDD program here at South.  In preparing for the tours and exploration, I signed up for, played around in, and created orientation materials for MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments) and MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Play Games) that I’d never been in.  I really did feel like I was scouting out a new frontier.  Plus, it gave me a taste of what being a newbie was like,...


Read More

This post is a bit late in coming.  I really should have written it days ago to give people enough of a heads-up to be able to attend the events.  Ah well, better in the midst of the activities than never! This weekend, the virtual nation of Caledon in Second Life celebrates it’s 6th anniversary.  Founded on February 26th, 2006 with only one sim (now lovingly referred to as “Prime”), at it’s largest, Caledon expanded to 50 sims.  With a theme of Victorian steampunk, this virtual nation is the home of artists, educators, writers, and creators of all sorts with a membership...


Read More

Harvard University recently held a daylong conference on teaching and learning, and I must say that it is refreshing to see that they talked about the same kinds of things that we talked about last year and will be talking about again. To find out more about their conference, click here.


Read More

This week, we’ll be kicking off our Spring 2012 tour season at Jaguarland with a tour of the sim and then we’ll hop over and play in the undersea area of our extension site at Caledon Sound.   Tours, as usual, are on Thursday evenings from 6 to 7 pm central (4-5pm slt) and set off from the Bay Boat Welcome Center at Jaguarland (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Jaguarland%20USA%20Education/62/19/27).   As I get more information about our tour destinations for this semester, I’ll post them here.  I’ll also post more on the SITE and VWBPE events as it gets closer to time...


Read More

The deadline for proposals for the 2012 South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning has been extended to February 10th. Proposals can be submitted here.


Read More

Maryellen Weimer, the keynote speaker at last year's South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning, had another great blog post this week where she compares the Ideal Professor with the Typical Professor.  She cites a research study where junior and senior students rate the qualities of their concept of the ideal professor and the qualities present in their more typical professors. The findings are somewhat surprising in that the differences aren't very pronounced.  The typical professors tend to do the same things as the ideal professors; it's just that the ideal ones do certain things...


Read More

There is not really a no-brainer way to do this, but there is a work-around that comes from Jim Mezzanotte in a Sakai user forum. Read on if you are interested. As an instructor, you may want students to post an initial message for a specific topic in a forum before they will be able to participate in discussions. The Forums tool does not let you set such a requirement, but there is an effective workaround that involves creating a special group for your site. Note: Keep in mind that you will need to move students to this group after reviewing their first posts, in order to give them full rights...


Read More