SLED event

Last night I joined Morgan and Zaneta in SL to look around and then attend the SLED event Island Educator Social.

The first part of our evening was a bit of an adventure as we decided to explore some new places that we had never been too. Our first stop was a nice island doing some studies on bunnies. We next adventured to a place that seemed like an alley with some rather interesting advertising and a lot of cats roaming around. There were no other people there, and I surmised that it was a place that might get busier later in the evening, I couldn't come up with an explination for all of the cats (and probably don't want to). Next we went to Chilbo. A rather nice community with a learning center. I definitely plan to return and do some more exploring.

Next stop was Alice in Wonderland. This was set up like an amusement park. We looked around at several of the rides, I was followed by what I could guess was a high school student who suddenly disappeared when his mom entered his room. I learned some dance moves, and Morgan and I wished we could figure out how to video capture things in SL.

At 6pm SLT time we went over the the ISTE island to check out the social. I think we arrived after the larger group event had finished. We went down to the "newbie" area to find a camp fire set up with people sitting around chatting. It was really kind of neat, although really very quiet. We had been using audio to communicate, so it was a striking difference to move to chat via text.

We were welcomed right away. I found it a little difficult to follow all of the conversations since several people were chatting at once. It was hard to read what had been said before it left the screen. I met some very nice people who gave me names of places to explore.

It was fun to talk to other people who were more familiar with how to get around and share some ideas. I heard a lot of people talking about doing presentations for their students in SL and someone mentioned showing power point in SL. I didn't get a chance to ask how you do that, but plan to see what I can find out.

I did some wondering around the island and found a lot more things to explore and will definitely continue to visit. I do see that there are more ways to try to incorporate something like SL into a learning environment, but depending on the students you would need to make sure you created the right environment. After randomly visiting a few places, I could easily see how some students/parents could wonder what the value of SL could be without guidance.

At the moment, SL is not something I would use for our organization. I don't think the hospital is quite ready for something like this. They have only started seeing the value add of doing e-learning assessments for re-certifications and annual training that has to be done to keep us in good legal standing. We are slowly trying to show how blended learning is a good idea, but currently I am only part time assisting the LMS administrator, who is a department of one for an organization who has over 10,000 employees to train each year.