Skype call with Bryan, 23rd January

Bryan was on-line at around 3pm our time (8am his), so we took the opportunity of discussing the meeting we're to have later today (24th January).

Bryan's got around 14 students (7 in each group) who're interested in working with our students. However, neither of us have been able to define too clearly yet exactly what 'working with' involves, since we don't know yet! Bryan's students are doing a Composition Course where they visit different places in world to gather information which will be included in various essays they write during their course. They've recently started using SL (I think it was Tuesday, 22nd January), and most of them access SL from a computer room on campus, so they're usually in the same room as each other as they work in SL.

One of the initial questions is: what do they get out of working with my students? The answer is: extra credits! Bryan's made it clear to them that the results of questions they ask the Swedish students will gain them extra credit for their essays.

My initial plan/request is for one, or a pair of, US student (s) to turn up as each group of Swedish students turns up on Kamimo (our island) on Registration Day. My plan is to introduce 3 Swedish students at a time to the environment, and then hand them over to a US student. The US student will then take them to a location on SL they've discovered, show them around and glean their reaction to it. My group of students will then use the impressions and information they've collected as the basis of their first presentation on the Oral Production course.

I'm meeting Bryan's students in SL today (24th January) to present my course to them, and to ask them how much of a commitment they're able to make to it. Ideally each US student (or pair) will become part of each of the Swedish study groups, and work with them all the way through the course, both providing them with inputs from different places in SL and acting as practice audience for their presentations (thus increasing the variety of the feedback they get as they go through the course).

We'll have to see how much of a commitment they're able to make in practice. I'm relying on my students to work together outside course meetings as they go through the course, but I can't require the US students to do this (since they're not on my course!).

Bryan and I also established a line of communication (very important with this kind of contact!). He'll have Skype open in his computer room, and I'll send him both documents to be displayed on his whiteboard and a Veodia link, if I decide to use one. Veodia is a live video feed program I'm testing this term. One of its features is that you can send a link to a live video feed and have it immediately displayed in SL. It'll enable me to appear in 'RL' in SL. I might use it for showing body language, etc during the OP course.

Apart from that, I'll be appearing as an avatar in Bryan's teaching space on Hyperborea this afternoon.