• Course information needs to be both more and less specific. I don't think that many students have read (and/or remembered) either the Welcome letter or the Business Pages on the course web site. This doesn't mean 'abandon them', but rather 'take steps to ensure that the right information gets to the students at the right time'. Too much info too soon is a waste of time, but it's difficult to know in advance how much 'too much' is.
• I need to be both clearer in my instructions about 'micro-level' tasks, and more disciplined about timing and outcomes. There seemed to be very little 'what does he want us to do?' yesterday, but I want there to be none. This is a disruptive environment for instruction-giving (which is why it's so useful for its present purpose), so that requires me to be absolutely tight in my planning and execution … paradoxically, that's the only way I can retain the chance to be flexible!
• I need to explore the group room area on Kamimo. I don't actually know how it works right now - but I'll learn before next session on 28th February. This may well remove the problem that students don't move sufficiently far away from each other when they break up into small groups, so they disturb each other's discussions. I'll get on to Judith today to book a time when she can teach me.
• The environment really came alive last night. Several people mentioned spontaneously how much more fun Kamimo is than most of the other places they've visited in world. I suspect that one major factor is Design Container's and the Kamimo team's (but not my!) sterling work in designing the environment. Another is probably the 'magic' of being able to just talk to people in a natural way, despite their being in completely different geographical locations.
• I started addressing people by their avatar names, rather than their real names yesterday …
• Keynote is a great programme for making visuals to go on the whiteboard. I exported my presentation as .jpg (having first learned not to fill the screen too much, since the Kamimo whiteboard is both narrow and shorter than a Keynote screen), and then uploaded them to my Textures folder. This costs L$10 per .jpg.
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1 comment:
This is great David! Thank you! Lessons learned from my point of view:
1. My computer crashed 5 times...really need to analyse the technical aspects needed to attend a SL course.
2. Students seem to be moore focused during lectures in SL than IRL....I will explain this further in a paper that I plan to write. Maybe we should write a paper together David?
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