I struggled to figure out how to do a workshop about Second Life in a limited amount of time, with attendees who have limited experience in Second Life if any, and who will have limited if any internet connections.  I wanted to keep away from PowerPoint and find something that would be compelling enough to keep the groups attention, my argument is that Second Life is engaging so my workshop should be too.  Thankfully I stumbled upon a wonderful new presentation tool called Prezi.

I see Prezi as a tool that helps you to tell a story and while PowerPoint lends oneself to use a lot of text, Prezi lends oneself to use more media – flash movies and pictures along with text to help tell the story.  You don’t have to worry about transitions, Prezi zooms into each object in your presentation which turns out to be a really nice way to show emphasis.  Prezi is fairly new and there are certainly some things I’d like to see.  For example, a way to include sound so that I could create a narrated presentation or at least some background music.  It can be more flexible in terms of themes and color choices as well, but all in all I think it did a nice job of forcing me to think a bit outside of the box.  Will see what the workshop thinks about it.

Below is an embedded version of the prezi (you can also see a larger version that is hosted on their site).   One thing that might not be inuitive at first is the need to click through the presentation and that is accomplished by using the controls on the bottom right corner of the prezi. You can view it full screen, click on any object to zoom in for a closer look, and click the links to open up a web page.  One of the nice features is that when an object is a flash movie, it automatically starts playing nice and seamless.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

I’ll also be giving a talk about Twitter and how it can be leveraged for classroom use in which I’ll be doing a basic run down of what twitter is – for anyone in attendance living under their green eye shades.  I’ll also cover some of the relatively newer ways of interfacing with Twitter including TweetDeck, Seesmic, Spreadtweet, Mishnet, and Tunein.  For managing multiple accounts something most anyone using twitter will end up doing, one for personal use and one for the classroom, I’ll be talking about two products, HootSuite and CoTweet.  And finally I’ll be discussion a neat tool from Poll Everywhere that allows you to take polls with responses coming from various sources – the web, text messages, mobile web and of course twitter.

The first presentation was for the 17th annual Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies and I presented some initial results of student perceptions of engagement related to their Second LIfe™ use and it’s impact on their performance. I have a lot more analysis to do and will be presenting a more detailed analysis at the upcoming Second Life™ Education Community Convention taking place September 5 – 7 in Tampa, Florida this year in conjunction with the Second Life Community Convention. I will post details of that after the session, but for those interested will post my slides from the AAA below.

My second presentation was given as part of the Conference on Teaching and Learning and was geared to how I used Second LIfe™, Twitter, Camtasia Studios, Meebo, Jing, and Concept Maps in my course. Whew that was a lot to over in 40 minutes! The slides for that are provided below.

Lastly, I was interviewed yesterday by CDB Barkley from the New Media Consortium as part of their Studio One series (follow the link for other interesting interviews). I mainly focused on the use of NMC’s orientation island which I’ve discussed previously in this blog and my plan on bringing in over 700 students this fall into Second Life™ (in just a few weeks, which says quite a bit about my lack of blog posting this summer).

Well it’s been a busy few weeks, but the real fun begins in 2 weeks as 700+ students enter begin using Second Life™, I promise to keep everyone posted with greater frequency.

To re-hash, I am using Second Life to augment the Financial Accounting class, as I have to many students to use it as the sole teaching platform. I imagine it will take a few weeks for everyone to feel confident enough with the technology to try it out (it should be mentioned that in addition to Second Life the class is using or will be using Twitter – to receive extra credit assignments and Cmap Tools for creating concept/mind maps. In other words they are a bit overwhelmed with all the signing up for accounts and downloading various software for the course. Of course I have heard that a few are having hardware problems with Second Life, but not as many as I feared.

The first impression I have is without a doubt there needs to be a better way to orient the students to the educational functioning of Second Life. They need to know how to sit, how to turn on a video or audio stream, including installing QuickTime if they don’t have it (why Second Life installs do not come with QuickTime is beyond me), how to chat with objects, how to teleport and find your land after they get off of Orientation Island, etc. Since my students are doing this at various times as opposed to all being in a lab, I’ve been individually sending them TP’s or emailing them the SLURL. It would be far better to have the orientation right on your own land which is possible now and something I might try for Spring.

There seems to be help in this regard already in place: As reported by SLNN.com Orientation Station is a new orientation destination, according to SLNN.com

The Orientation Station estate consists of five regions beginning with the Welcome Area where residents can choose translations for their training in over 20 languages. The other regions address specific training needs.

Scholar provides extensive tutorials and resources for educators. …

I also learned that the SciLands has orientation which is available and allows you to meet your students as they come in-world for the first time – this should make the transition a bit easier, as you can help with the orientation.

I began to hold orientations for students once they get off Orientation Island, and will continue throughout the week to help make the transition for the students smoother. Here’s some pics of today’s session:

The second thing I’ve discovered is that once students get to my land the first question is invariably, “what can I do here”? They are looking for interactivity but want to be shown where it is as opposed to exploring and reading bothersome notecards. I have noticed some students returning again and again, I think (hope) this is the engagement I’m looking to establish, and not a few number of them have mentioned that they are excited about the class, imagine students being excited about accounting! Of course it’s fun when you can go to a lecture underwater.

Lastly I have had quite a few discussions with several of the stuents in-world, asking me about homework and such, but also some very good conversations about more complex concepts such as why dividends are not expensed and why Net Income is not the same as cash. These are concepts that they are just working out, and quite frankly fairly advanced thoughts for the first week.

An explanation for this might be something I discussed at an in-world breakout discussion for the Education track for SLCC hosted by NMC (chat log of session), when Sneblen Dagger a student on the panel mentioned the hesitation of some students to ask questions from instructors (for many reasons but particularly because of a sense that the instructor is unapproachable because of their position and expertise). Second Life can remove these barriers, perhaps as a result of everyone’s Avatar looking similar, a democratizing effect occurs and questions are more forthcoming.

I do not believe Second Life is magically developing more in-depth thinking (at least not yet) but is allowing more in-depth questions to be asked. This is pretty powerful if the hypothesis is true.

Parties over, apparently I make great PBJ sandwiches and I’m the BEST DAD #

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