So for my first example of educational space within SL I have chosen to start with a familiar point of reference: the lecture.
I need a slide displayer for a lecture to run through their slides.
I got the free Powerpoint Presenter from EduNation, but for some reason I couldn’t drag my textures into it as advised by the Help file. Also, I found the interface a little fiddly; you have to click on a simulated laptop’s keypad to bring up a menu from which you then chose the slide to display. They’ve got a lovely educational island at EduNation, and some great free tools, but I am looking for something very simple.
It strikes me that I also want a displayer that users can access to run through the slides themselves.
The ideal would be: a screen that the owner dops their textures (slides) into, which they can then choose to ‘lock’ so that they are the only ones who can run through the lecture slides, and then, after the presentation, they can unlock to allow bypassers to see the content.
It also strikes me that some of the free vending systems might easily do all of this except the locking.
I am standing infront of the SLideShow tool – the slides are controlled by a HUD, so I don;t have the ability to let users run through the slides themselves. Am I really looking at two different things – a live presentation tool and a viewer-controlled display system?
I’ll get the SLideShow tool, then experiment with vendors for a user-controlled presentation tool.
There’s an awful lot on the SLED mailing list about not just using SL to recreate traditional proximity-based forms of teaching, but it strikes me that I WANT to see how these work in SL, alongside more open forms of learning that might better suit the medium.
In any case, I’m quite a fan of one-to-many teaching…
Last thought here: bith the EduNation and SLideshow tools refer to PowerPoint in some way. Actually they’re jpeg displayers, not .ppt. I would much rather make my own JPEGS in Fireworks or somesuch than convert memory-heavy ppt shows. Still, the world teaches with PowerPoint now it seems… for an excellent broadside against the ubiquity of PowerPoint and the overuse of information-poor visualdisplays in education and business, you MUST read Edward Tufte’s “Essay: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within”.
This really does worry me. At my university I’ve had lecturers tell me, in a way that makes it clear they expect me to approve, that they now use PowerPoint for all their lectures. Why, and to what end? As a script, as an aide memoire to your self or for your students? As a guide rope? To explain complicated concepts or dense information with helpful diagrams? As a supplement to notes, or as the notes themsleves?
It’s clear that the students want the PowerPoints ( in our Medical School students will stay behind after the lecture with their USB drives, hoping to plug in to the presentation computer and snaffle the slides, which are often then put up online anyway….). But does it do them any good? What kind of learning are we encouraging? Are we aware when we make the slideshows of their possible later use as student study aids, and if so how do we want to craft them so that they’re useful, but perhaps not so useful that they supplant note taking…
Well-worn territory, and – here’s a though – perhaps PP-esque slideshows ARE more important – or more educationally valid – in SL then in RL, because the barriers presented by the medium DO need a sort of visual crutch (it’s not easy to put your hand up in a lecture here).
Well, I’ll set up the space and we’ll see what some of my e-learning colleagues think of it.
