I just posted my hello post on SLED, the very active active email list for SL Educators. Am pleased to do so, and have one (lovely) response already.

There’s so much enthusiasm there from people who or run have had terrific educational experiences in SL – I do hope that I can make it work too, even if just in the speculatory sense (rather than actually teaching students) that my project entails.

2, originally uploaded by sambrenton.

Test post of a photo from Flickr.

In my job I am helping to introduce e-portfolios in the university.

I have been sceptical of e-portfolios and the e-portfolio agenda. My own undergraduate experience was so unlike that which is being encouraged in some areas. i doubt I would have filled an e-portfolio in, and I doubt whether I would have found it useful. (We talked…). But I just realised with a certain but tiny (let’s not over-claim) shock that this blog is an e-portfolio for my project, and I am finding the blog useful.

If this project fails to show that SL can be a useful environment for distance learning, will it be SL failing or my own instructional designal failing? How can I tell?

My current ideas for next steps:

- I have, more or less, a workable topography, some defined spaces in which to make things.

- I’ve been struggling with what I am going to make – what will demonstrate different kinds of teaching methods that will encourage people to experiment with differen tkinds of learning via SL?

- I know I can make things that demonstrate some of the traditional forms of communication that we use on formal learning situations

- I know I can use SL to demonstrate various distance learning methods

- The question is then: what do I teach/present/facilitate/task people with learning for the purposes of that demonstration in my project?

- I have the problem of either picking something so meta- that it eats itself (learn how to pick up an object by picking up an object – ‘how was it for you’?) versus something so spefici that it is entirely artifical to the people I have on board with the project (e.g. here’s a 10 minute anatomy lesson, now here’s a sample of an architecture course – which is the better learning experience?). I want to avoid both those, and I also am not conducting the sort of project that splits student groups and teaches the same stuff with different methods and then evaluates each one.

- So I think i will have to swallow the pill and risk going a little meta. That is, my subject, which people will explore through SL, is learning in SL. I will develop each of my exemplars as a piece of teaching (I’m going to settle on ‘teaching; in my terminology – it’s what I am interested and is an emphasis I wish to restore to e-learning, whatever the method) about different way to teach in SL. So, yes, my one-to-many Sl lecture will be about lecturing in SL. My problem-based-learning activity will be about PBL in SL… action learning exemplar about action learning etc etc etc. There are further reasons for this…

- 1. the people who have kindly volunteered their time will deserve back something abotu the subject of the project at hand – so it might be something they (because they have signed up for this) want to know about.

- 2. It can outlast the project itself as an educational resource in SL.

- 3. The exemplars – standing and there for people to try out – coupled with links to the discussions and evaluations of each – will be meta in all the right ways – about itself, but straightforwardly so, without conceit.

This is always risky terrain, the meta quality of much ‘learning about learning’. The fear is: padding, self-referential content only (self-generating empty systems, snakes that eat themselves, etc).

Fingers crossed.

I am still a ‘newbie’ avatar. These are called ‘Ruth’ in SL – so I am still in my Ruthed state. I have a beard, glasses, a yellow t-shirt with white shirt over it and khaki shorts. I look awful. There is no realism to me. I look like a tourist, in every sense. If I walked into a casino, card sharps would sharpen their cards, cats their claws, and sharks would mix whatever metaphors they had to hand and certainly lick their lips. On the mainland, put simply, in a sophisticated sim, I would be toast.

And yet I like the way Samuel Mesmer looks. He can slip under radars, inspire disdain as he shops for communications gadgets, and ask questions of people with the eyes of the new born.

Actually, this has to be nonsense. I need a look. But what? What befits an SL researcher? Do I go dusty stereotype – older, with patched tweed jacket? I’d quite like to, but really. I don’t want to go halfway to high design – a sketch feebly nodding at character, but too proper to look like an enthusiastic SL denizen. I was thinking of playing with identity a little more radically – but what gesture politics am I here to get involved in, and do I give more credence to that easy kind of signal-play than I do in RL, just because, what, because I can do that easily here?

The risk is that you alight on something rather bland.

I met a colleague in SL a few days ago who had gone full blown into some kind of whimsical-death-metal-daemon-rave look, complete with ashen crucifix chest tattoo. Kind of Hell-Puck. It was impressive. But Samuel doesn’t go to those parties (lack of interest or invitations – you decide).  This makes me realise that my avatar doesn’t have a personality as such yet. Perhaps this is because he’s spent his time on the island, alone, busying himself, or else scooting off to look at educational builds (mostly empty!) and gadget shops. Who is he and does it matter? What implications does that have for Samuel’s – I mean: my – SL ‘learning experience’?

I realise straight off that I don’t cast him as purely an extension of me, and don’t feel any compulsion or obligation to do so. That’s the power of puppets. But it is to play with strong and old human qualities, then. This isn’t a new observation – we’ve known it since Aeschylus. So what are the implications for learning and specifically (perhaps axiomatically) for this project: for distance learning?

Remember the question, Samuel… always the question: no blind alleys, no for-the-sake-of-it-ness, no uneccessary semiological vagaries.

Oh well, just a few: time to get an avatar.

Having signed up with Flickr and had it resolutely fail to process one image in 30 minutes, here are some early photos of the project…

Over the course of today, as I’ve been trying to clarify my thoughts about what kind sof teaching might profit from SL (what kind of learning…) I’ve started to get a bit more definition on my early thoughts.

I keep wanting to reach for things that aren’t native to SL.  So I want to summon audio, video, live voice, rss feeds, image database, live communication tools, and so on (well, ok, some of those can be done in SL, or through it rather).

Some of the niftier gadgets I’ve acquired today let me, for example, summon mp3 files placed on the web and play them in SL, and to hook up with rss feeds to display blog headlines.

This means that the natural thing to do is use a raft of web 2.0 (so called) services around the SL project.  I now have a Skype status indicator (broken thus far),  and a feed from this blog, and the BlogHOD tool for instant SL-web comments, and am busy signing up for a Flickr account – and next step YouTube or Google Video.  I can then link to or summon those to within SL to extend it, to be able to connect my SL guinnea pigs to web content.  Maybe put up podcasts on iTunes and see how a feed from that can operate in SL.

The obvious next question is: what does SL itself bring to the party?  It’s an awkward aggregator, there are many better out there, and all this is nothing I couldn’t do on a website.  Is the priceless quality, finally, presence? Social presence for all the linked, fed, imported stuff to be made sense of communally, be ‘people’ who can move about, see each other, congregate, disperse?

If so, how unpresent are we then when we naviagte alone or with others through different web offerings, as diffuse or fluid as their stitching allows?  Are we any less ‘there’?  Are we in fact more in command of our sense of presence as ourselves (communicating, learning, battling the cognitive friction of various tectonic interfaces abutting eachother), a sense of presence not compromised by the basic weirdness of being ‘yourself’ through an avatar, a puppet depiction of yourself, in a puppet metaphor of physical space, where, actually, we have little need of one, so used are we now to skipping across web spaces which have no physical corollary?

It’s troubling me at the moment.  And yet I’ve certainly felt the extreme uncanniness of ‘being’ in a metaverse on many an occasion.  I am sure (in my bones) that these are baby steps in a social revolution of sorts.

However, if SL is a shell which I need to surround with web content from a host of different tools, then what is the function of the shell, given that other things are better at pulling stuff in?  What does SL help people do with all that stuff, so that they can learn from it and each other? That’s my question, I suppose.  I’m not even sure it’s the role of my project to answer it – rather, I build things to help explore the question and ask my fellow e-learning professionals what they think the answer might be.

Call it consciousness-raising, call it passing the buck, call it an ‘early exploration’… these are nevertheless things to ponder…

In my sim I have the sun in a fixed position.  There is no dusk, no night, no rain, no fog.  There are no clouds – we are in hot Greece every day.

With no rain, what need do I have for roofs?  With no need to occlude light or provide shelter, walls are just space markers, delineators of social space, functional zones.  In any case walls don’t provide privacy in SL.

So my ‘build’ is looking quite sparse and simple.  It;s based around two courtyards or agora.  There are low walls, and archways to mark entrance and exit points.  A series of paved walkways link them and lead through them, helping to mark each courtyard into quarters.

And it all does look very Ancient Greek.  Large, sun-blasted public space, and amphitheatrical seating (an old democratic seating plan for discussion, oratory – and low on prims). Semi scorched earth and the odd, dry tree, long  sightlines, and modest built objects viewable from pretty much any location on the sim.  There are good reasons for this – people have a mental handle on where they are, they can see activities, locations an dpeople if they get lost, and it’s a simple, light topography that will forefront the exhibits and activities within.  But I’m getting the itch to build something grander now, to fill the vertical plane, impose, announce (… show off?).  I will resist it, I think, as it would be wrong for the function.

There is a little roofed area at the centre of one of the agora.  It’s wrong (it’s an angular roof which jarrs with the Saxon arches I’m using elsewhere).  But I need something there, a landmark – I was thinking of the sort of tented centre of a market.  But, you know, if this space is open, accessible, easily navigable, and there to present different examples of SL education, I probably don’t need it.

Still, the temptation to build a dystopian megastructure, plonk it down in an otherwise very considerate, polite social space, is strong…

The blog HUD is interesting. I got it for L$900 at Nooribeom 194.189.23.

You wear the HUD and /9 type a message to the BLOGHUD website at www.bloghud.com, wher eit appears immediately.

My blogHUD area was automatically created at http://my.bloghud.com/samuelmesmer/ when I sent the message.

If I can RSS it from here then it could be a snappy way to send comments and LMs to this blog…