Edu-Entrepreneurs in SL

The education community, especially librarians and specialists in educational technology, just succeeded at something that many corporations and emerging businesses have attempted. They became a community in-world that quickly developed enough experience in online collaboration that they were able to present a large public event in SL that stretched, but did not break, the system capacity. The Education in Second Life: Best Practices conference arose from a model of best practice within SL.

Over a 24 period, there were hourly presentations in three locations, as well separate locations for vendors, posters and a welcome area. There was a wiki for registration, presentation abstracts, event schedules and vendor and sponsor information and logistics updates. The SLIC2007 blog was updated all day by Ryan Bretag, who provided brief descriptions and snapshots of presentations as they were being completed. The presentations were available live on the web as streaming video from Second Life Cable Network, and will be available online soon as archives.

There were more than 1,000 advance registrations; and an in-world headcount of more than 850 unique avatars part-way through the day. Most presentations were held at capacity, with just a bit of room available at the overflow locations. Both the poster area, at Rockcliffe University, and the vendor displays, at the New Media Consortium's Outreach site, were crowded all day. These display locations will remain available over the weekend.

Kudos to the organizing committee, especially Chris Collins of the University of Cincinnati, and Beth Ritter-Guth of LeHigh Carbon Community College. It speaks volumes for this group that the wiki front page was updated last night with a thank you from the organizing committee to the 200+ avatars who helped make the conference a success.

SL Education Posters

Here are some of the posters available during the SL Education Conference, illustrating some of the SL educational activities and installations. The full list is here.

Mary Ann Clark's Gene Pool, a Second Life educational site where anybody can learn about genetics.

Yvonne Heyning on the use of Machinima in the virtual world, a mash up many of our previous and future projects in a single look at moving cross-platform with new media.

Lisa Perez from the Chicago Public Schools on K-12 librarians' use of SL.

Alan Hudson on collaboration in the SL Genetics Center.

Jean-Claude Bradley on intellectual property in the sciences.
UPDATE Correction: teaching and research in organic chemistry in Second Life - Thank you for your comment, Jean-Claude.

Sharon Tettegah on SLQuest: What happened to WebQuest?

SL Education Presentations

Here are some of today's presentations at the SL Education Conference: Best Practices. The full schedule includes times and locations in SL.

Deb Butler on A Living London: Non-Educational Sims that Work for Education.

Jeremy Koester on Gaming and Learning in SL Talk. An outside the box look at immersive environment opportunities in SL.

Marie Digne on The Center for Water Studies: a virtual simulation for real life education.

Suku Sinnappan on Virtual Identity and Representation.

Josephine Dorado and Dan Winckler on Creative Collaboration and Cultural Exchange.

Beth Ritter-Guth on Monsters to Monarchs: Teaching Literature Using SL, and later, The GenX Professor: Teaching Issues for the Non-Tenured.

En Ye on Using SL to Enhance Software Engineering Education: The MO-SEProcess Game & SL Groupthink Game.

John Jamison (avatar Virtual Bacon) on Two Years of Introducing Educators to Second Life in 60 Minutes, or: Tips for Dinosaur Wrangling.

Jonathan Richter (avatar Wainbrave Bernal) on Creating a community of practice and searchable database of learning objects in Second Life: The SaLamander Project.

Chris Collins (avatar Fleep Tuque) on SL Best Practices in Education: An observational survey of educational institutions in the virtual world of Second Life.