These were for me some of the highlights of the day long session by Dr. Martin Westwell yesterday.

I had to hold my own impulses to feed in my delight at what was being said as I live blogged.  There are so many ways to blog and live blog and I chose to summarise what was being said to allow people who couldn’t attend in person to participate online.  Occasionally I dove into the lively discussion that was taking place in the live blog and was also able to take some of the questions asked and get them answered at the live event.

I also was lucky enough to chat with Martin after the event.  He’s an approachable, down to earth man who delights in sharing his knowledge and learning about the experiences of others.

I’ll be editing the podcasts today and sending them out via the seminar blog.  I’m looking forward to being able to deeply listen to what he had to say, without having to attempt quick-switching (I’ll not put claim to multitasking ever again).

It’s about knowing how to choose the right tool for the job.  I wouldn’t use the same tool to tenderise my steak as I would to drive a tent stake into the ground or do tap a nail into a picture frame (okay, I would, but I’m a bit lazy).

There are a wealth of options in online tools - blogs, wikis, RSS readers, virtual worlds, social networking sites — and within those categories we are as spoiled for choice as the owner of the hammers in the flickr photo in this blog post.

However, the owner of these hammers probably knows which one to use for tent stakes vs. picture frames — he did so by trial and error or consultation or research.

So too we need to explore a range of options within a category of tools.

When I started blogging, I didn’t get Bloglines, thought Blogger was a bit too exposed for me, and MySpace felt too unfocused for what I wanted.  I tried my own instance of WordPress on my own server and likedit for a number of reasons.
However, I know people who LOVE those other tools and wouldn’t dream of switching.

If I’d stopped after Bloglines and Blogger and decided that blogging wasn’t useful I would have missed out on years of useful and fruitful conversations.

Thanks to fciron for the hammer image - click on it to go to the Flickr page for the photo.

These questions are behind a new project being fired up by a passionate educator named Lauren O’Grady. The action is — take a photo of a scene out of your life and add six words to address one of these questions:

* I am passionate about …
* What excites you about teaching?
* What excites you about learning?
* A teaching moment I loved was?
* My lightbulb moment came when…..
* I get up in the morning because….
* I think teachers should be

You can create your 6-word story using presentation software like PowerPoint, graphics software, etc. and then just output the result as a jpg.

Add it to the 6 words wiki that Lauren has set up for the project, or get in touch with her and she’ll post it for you.

Make sure you own full rights to your photo and are happy to release them under a Creative Commons Attribution (or Attribution Noncommercial) License because Lauren’s vision is to combine the submissions into a video with music.

Complimented by a map of virtual worlds by age group and focus created by a UK new media agency, it’s easy to see that virtual worlds are increasingly part of the lives of children, teens and young adults. By far the most crowded market seems to be for players in the 10 to 20 age group, tailing off in the 20 to 30 bracket with hardly anything identified as being for us oldies over 30.

Second Life is not the first, second or fourth largest world on their radar — it falls around number 10 or so. Habbo, a virtual world for teens and graphics that look about as fluid as a set of building blocks claims 100 million registered users worldwide as at 26 June 2008.

It’s also helpful to see that not all virtual worlds are created equal — though I think it overly simplistic to attempt to categorise them absolutely. For instance, Second Life can be chatting, music, sports, content creation, Mirror world and Education — and Quest Atlantis is both educational and role/play fantasy.

As we consider virtual worlds for education, other considerations come into play such as age apropriateness, bandwidth, ability to collaborate, learning and/or communications objectives.

The choice of a virtual world for collaboration and exploration would differ from one chosen for private use and role play. Is the need just for enhanced chat? Should there be structured activities that can be repeated or should there be the freedom to create?

Another big question for virtual worlds and learning — what about movement BETWEEN the worlds? Can students’ virtual lives grow with them — so what they build in Bunnytown could come with them to There or Twinity or VastPark or Second Life?

There are always going to be mis-matches in terms of the environment — but the move toward interoperability is happening. Linden Lab and IBM were able to move an avatar from the Second Life Preview Environment to an OpenSim server.

It may sound like technobabble but what it means is that the borders between virtual worlds for play and learning and professional development and our current 2D web sites (see my post on ExitReality over at my Neotenous Tech blog) are going to be permeable in the future.

She is a modest women, but I convinced her to give me a photo opp in honour of her thoughts on “Having a go” and collaborating being published in the book decentre .

Published in Canada (ISBN 0-9209397-55-5) by the Toronto artist-run centre YYZ , the book aims to “present the views of artists and others working in artist-run spaces to write short texts addressing the issues we face in this milieu”.

Congratulations Janet!

Are your learners benefiting from what you’ve been doing? I’m going to start by quoting a friend and respected peer, Dean Groom:

How can we tell if what is happening in the ICT ‘computer’ room is adding value to learning? Perhaps what is going on is actually so un-demanding, un-creative and un-inspiring that students are spending their time doing an computer based activity, rather than using the computer to communicate what they have learned, what they are learning, and what they need to learn.

So point one — is there a point to what you’re doing? Or are you just using ICT or the latest greatest shiny thing because you think you should be?

Learners see right through it.  It’s the online “conference” where we all get to sit at our desks and watch a presentation without being able to participate.  It’s the computer assignment that is copy and paste or fill in the blanks.  A virtual world where the only activity is to click on something that opens a link to a web site or notecard or where your avatar sits, sits, sits there quietly. A group where everyone looks to a central leadership for inspiration or stimulation rather than collaborating.

It’s easy to see that we are repeating earlier mistakes — taking our knowledge of older technology and trying to apply it to the newer technologies. We need to make mistakes as we explore.  And there needs to be time allowed to build up evidence whether new practices are going to fulfill their promise and deliver learning outcomes.

However, we should be easily able to identify what we’re doing that isn’t using a technology to its full potential, shouldn’t we?  Why use a tool if it isn’t enhancing the learning process? 

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to talk to an educator who told me she used a particular tool (ning) to try to break her class out of a dynamic of a few kids dominating the conversations — and it worked.  What was exciting to me is that she didn’t use ning because she’d heard of it and thought it sounded intriguing — she was looking for a solution to a problem. It worked.

At the conference I attended in the first 8 hours of Tuesday morning Adelaide time today, I “Stepped into Literature” and participated in a virtual book discussion group, then toured a sim (simulation/3 D representation) of Dante’s Inferno and another of the novel Linden Hill.  I have a list of sites to explore that include historical re-creations, role-playing sites, art exhibits and scientific models.  I also did a lot of sitting and listening.  I can honestly say that 50% of the time I felt we could have done more interacting — but the other 50% made up for it.  As the convener rightly pointed out — you have to start with the familiar when people are new to a technology.

A second point to make is — can interactivity actually DISTRACT from the learning outcomes you’re after? After interviewing Dr. Martin Westwell, I’d have to say yes.  I don’t feel I could absorb and understand Dante’s Inferno or Linden Hill just from walking through the sims I experienced last night.  However, would these sims have helped me to reflect on my reading — given me some visual cues to lock in my understanding? And would creating these sims have an even greater impact on my understanding?

Okay, we can walk back to our workstations now.  After all, we’ve got work to do and people we need to talk to.

Hmmm. Should I use SMS or Skype or Twitter? Or would it be more effective to walk over to Lynley or Alison or Cecily or Janet or John, tap her or him on the shoulder and ask my question?

During the 24-hour period that is 8 August 2008 wherever you are, they are inviting Flickr users to submit 1 photo about their day to a special Flickr group. Flickr ran this on 5 May 2007 and flipping through the photos in that group provides a very personal look at the lives of close to 7-thousand of our fellow global citizens.

Whenever I feel the need for inspiration - I use a simple keyword search like family, teacher, home, parents, friends — and am always delighted by what I find. It’s a global and cultural education to look through these one-frame digital slices of life and culture. Stereotypes break down when you see people interacting in ways that are familiar.

If Flickr is blocked in your institution, see if you can get it unblocked once in a while and try this experiment. And for the 8 August event, what a great exercise for learners across sectors, disciplines and age groups to get them to plan and produce one frame, one image from Friday, 8 August that provides a window on their worlds to others!

Last night edna workshop participants from Canada, New Zealand and the US got the chance to jam out and create music together and then share some virtual sushi and champagne. Here is a look at the drumming session:

For the time being, you need to be registered with edna services in order to access the archives page.  There are plans to make the page publicly available at a later date.

If you missed out and want to attend — register your interest in future workshops http://sandpit.edna.edu.au/mod/feedback/view.php?id=1224  We also welcome any and all suggestions for future topics.

As well, if you have an area of expertise you’d like to share with other educators via a free online conference, please let us know that as well.  Please refer to the edna content standards policies and then submit your proposal via the register your interest in future workshops form.

Thanks again to the 83 some odd people who attended the online events starting at 8am Eastern — especially those hardy souls from Western Australia who were there bright and shiny throughout the day and night!  If you haven’t provided feedback yet — please do. It will help us to deliver the sorts of content and experiences you want and need.