Relive08 Blog

It’s been a long, but very interesting (sorry, am going to think of another adjective to say same) day with a wide variety of presentations and lots of stimulating discussions. I have taken copious notes on the sessions I have been in with every intention of blogging on each one but I didn’t have a terribly strong wifi connection and kind of gave up on that idea. Might be better using my dongle tomorrow! Currently uploading photos to flickr – and that is struggling too. (And while I remember, I apologise for just throwing up the pics, I shall tidy them up later!) I am convinced we had son of Liam Neeson doing a presentation, ah, but no, it was Graham Hibbert talking about how they got students comfortable with virtual worlds on OpenSim before going into Second Life. Then next up was Margaret de Jong Derrington urging us to “Get real!!! This isn’t real. It’s Second Life!”, in other words, don’t have classes in classrooms with tables and chairs with teacher at the front – be a bit inventive. Kathy Trinder then talked about the fear for some people of Second Life and how they have overcome this by putting on evening classes for staff, students and the general public. After tea and scones (hit the spot), Mark Bell kicked off with his Virtual Assisted Self Interview tool. You can read all about this on: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1188562

Paul Grove and Graham Steventon told us about their pilot project:Exploring community safety in a virtual community where students could experience first hand different scenarios in community design. The final session of the day was an informal discussion from Paul Hollins and Sarah Robbins-Bell asking whether something has gone wrong with education and looked at different headings eg Identity – that was a biggie, we could have talked all day about that one! Oh, and what was that disparaging remark ….?

I really haven’t done any of these presentations the justice they deserve. And I’m sorry I couldn’t get around all the other sessions but there were far too many (had it been in Second Life, teleporting between them would have been a doddle.)

Flickr is still uploading…