Feedback from our Second Life Theorist Project

Bill sent an email to us after the SL project unveiling. Here is some feedback:

Bill,
The presentation last night was fantastic. The student/designer/builders should feel very good about their work. It was great to be able to chat with them as I experienced the learning theorist spaces. I think that doing the project in SL probably engaged them with the learning theories more deeply than some alternatives (like writing a paper).
Are there any plans to install the work in a public area? The project is truly an exemplar of effective teaching/learning in SL. I would like to be able to visit again -- and bring some friends!
Thanks for sharing!
Rex Thursday Xu (SL)

Bill - I missed this... But I hope it went well. I have my Ed.D. in Ed Tech from Pepperdine, finished in 2003. Missed SL, but we did a lot of other great online stuff. I'll swing by sometime to look at the exhibits (I'm assuming they'll be up for a while). I have access to the Island. Way to get Pepperdine's name out there! Laurie Ralston

I would like to add my congratulations as well. What an engaging exhibit! I really appreciated the opportunity to visit the island, look at the theorist projects, and then fly around the island and view the overall set up of the sim. Thanks for the inspiration, Debora (SL Devorah Corvale)

Oh, YES!
You can add my voice in unison to what Rex/Thursday just said…a marvelous build, an awesome example of an effective (and fun!) learning space. This SHOULD be opened up again and in perpetuity for educators and other students to be able to appreciate!!
Have a great day!
RP

I'd like to add my voice here also - I am very interested in visiting, but was unable to. Are there any alternative possibilities? Thanks!
Beth Wellman
(Ivy Innis)

He said we've created quite the buzz in the SL education community. :) We are pleased!!

Teaching, Grad School, Thanksgiving update

I am feeling very excited about the culmination of our 1st real semester in grad school! I don't feel like the summer semester counted too much as it was really short. I am enjoying learning so much... and never being bored. Haha.

Teaching has been fine... except that I am never actually teaching. My principal has placed me (and the other 2 competent teachers at our school) on multiple committees which means we are never in our classrooms! We are either at the district for trainings or we are writing for our California Distinguished School award. We finished the rough draft and are now going to peel it apart, connect ideas, etc. We are also recruiting one of my students' parents who teaches at our feeder middle school to edit for us.

Funny classroom story for the week: One student was absent and I had another student give her the words for her spelling test. My kids are awesome at spelling... so it's almost a joke. About 25 of the 31 have an A+ in spelling. Anyway, I had a boy give her the test... and he took a peek at the upcoming test's bonus words. These words are selected by me... just randomly from whatever we learned throughout the week. Anyway, he told the rest of the class in private... thinking I'm never going to find out. Turns out I have ONE honest kid who emailed me with this information. I never busted anyone... just simply changed my bonus words to INTEGRITY, HONESTY, UNACCEPTABLE, CHEATING. Too bad I had a sub yesterday. I would have loved to have seen their faces. :)

For Thanksgiving, I am driving up to N. Cal with my parents and Elliot. During this nice 12 hour trip, I plan to bring my laptop and do some serious revisions to my lit. review.

I am close to being done with the conversions of videos for Gary's class and I worked very hard on the SL project for Bill's class... that I am looking forward to presenting on Monday. I need to work for Margaret's class and design my ARP plan and clean up my lit. review this weekend/through Thanksgiving.

I'm also looking forward to watching The Comedian! :)

Second Life Project, Learning Adventure #6, ARP project... updates

The SL project is going well... although slow. I have never in my life spent so much time building things in virtual environments. I swear it took me a few hours to get walls to line up. Regardless, what my room has come to is something I am proud of. Todd and I teamed up with Papert and Csikszentmihalyi (although Todd is the master and has essentially taken the Papert room on his own) and has helped me with the scripting for my room... and the game idea.

I am proud of how hard some people are working at this project. The structures are impressive... but even more impressive is the amount of single-handed work that some are placing on the project. I tried my hardest to create everything in my room. I love to see what others have done as well.

Learning Adventure #6 sounds cool... but it's hard to get a lot of this done in a distributed learning environment like this one. Again, being in a VirtCamp setting is such an easier way to handle these types of team projects. We are meant to find presidential campaign clips download them, find a conversion/compression/storage ability for next year's group to tackle. I can't wait to read their blogs about this and see what they come up with. The perks of the OMET program and how learning doesn't stop upon the diploma. I can already see myself becoming addicted to their thoughts, reading their reflections, etc.

The ARP is slow right now. I was pretty discouraged at Margaret's comments on my Lit. Review. I know there was plenty to be corrected, but I guess I saw this project as more of a constructivist writing/research/action project that I wasn't going to be judged so heavily on the writing part. Considering I know my strengths and weakenesses as a writer, I didn't enjoy the feedback much... but I never really do. That's part of my reflection here... learning to handle the heat, (I guess). I also see writing and research as a subjectivist activity where the writer is not always seen as great in some eyes, and wonderful in others. Could be why some people like certain authors and others can't stand them.

It gives me new light in offering criticism to my students on their writing.

Trecking along... feeling a bit overwhelmed and know I still have many months to go! Looking forward to getting pumped up again in January at the FETC conference.

Second Life, Theorist display construction

I worked really hard this weekend to committing myself to this project. It took me hours to just get ahold of creating a room... just a room! It does go to show that others have a knack for things like SL and others have to struggle, like in anything.

I did, at one point get frustrated to the point of signing off... right smack in the middle of building. Brent was being ever so patient to help me use the focus key (which now I've come to love) and link my parts. For some reason, I have had the most problems with linking my parts together. One of those buggers always gets away unlinked. Well, I then consulted the SL manual, never thought I would... and low and behold, there was a way to drag an edit box around all of your OWNED pieces to link them. I knew this before as Brent has mentioned it, however, I could not figure out how to not link other people's objects together with mine. There was always a bush or tree in the way. Finally... using the SL manual, I figured out that there is a box under the tools menu that allows you to only link YOUR items. Phew.

I've also created a theorist poster in the main gallery to go with Csikszentmihalyi's room in which I am constructing. Todd and I were both doing Papert and have agreed to do two collectively as this would help out the team. And let's be honest... Todd would do Papert more justice than I... sad to say. I believe Rita sent over the information to create posters in SL. I am now the proud owner of $587 Lindens... great. ($2.50 real bucks. I'm a big spender)

With the help of Samiya and the scripting information sent over by Todd and Karen, I was able to create script that linked the visitor from the gallery to my room, and back. Successfull, although not without mistakes. Somehow I got the coordinates wrong and when Todd tried to leave my room, he got stuck in a wall and was kicking like a baby. :) All fixed now... changed up the coordinates just a bit.

As I was trying to add furniture to my room, I accidentally unlinked something, because when I tried to delete a chair, I deleted my whole room. No big deal because it was in my inventory, but the I had to go back and re-do my script for my teleporting.

I've also added some rugs to the main gallery to break it up a bit and add a little pizazz.

So far... that's the progress. I am excited to move forward with the actual interactive learning part now. :) Hm.... "flow"....

...

I'm really tired... just really, really tired.

My Brain on OMET

Anyone remember that commercial about the brain on drugs... and then the guy fries an egg in a pan to illustrate that drugs fry your brain... well I think OMET does too.

My reflections:

638b: I am working, working, working away. I spent a good number of hours working on a lit. review that I have a feeling will be revised more than one time in the coming weeks. That makes me nervous. I have never been great at revising my work because I always feel like I did a great job. It's a tough process. I am also struggling through reading some of the books. I am all booked out for right now. I read a lot in the beginning and needed a little lull here. In addition, if I try to even think about sitting down to read (considering standing up), I will be asleep in a hot second.

664: I have enjoyed some of the adventures, but above all, I have enjoyed MicroWorlds the very best so far. I knew I would... considering that I had been messing around with it for awhile before we started up with it.

633: The Second Life project makes me anxious. I don't really know if we are going to be able to pull this off and make it as grand as we are hoping. I think we all want to do an amazing job, but are seeing the difficulty in distance learning as of now. Doing this project at VirtCamp seems like an easier task because we would all be in the same room. We are starting to see the major players in the program... especially on projects like this. Looking forward to beginning the building challenge. :) Turtles here I come!

Students teaching Students

In having dinner tonight with a friend of my fiance, we began talking about her education. She is a senior level student in her undergraduate program at UCSB. While definitely a hippie with the utmost respect in using the term, she's a world traveler and has been many places in her 20 years on this earth.

This was my first time meeting her and I have been anxious because I love her mom who I recently visited in Colorado (see earlier blogs). She has a passion for making change in the world but shuns the idea of teaching because she does not want to conform to the Western World's view of education. She doesn't want to become a professor and simply have knowledge that proves to be less useful than going into the world and changing it. She has aspirations to work with those who are less fortunate in countries she has already traveled to and intends to go back and help... she simply has dreams that many people keep in the closet.

Since we've been learning about progressive education movements throughout OMET thus far, it was interesting that she brought up an upcoming opportunity at UCSB. Apparently, there is this program that allows students to teach classes about essentially anything they want. Now, they have to be sponsored by (I think) another professor in the school or at least within her department of study and it has to be legitimate. When I asked what class she planned to teach (they get credits for teaching too), she said very quickly "How to Change the World" as if she'd been planning this her entire life.

I asked about her curriculum and she told me that she was hoping to have speakers come in from different organizations and different scholars come in to express needs within our world for the first portion of the class, and for the second half, to create a "project" collectively as a class to change the world... could be an excursion, something. She also expressed this idea of having her students interview their professors (who are researchers) about their research and ask them how they could use the information they teach in their class to better the world or make a difference in some way. In this "homework" assignment, students would learn from their professors and open their eyes to new ways to rejuvinate their own brains to hopefully making a difference. I found this to be awesome. I took multiple classes in my undergraduate years that added no value to my brain or to the world. I would've rather spent time at least seeing the world through other's eyes and opening my eyes to the world of need around me. Although such a typical hippie thing to want... I still loved the idea.

Finally, she talked about a professor she had who spent half of the year in India and the other half teaching at UCSB and said that the reason he continues to come back and teach (besides the $) is because he feels that if he can even steer 1 or 2 students to proactivity, he feels it is worth the while. She brought up a good point and talked to her professor about raising his bar. What about wanting 50 students to become proactive?

Even more profound from a 20-year old... she mentions that since she used that "homework" assignment with herself to talk to her own professors about ways she can use the information they teach to better the world, she was able to speak openly with her obviously intelligent professor who may have been living in research (but no application) land and needed to have the fresh mind of a young adult to free him from his stagnance.

Finally, thanks Todd. I posted the music onto my website and it can be found here: http://students.pepperdine.edu/blfoster/OMEThome/fall07/index.html

The Hundred Languages of Children - The Constructivist Approach

In reading the article, here, I have come to connect the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy to be among a group of constructivist schools. The constructivism theory, like Reggio Emilia's school follows, does not require all students to learn the same thing, but the teacher act more as partners of learning rather than an authoritative figure.

The students in Reggio Emilia are given the tools to use as they process and create their own learning --without deadlines, outcomes, objectives or major roadblock boundaries.

(really... I am doing reading right now, but I will have fun today. I also start back to work tomorrow and I'm trying to get a little heads up on reading---although I feel like I still have PLENTY to read)

My job - The Objectivist Approach

What better to do on my labor day then to read about objectivist and constuctivist theories of learning? :)

In response to some of the reading... my job certainly exemplifies an objectivist approach. Objectivism seeing learning as being done one way and having outcomes to prove that learning has occurred. This journal article would be difficult to read if I didn't have the connection abilities in my own life --sure glad I can relate it to something!

In the teacher world, we are taught to create lesson plans in our teacher ed. programs and once we begin teaching, they all go out the window. Anyhow, on those lesson plans, there are places to put "outcomes" and there are places to write the activities the students will do to achieve these outcomes. Some lesson plans even have a space for whether or not those outcomes have been achieved.

I believe my mind to be more along the constructivist approach in that I believe there can be more than one interpretation, meaning, way of learning, etc. I don't believe that you must learn "a" by doing one specific action or reading one specific book. I also believe that objectivism limits the learner in communicating with others to find meaning. Who is to say the professor/teacher knows everything? No one person is an expert.

I do think that constructivism is a little too liberal for me however... I might be about 75 constructivist on the continuum.

Accepted - Reflection on the movie

I too, rented Accepted and wanted to place my reflections:

The movie was very much like the readings we have been doing about learning theories and how students learn regardless (or possibly, arguably, better) of what we force them to learn and in certain orders.

The premise of the movie (see Jessica's post for more details) explains much of the stigma of getting into colleges that we as a culture have deemed to be acceptable. Unfortunately, this alienates the smaller crowd who feels like they belong no where. South Harmon attempted to change this and opened a school where students can learn naturally, as so many philosophers have been harping for decades --if not centuries thanks to Dewey.

I found the movie to be entertaining but also enlightening (as much as seeing/hearing the word "shithead" can allow). Thanks to Bill for suggesting it! Now, question: Is it possible to quote the movie for reflection during other projects and our ARP? Haha. :)