The Story of My “Second Life”

Edutopia is running this excellent interview of James Paul Gee, Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003). Jim was omnipresent at GLS 4.0 this past July (I attended and presented), and can say it is without question THE conference [...]

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Tom Hanson, Editor, OpenEducation.net passed along a couple of articles that got my attention and earned the site a spot on my blogroll. If you’re not reading OpenEducation.net, you should be! Here are the two articles in question: Virtual Worlds Offer Meaningful Educational Opportunities for Children and Virtual Worlds – Westminster Professors Discuss Research Let’s [...]

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Have about 30 minutes to spare and a fresh cup of coffee? Spend some quality time with this 11-page masterpiece by Wade Roush (that’s his place in SL), Contributing Editor at MIT’s Technology Review magazine (free registration is required). It begins, boldly enough, with this quote: “The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into [...]

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My good friend and colleague Dr. Leslie Van Gelder, Chair, Educational Leadership & Middle Level Education and Faculty Development at Walden University, who was kind enough to attend (and participate in!) my session yesterday, scribbled a note to me during the talk with these books, which I have put on my readings page: Blakeslee, S., [...]

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Preparing for this upcoming presentation has let me to a variety of outstanding resources I otherwise might have missed, which I have now included on my readings page. The first, Second Life: What it is and why it matters by SocialSignal.com, is a brief excellent whitepaper from a Second Life consultancy that includes Catherine Winters, [...]

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Special thanks to Kathy Schrock for sharing this great article in eLearn Magazine by Jay Cross, Internet Time Group; Tony O’Driscoll, IBM; and Eilif Trondsen, SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. It’s written in plain language that makes it perfect for sharing with non-technical friends, family members, school board members, district administrators and cynical colleagues that don’t [...]

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Very special thanks to Serena Kuramoto for pointing out this fantastic, just-published (19-Apr-2007) listing of online virtual worlds (both social networking and online collaborative tools) produced by the good folks over at TechSoup. It’s important because we as educators need to know what else is “out there” for creating teaching environments. Second Life is a [...]

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Just updated my Readings page after my shipment from Amazon arrived with Gee’s work and Prensky’s too. Stumbled across Turkle’s 1997 work, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and added that to my list as well. Where do I place my order for an extra hour a day to immerse [...]

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Quite a bit of rumbling in the blogosphere following Vicky Davis’ excellent post, The Frontier of Education: Web 3D, which eloquently summarizes Vicky’s views on the state of Second Life in K-12 education, and provides a great recap on current developents, technologies, and issues. It inspired blogger Sean Fitzgerald to respond with even more information, [...]

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Managed to read (skim) this book while sitting at a local Board of Education meeting last night …found it to be generally okay, and easy read, with a good bit of helpful information, though nothing earth-shattering. For $23 or so, I think it’s a good starting point for people to review before their first experience [...]

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