Learning in Virtual Worlds Confrence

Attended the Learning in Virtual Worlds conference on Tuesday at the University of Sunderland.
The university is very nice and well set out, The student ambassadors were very helpful.
The conference started off with a Keynote speech from John Kirriemuir, of virtual World Watch. www.virtualworldwatch.net after this smaller seminar was held.We attended the Student Guidance in SL, by Garfield Southall, of the University of Chester, who looked into using second life to enable there students to get anonymous advice from their student guidance team. The main problem was with authenticating users to make sure that that they were really students of the university that was getting the advice, but how would they do this and keep the anonymity? Garfield explained how they had a library of information on there little island to refer the students to and also staff that they could talk to. This solution in my opinion is really over kill, yes the solution works. But theres nothing more been done that putting it in a virtual world. I would have put the library information into a VLE where the students can get access to it anonymously anyways and having a chat room that allows anonymous log ins kind of like the technical help or speak to an adviser app you see on some websites. The solution seamed like using second life for the sake of it and needlessly adding more complications in to the students life’s especially as they are more likely to be more vulnerable as they are seeking help. we need to cut the barriers down not add more
After dinner we attended the Theatron 3 Project by mistake as we should have been looking at the pathology labs, but were in the wrong room. Although I’m not a big art fan I could see some merits in this project. obviously its not feasible to fly the students out to theatres around the world and in some cases they wouldn’t get permission anyways. So to be able to use virtual replicas of the famous acting spaces would give the students an image of what it would really be like to perform there. Then it was on to see NewcastleGateshead SL with Shaun Allan of Vector76 http://vector76.co.uk/ngsl/ who had produced a second life representation of Gateshead and Newcastle. A good presentation on how detailed you can make things in second life, and maybe a way to get students use to there new area before they arrive in person.

The real gem was saved to last though another key note speech but this time from Kate Boardman http://katielou.blog-city.com/ from the University of Teesside. This was a really motivational speech in the way to look at virtual worlds most of the ideas were aimed at second life though taking the ideas and changing them a little would allow for use with VLE's as well. A lot of the session was based on why we do things and how there linked to the learning outcomes. How things are perceived in peoples heads an example was "who is your Mr Darcy?" some people can watch if it’s Colin Firth or visa versa. So in some ways your ideas are different to other peoples, sometimes the way things are designed don’t matter to the learning outcome other times it does. I cant remember much of the speech but it did fill me with ideas and wanted me to implement some new thoughts and ethos at work.