Shirley Alexander
Tim O’Reilly slide share presentation “Working on the stuff that really matters”
Shirley #1: How to design learning to meet the diverse needs of students in contemporary social contexts?
Jan Herrington
Jan Herrington’s Authentic Learning work has won EATC awards (worth looking up).
Note that the Authentic Learning is timeless because it doesn’t really look at the technology, it looks at effective learning principles.
Jan says of Tom: the main factor that influences learning is the task.
Margot:
There is some alignment between learning outcomes, technologies used and types of thinking assessed – the main point for educators is to focus on assessing higher order outcomes (ie using virtual worlds, wikis, blogs etc)
Symposium:
Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds – is it worth the effort?
Useless to test the difference between what would happen in real world and virtual worlds.
Argument: Reduces cognitive dissonance if there is fidelity between virtual world and campuses with which that they are associated. Counterargument – can leverage the potentials of the environment to create designs that would be difficult (or impossible) in the real world.
Pedagogies: Games, role plays, SLOODLE, Business Island (by International Education Services – businesses that students need to run), Law Courts can be purchased in Second Life (USQ has one).
Sue is creating virtual classrooms for teacher training that will be open for use by others.
Merlot know includes Virtual world objects SLURLs
