Tonight I hosted a social event for incoming Distance Learning students to the Instructional Systems program at FSU – in Second Life (SL). I worked with a doctorate student to set it all up. We hung out in SL for the last few nights, helping people get ready for the event.
Alot of prep went into the event, and we only used voice chat. Emails telling people how to sign up and download SecondLife, getting them to tell us their SL usernames, compiling a username – real name list, advertising the event, troubleshooting the event, and sending wrap-up notifications. WHEW.
To top it all off, tonight SecondLife had such serious database issues that they had to shut down logins. At the same time our event was supposed to start.
SIGH
We worked through it using email. We coached people through logging on and not being able to find our slurl due to the database issues. We also smoothed over issues people had since voice chat seemed to be affected as well.
All in all everyone seemed to enjoy the experience. I blogged about it over on our student organization blog (with pictures). We are planning to build upon this experience, and hopefully build upon it so we can have a synchronous event in SL and in Real Life.
I realized one other thing I have to do is really start talking about how to use RSS. I’m going to be talking about it at work soon, but I need to talk about it at school. I have people used to the blogging idea, but I still have to send links via email. I need to change that.
Many thanks have to go to ASTD for allowing us to spend time on their island!
I think we’ll probably run another event in SL. Lots of people want to learn the technology. And that is what I am all about!
I’ve found that in general people don’t “get” RSS until they need it. Until they are missing out on info because they can’t keep up with websites that update at random times/etc, they don’t understand the appeal.
I totally agree. But *I* need them to get it.
Not knowing what you don’t know is the problem here – education people need to see how these tools solve some age-old instructional issues. So maybe it’s not good enough for them to realize on their own what they are missing.
Teaching education people how to use these tools is actually harder than I thought it would be. Things some of do as second nature seem to be difficult for non-techies to pick up.
Dave’s website is http://www.davidkspencer.com
Blame his typo on the 80s.
Here I am talking about comfort with tools and I can’t master a keyboard. Thanks, Gina.
Getting newbies to a certain place at a specific time is very hard in any of these VW tools. The web-based worlds that provide URLs tied to a single room should be much easier to use (Vivaty Scenes in Facebook, Google’s Lively, etc.) but they lack so much of the functionality and content of Second Life. If Linden Lab can develop a lightweight viewer for newbies in a browser, they’ll have a hit on their hands. There’s plenty of evidence that this is happening.