Finances

I spent last Saturday doing an online defensive driving class and am happy to report that the defensive driving certificate - along with a careful look through the list of potential discounts - has cut my cost for auto insurance significantly! Hurrah for online learning! Make that phone call to your auto insurance company and see if you are entitled to any discounts! Did you librarians know there's a discount for ALA membership with GEICO? Once the dust settles, I'll do some comparisons with other companies and see if I can get the same coverage at a better rate elsewhere. I read a Kiplinger magazine article that said InsWeb at http://www.insweb.com/ as a good place to go to save some time doing comparisons. The online course I took at http://www.nscddconline.com/geicosenior/ was exceedingly bearable. There were learning objectives for each section, some short videos included, some formative assessments within each module - and a quiz at the end of each module. There was a voice-over with the text. I thought that would be annoying since I'm a fast reader, but I decided that it really was helpful. The narration helped me stay focused.

Getting faculty into Second Life

I sat in a real life presentation on educational uses of Second Life for some faculty on the University of South Florida Tampa campus. Bill (Rikki Ninetails on Second Life) from the USF Center for 21st Teaching Excellence ran through some of the features that make Second Life the interesting educational platform that it is - and then got those faculty who already had avatars in-world and toured them around. My colleague Joe and I helped with some questions about getting around, using inventory, changing appearance, etc. Two popular handouts: Quick Start Guide to Second Life and Meg Conklin's 101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom. What a great way to spend the afternoon!

Information literacy in Second Life

Sheila Yoshikawa (Second Life name) invited all Second Life to her students' exhibits on information literacy. The students are first year BSc Information Management students at the University of Sheffield The class used the SCONUL Seven Pillars Model for Information Literacy (http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html ) to look at the way information about the H1N1 flu was conveyed in the British press. (The students had been given a choice of five topics and they themselves selected the topic. ) The class used posters and notecards to display the information at seven stations representing . They developed a mind map , included a list of the newspapers reviewed, posted an analysis of sources quoted in various newspaper articles, assessed whether or not the articles were reliable.

The students started with some metasearch engines, looked at Google searches compared to NHS website searches, etc. They compared government sites noting that some sites had info more fit for physicians and some more fit for consumers. Some sites had basic facts such as the number of people who had gotten the swine flu in a certain amount of time. I was able to talk to a couple of the students: One student had already had the flu. (Original research? ) One student reported their information seeking changed and planned to work harder to find reliable sources of information. They had learning that it is important to review search results and that advanced searching in Google was a help.

The "seven pillars" exhibit is at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit iSchool/135/213/350/ .
For more on Information Literacy week (November 9 - 15) in Second Life, see
http://infolit-week-in-SL.ning.com/

Recently retired

I retired from my position at the University of South Florida Tampa Library on September 30, 2009 after 35 years. (35 years??? Yep!) Since I never got around to doing any consistent blogging, I thought this would be a great time to go at it. I want to use this as a place to reflect on retirement - especially finances(!) - and save interesting posts I see. I'm going to be keeping up with technology as related to teaching and learning. So there will be a mishmash of topics!

Blerp

Any idea what Blerp is? I'm going to try it out...

Blogging

I never have gotten it together to keep up a blog. However I am looking for a way to maintain some lists of useful links, etc. I'm going to experiment with Google Sites and Blogger and see how it goes.

Does research show that Second Life is a good educational environment?

Since much of the educationally-oriented activity on Second Life has gone on within the couple of years at the most, there is not a lot of hard data to pass along to administrators about the value of this particular virtual environment. (Harvard's course CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion was first offered in 2006 - not the first Second Life course - it was but one of the first to recieve a lot of media attention.) In spite of the lack of hard data about Second Life in particular, some educators on the SLED discussion list point out, virtual worlds have been around for 20 years and research has been done on those environments. Milosun Czverik (SL name) suggests trying ERIC and other education databases to search for research on virtual worlds. Use terms such as massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), 3D multiuser virtual environment, MUVEs, computer simulation, video games, Active Worlds, Second Life.


Mark Pepper has an Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Online Educational Resources at
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib Among other links, Pepper includes:

Ixchel, Anya. (2006). My Teaching Semester in Second Life: Pitfalls, Challenges and Joys
http://www.slatenight.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=40



Freitas, Sara de. (2006) "Learning in Immersive Worlds: A Review of Game Based Learning." Prepared for the JISC e-learning program.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning_innovation/gaming%20report_v3.3.pdf



Stoerger, Sharon (2007) It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: The Role of Virtual Worlds in Education.Annotated Bibliography
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~sstoerge/virtualworlds.htm



Additional documents:



Livingstone, Daniel, (Ed.); Kemp, Jeremy, (Ed.) (2006).
Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop, Part of the Second Life Community Convention (1st, San Francisco, California, August 18-20, 2006). "...14 papers from presentations and posters from the Second Life Education Workshop at the Second Life Community Convention, presented at the Fort Mason Centre in San Francisco, California in August 2006." ERIC document: ED493670.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/ef/03.pdf





Life Science Informatics Trends Analysis for Community College Program Builders -

Volume 3: Virtual Worlds: http://bellevuecollege.edu/informatics/VWTAFinal.pdf
An excellent introduction and overview education and Second Life from Spring 2007.

Educators Coop
Published Research Papers
http://www.educatorscoop.org/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=categories&category=1

Syllabi
http://www.educatorscoop.org/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=categories&category=2

SaLamander Project http://www.eduisland.net/salamanderwiki/index.php?title=Literature_review (more generally on gaming and distance education)