Eduverse Talks Archive!

ISTE Eduverse Talks episode number 7 is now available for replay at the ISTE Eduverse website. Click the image below to visit, watch, listen, or watch and listen. I've been invited along with my MUVERS LLC partners Cathy Walker and John Miller to participate in another eipisode Tuesday, July 28, so join us there live (5 pm SLT, 7 pm CDT) or check back at the Eduverse website for its own archive a week or so after the show!

I'll be completely off-grid for a couple days as I head to the hills with my honey, so comments here, if any, may take longer than usual to show up. Vacation time, ya'll!

NOT a Second Life!

Cross-posted from Oh!VirtualLearning!:

Facebook post yesterday morning:

Scott Merrick Still reeling from the experience of being on a virtual talk show last night. It'll be up online in a week or so at the show's site. My family watched via the stream URL at the family computer while I stumbled through what I had to say, and the Q and A at the end was the best part, IMHO. Heavy sigh! Thx to everyone who made this happen!

Heavy sigh indeed! It was fun! Most of all, it was fun being up in front of a very nice-sized audience onstage with four other dedicated educators, three of whom I already count among my real-life friends and the forth of whom I'm sure will join those ranks in a couple of weeks, as technology educators and administrators gather in Washington, D.C. for intense networking based on a shared interest in technology for education. NECC, of course, is the National Educational Computing Conference.

You can read the pre-show details now at the ISTE Eduverse Talks site, and that's precisely where the spiffed up [nods to Andrew] show will be up for viewing in about a week. I highly recommend you view it when it's there: This was a great experience, and from the comments from the audience after the cameras were shut down, it was a jewel amongst the growing library of Eduverse Talks.

One comment I made toward the very end bears repeating in print, or at least I think it does.

To paraphrase (you'll have to view the show to hear the original): "If I hear a teacher say 'I don't have time for my first life--why should I go get a Second Life?' one more time I'm going to SCREAM! It's NOT a 'second life,' ya'll, its a rich, rewarding, entertaining, fun, and professionally valid extension of my life, the only life I have, into a creative, challenging, and all-those-other-adjectives new realm." Okay, I embellished a bit, but that's the beauty of afterthought.

Spiff/Andrew also said something that sticks with me. It may be that my reaction to his comment issues from a (unintentional, I am sure) hurtful comment a colleague made a couple weeks at the Vanderbilt School for Science and Math, when I was recording material for my CSO podcast, Snacks4theBrain!. He smiled, looked away from me, and said, "I hear you have three wives in Second Life."

Well, I don't (as I replied, stifling the urge to respond more assertively). And I won't, even though, as Andrew referenced the Bible near the end of our show, "Seek and ye shall find." If you go looking for bad stuff in Second Life, it's there, though as we speak Linden Lab is making serious and controversial efforts to isolate the so-called "bad stuff." But if you gear your time and efforts to seeking creative, innovative colleagues and fun, interesting educational content, it's there, too--and in spades, as I hope this blog has been reporting since May, 2007. Isn't it exactly the same "in real life?"

So the problem, it seems, is in Linden Lab's choice for a name for their metaverse. This is no new idea. I submit, though, that the scoffers and otheres who are letting this intense and important phenomenon pass them by while they choose to spend their media time watching CSI (who did a weird and possibly off-putting episode involving Second Life) should get off their "real" backsides, turn off their TVs [hears John Prine], should simply "Get a Second Life." Remember, it's NOT a second life!

There's a link in the sidebar. Go. Look me up when you've done your assignment. I'll give you a hug. If you're already in, and you're going to NECC09, come see me in the Second Life Playground. I'll give you a hug there. I'm a big fan of hugs.

ISTE Eduverse Talks Appearance!

I hope you can join us in Second Life this next Tuesday, June 9, as my avatar sits down at 5 pm SLT on stage with those of Peggy Sheehy, Marianne Malmstrom, Andy Wheelock and host Kevin Jarrett to talk about the impact of Second Life and ISTE on my "real life." In the live talk show, ISTE Eduverse Talks, you'll likely hear me say that Second Life, for me, isn't a "second life," but rather a fun and exciting extension of my only life into another realm. I've made dear friends, whom I see admittedly more often than I see my "real world" friends, and I've shuttled  some of those friendships over into "real life" to become colleagues and collaborators in ways that would never have thrived as they have, not even been possible, without Second Life.

A couple summers ago, David Warlick, kindly Skyping in for a talk with a group of teachers I was leading into Web 2.0, made the statement: "Scott and I aren't friends because of our geographical proximity, we're friends because of what we think." I'll always cherish that concept, and it goes a long way toward explaining the draw of Second Life, Twitter, and any other tool I can use to network with innovative and technology savvy educators. Life(s) is good.

Location: ISTE Broadcast Studio: 
http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%203/197/238/23

I hope you'll come to see and hear what I know will be a fascinating hour. Here's a pic from the most recent episode of the show (sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and ISTE and produced in collaboration with the Second Life Cable Network!):

Now I have to go shopping for professional virtual clothes. I don't think my medieval knight's cape or my MUVErs scrubs will do the trick!

New Entry Point for Educators!

Here's an email I sent out to my colleagues at University School of Nashville Just a minute ago. Think it'll work? If you wish, feel free to copy it to send to your own school's teachers (substitute your own example, of course), and delete the reference to helping with the resource room. Oh, heck, edit it any way you want!

If you're not in the "oh, god, how silly" camp in conversations about 3Dinternet virtual environments, and you want to investigate Second Life beginning at a safe and informative entry point, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), an 85,000 member organization with well over 3,000 of them using SL, has created a new way to enter the environment, accessible at the webpage at http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/education . I helped a bit with the design of the resources room and I'm very proud of the work ISTE's doing.

Just visit the site, follow the directions, and feel free to Search "Scottmerrick Oh" and offer him (me ;) friendship.

EXAMPLE:
I dropped into ISTE island for a bit just last night and made a new friend, a teacher from New York, who has used two relatively new computer programming tools (Scratch and Storytelling Alice) with her students for years, and I'll be picking her brain as I move toward helping introduce those tools for our K12 students at USN. Whatever your professional interests, SL is a way to extend your learning about them in collaboration with teachers on a global scale.

Here's a screengrab:
Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”--Kurt Vonnegut, from "Cold Turkey"

http://scottmerrick.net

The "Embedded Practicioner," -- Words of Blogging Wisdom from an 8th Grade English Teacher

I didn't mean to do it. After all, I had already spent over an hour in Second Life earlier in the day at a fantastic panel discussion on "Virtual Identity," the discussion facilitated by the dana centre in England. That panel featured Howard Rheingold, coiner of the term "smartmob" and widely acknowledged creater of the concept of "virtual community," and Will Gardner, founder of the non-profit "Childnet International," an internet safety organization created to "help make the Internet a great and safe place for children." I did some recording there but haven't had a chance to do anything with it. (I hope I can, since it was really wonderful.)

So when I logged in on my laptop at my boy's bedside while he went to sleep last night (he doesn't really need that anymore--it's just a tradition with us, one that I'm sure I'll be losing soon as he breaks into teenagedness) I never intended to get caught up in another online presentation. I made the crucial (propitious) mistake of checking out the happenings at the Auditorium on ISTE Island.

Friend Kevin Jarret (KJ Hax inworld) manages a wonderful Tuesday night speaker series over there, and his blog, "The Story of My Second Life," was one of the first ones that motivated me to begin blogging my Second Life experiences. Last night, KJ offered Torontan 8th grade English teacher Konrad Glogowski (SL: Konrad March) on the topic, "The Embedded Practicioner," sharing information about his journey from attachment to his "teacherly voice" to the development of his "readerly voice," which a teacher attempting to nurture literacy skills with blogs must, in Konrad's view, adopt.

Take 20 minutes and listen up to the segment of the talk I choose to share. If you are interested in educational blogging with students, I feel it's a "must listen!" Then head on over to Konrad's blog, "blog of proximal development," for more. I'll add the pics I took here soon, but here's one for starters, the one referenced early in Konrad's presentation, when he's talking about what most of us traditionally, and habitually, call "teaching":



Cheers,
Scott

NECC Birds of a Feather Gets its Final Co-presenter!

Okay, ya'll. In an effort to make the Birds of a Feather June 30 interesting and fun, I've added several co-presenters. Why? 'Cause I CAN, silly! I promise I'm finished!

The RL rundown:
Me, you know me
padl is a Tech Coordinator in Arkansas, JS is a Community College nursing educator in Washington state, Gia is a SLoodle expert in London, Know is a theater teacher in New Jersey, and the Prof. is an English language teacher in Kobe, Japan.

Sound fun? It will be. Join us. :)

The Globalization of Higher Education

I knew I did something right when I nominated the "Teaching College Math Technology Blog" for the March featured RSS feed in the Blogger's Hut in Second Life. Don't worry, you don't really have to understand any of the foregoing. Just know that if you are interested in teaching or learning, be it math or not, Maria H. Anderson's blog is well worth adding to your list of favorites.

This entry will point you not just to another blog, not just to an entertaining post by a thoughtful educator, not just to her description of an insightful (and maybe inciteful) presentation, but finally to the presentation itself. After you read Maria's armchair review, you'll want to visit YouTube to pick up the 5 part video of the complete (30 minute or so) presentation. I know I want to do that, and it's on my list of things to do in the early morning, before I start shaking the kids out of bed for the school day.

The presentation is called "Exiting the Educational Silo, Entering the Global Freeway." It was shared by Mike Lively (hmmmm, wonder if he knows the Kid-Web diva, Gail Lovely?) in Washington, DC (Maria doesn't say where), and is loaded up with interesting takes on the survival of our current models of technology in education, as well as their relationship to the size and scope of institutions. I won't spoil the joy of reading Maria's descriptive article for you, but I will mention my agreement with Lively's (along with co-presenters Sam Zachary and Kevin Corcoran) position that we don't have to have a faculty comprised of what he calls "Uber Instructors," (pic from her blog) but rather a faculty willing to innovate with a support team of knowledgeable and innovative designers "supporting their technological desires for improving pedagogy."

I am looking forward eagerly to seeing the first-hand delivery of Lively's "shot at the present day LMS leaders with this slide 'Why Present Day Learning Management Systems Will Fail.'" Go on, you know you want to see this slide and read the article, and then you know you want to view the presentation. Spoil yourself, just "doit."