June Activity

June was a busy month and a month of frustration!

We have been unable to get the Voice Client working in Second Life at Elizabeth Campus, which has been incredibly frustrating in terms of preparation of digital orientation materials. In the end we worked closely with IT Services and discovered that Voice Client only actually worked on one campus in TAFESA Adelaide North, Tea Tree Gully. The good news is that as a result of our project IT Services became aware of this situation and it has been rectified. This means we have paved the way for others!

Another issue for our project has been getting access to the TAFESA Island as it's popularity has grown so much it now needs a 'Management Committee' to administer it. This has held things up for us in terms of getting access to our own space with privacy and the ability for our learners to teleport in, but we are hopeful that things will get sorted very soon.

This month the team have been working on getting the orientation materials together including a fact sheet on the technical specifications that the learner's computers will needto have to successfully access and operate in Second Life. The project Moodle site which will house our resources has also been set up and we are in the process of linking this to SLoodle (moodle in Second Life). We have developed a Second Life media clip on our project which is accessible through YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLZn8kxLKEU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efacebook%2Ecom%2Fhome%2Ephp%3F&feature=player_embedded

As our project will result in a White Paper that will provide research that compares traditional classroom based training to training in Second Life, we have also started work on our Evaluation Strategy. We have made connections to the e-Learning Benchmarking project http://flexiblelearning.net.au/e-learningindicators through Annie Ferguson and are very lucky to be given the opportunity to work with Ian Phillips who manages this project. Ian has agreed to help us to establish what we will measure, what data we will collect and what tools we will use.

We held a full team meeting on 25th June and we were very fortunate to have Ruth Frazer and Jacinta Ryan, who had a Second Life project last year, attend and share their knowledge and experiences with us. Among many things they talked to us about Decka's Decks in Second Life, a place where we can book space and have privacy to run activities with our learners and also connecting up with Malcolm Jolly who has already done quite a bit of work on protective behaviours. The day was full of wonderful exchanges of information and we finished off heading into the IT suite to watch media of Ruth and Jacinta's learners in action and then 'visit' a range of places in Second Life.

On Thursday 16th July we will be trialling the orientation processes that the team have been working hard on. This includes gaining access to the project Moodle, registering in Second Life, establishing an Avatar and undertaking an orientation to operating safely in Second Life. More on this next post, when I will also include the pictures of the team's Avatars.