October Activities

Hi,
I’m Cathy Gauci,
Michelle is on leave and I’m blogging for her in her absence :o)

Our first ‘real’ class session seemed at the time to be fraught with problems, and while
Helaine ‘woman-ed’ the phone and dealt with red tape, I waited in-world to meet and greet the students.
We had 9 enrolled - three from Elizabeth, three from Port Adelaide, two from Noarlunga and one from Millicent. To make our project as close to a true indication of distance based learning as possible Helaine and I worked from her office and had no face-to-face contact with students making the process entirely electronic.
The moodle server was down at Port Adelaide campus, and the 'can't register more than 5 people' problem came back to haunt us. There was little we could do about the moodle but 'Jojo'
saved the day by letting two students share her avatar, giving us 5 avatars in-world (7 including myself and Helaine) and 6 students present. Unfortunately, students from TafeSouth could not join us at all. These problems were compounded by problems with Helaine's email and a slow computer and she spent most of the morning on the phone trying to iron out the glitches and co-ordinate our students.
On the SL front, the students were marvellous, they read instructions, listened intently, and were very patient with us.

Our second session was somewhat better than the first.
Luckily, everybody managed to register an avatar of their own this week although students at Port Adelaide still had Moodle issues and those from TafeSouth could not get into SL at all. We later found that this was because Second Life was still blocked in Tafe South
The learners that had attended in SL last week went off to explore Tafe Island while the newcomers checked out the classroom and got their bearings, and Helaine again dealt with phone calls and frustration before joining us in-world,
We set the disappointed Tafe Sth students to download and reading the instructions on moodle.

After a break, we did an exercise designed to show how distance in SL can affect communication and ways to overcome this. We had a bit of a glitch when one student tried to voice call another instead of IM'ing, but that was soon sorted and we once again went back to the beach to unwind with a dance and a few pictures..

In week 3 we finally had all our students in world with us - for a little while at least - but not until we had to chase up the IT dept and get access unblocked at the south campus. After being informed that we were not authorized to even request the job, Michelle stepped in and saved the day for us. We learnt not to assume that because we had things worked out at our campus that they would be elsewhere too. Our student from Millicent was trying to access SL from home but had internet issues and couldn’t stay logged in.
The students that made it for the first time caught up quickly with a little help. This leads me to believe that the extra time spent reading all the instructions is beneficial.

This week we had students attempt a modified version of the obstacle course, tasks 1-4 gave them a gift at every stop, including a scooter and a thriller dance. We used a Halloween theme and reactions were positive. There seems to still be some issues about using IM's and communicating with each other, time got away from us and we had to drop the excursion to the Women's Ed resource hub.
Apart from not completing the session, the lesson went well and the main points this week under consideration are whether to have shorter, more regular breaks and how much we can expect to accomplish.