Merlot Conference, Second Life for Education, etc., etc.,

HI all,

I have just returned from the Merlot Conference in San Jose! I have to say that my head is spinning there is so much going on at Merlot that it is not possible to sum it up in one blog post, but I will start with some general observations.

John Willbanks provided the opening Keynote. John is from the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) a non-profit organization that provides "edicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." (retrieved from http://creativecommons.org/about/)


I had committed myself to facilitating four Second Life tours with the presenter in world, I was apprehensive to say the least! It was a trial and error/pilot project! While I think the technology worked beautifully there were certain things that I learned I could not do such as opening people's profiles, going in to mouselook, and doing searches while having my screen projected to the meeting room. If I did any of these things my computer locked up and I had to totally reboot the computer.

Saying that though I do believe the tour of Virtual Ability was well received and special thanks to Gentle Heron and especially Eme Capallini for Virtual Ability and conducting this presentation. I was pleased to see so many new people just coming in to Second Life at the conference..and doing so well as they got their "virtual world bearings" and were getting teleported and participating in the sessions. I hope they go back to Virtual Ability and participate in the orientation.

The next presentation was from Jonathon Richter, Wainbrave Bernal, who gave us a tour of the Merlot Campus and a presentation on the new CLIVE hud developed by SIFY...let me say this technology is amazing. This innovation in Second Life really had folks at the conference buzzing about the use of Second Life as a means to access Merlot resources!

On Saturday we had an excellent presentation from AJ Kelton Director of Emerging Instructional Technologies at Montclair State University. I give AJ a hard time but he is really the one who introduced me to the use of Second Life as content for learning, creating a learning environment and learning experience in world. The Theorist Project at Montclair State does just that.
Finally we toured Sci Lands, Jim Zeigler of Northern Michigan University introduced us to the Speech and Language Center in Second Life. With a larynx that an avatar can walk through, interactive quizzing, and more than life size ear that can be toured this is an amazing build. The person who built this learning environment is top notch and I encourage you to contact Jim for more details. His contact information is on the NMU website. As I checked NMU's website I see there are many innovations occurring in Second Life by educators there.

IN addition to this I would like to point out that some of these sessions are not so much about the build itself but what can be done and how it can be done in Second Life. Hopefully people picked up tips on navigation and communication through these sessions. In addition to this I hoped that they learned something about resources on the web regarding Second Life and how to use those to learn more about the program.



I would like to recognize the Elluminate sessions I also facilitated. The technology worked great but I learned a lot..it's best to block off a whole day for presenting these sessions rather than individual blocks of time for each. We did trials runs with each presenter prior to the session and that seemed to work fairly well.

I was thrilled with Judy Greaves presentation on the Library of Commerce there is a great deal of quality resources there to incorporate into your course and it is well organized and indexed. Other presentations using Elluminate included Turning Technologies on gaming and Ramona and Carmen on Web 2.0 tools application to teaching.

Overall a great conference I was honored to go and in spite of the technical hiccups I hope we see an expansion on the virtual conference next year!