That’SLife

As part of the fifth birthday celebrations in Second Life, I’ve been asked by the folks at Linden Lab to coordinate a roundtable on language learning and teaching n Second Life. Here are the details:

Language Learning & Teaching in SL: a roundtable with…

• Dudeney Ge (Director, EduNation)
• Iffaf Ling (Teacher Trainer, LanguageLab)
• Head Teacher (Director of Studies, LanguageLab)
• Daf Smirnov (Spanish Courses, LanguageLab)
• Baldric Commons (Project Leader, British Council)
• Howie Yokishawa (CEO Avatar Languages)
• Calisto Encinal (Glendale Community College, Arizona).

Monday July 7th, 12:00 noon PST (21:00 CEST)

In this roundtable we’ll be discussing the advancements made in language teaching and language teacher training over the past two years and considering the core skills needed to get started, as well as approaches, tools and content that work well in SL. Our mixed panel includes teachers, teacher trainers and materials designers and we look forward to a lively debate followed by even livelier audience discussion.

• SLURL to the venue
• Birthday celebrations wiki

We hope to see some of you there for some moral support and some cheeky questions and comments!

I’m at the end of the second day of a four-day teacher training course here in Nicosia, working with a group of lively (they’ll know what I’m trying to say there, I think) teachers from all around the island. As is usual these days, the group is about 95% female, perhaps illustrating that while technology may still be largely male, teaching certainly isn’t.

We’re working at the Pedagogical Institute just outside town in a dry, dusty landscape which reflects the lack of water on Cyprus, something I can appreciate from back home in Barcelona. I’m delighted to see that the Institute has a mascot cat who wanders imperiously around the place, falling asleep on office floors and generally ruling the roost (or whatever it is that cats live in).

We’re covering a variety of Web 2.0 tools and time is short so I’m trying to keep the heavy reading and theory down to a bare minimum and concetrate on tools and approaches with practical examples and some hands-on time. This will increase over the next two days as we move on from more traditional activities involving websites and writing activities to blogs, wikis and podcasts before finishing up with professional development opportunities online and action plans. If all goes well I’ll be coming back at some point to do a follow up and take up the invitation to go to the coast and have some fun.

This afternoon it’s 34 outside and a bit too hot, so after a quick iced coffee I’m back hiding in my shaded, air-conditioned room making some changes to tomorrow’s content and getting ready for a night out on the town with everybody, a stroll, some beers and some dinner.

It’s good to be back (I was here a couple of years ago for an excellent conference at the university) with some notable changes: the Euro is now the working currency, which is easier for me to work with, and the UN-monitored wall that divided the city then has gone now - I guess we’ll see that later when we venture out for a bit of relaxation. One thing hasn’t changed, though - and that’s the amazing hospitality, the warmth and care that people show visitors and the fantastic food.

However, with net access costing an eye-watering EUR19.99 for five hours, don’t expect another blog post…

I don’t usually go all gooey over GUIs, but the Apple iPhone quite simply has the best user interface I’ve ever seen in any gadget I’ve ever owned. The phone hasn’t yet arrived in Spain, but when it does it will be tied into another of those abusive Apple client contracts with a major telephone company - in this case Telefónica - where you pay thousands for a phone with a data contract which you may or may not need (and in my case, I do not).

I picked up mine in Tokyo earlier this week whilst on a work visit - unlocked, updated and ready to go. I got home, installed my SIM card and added a few applications, synched with Outlook and was ready to go. I get high-speed access via my home (and other) wireless LAN, and the normal data speed from Movistar is sufficient for email, which is all I’m likely to do on a paid data connection. Job done - truly beautiful phone, no exploitative contract.

The included apps handle various media gracefully (YouTube, websites, etc.) and synching, installing and just using the phone is a true joy. I don’t generally buy into the vapid Apple Fanboy thing (having been a PC person since 1989, when my Mac has a small, square green screen), but if you haven’t had a go on an iPhone yet, I’d encourage you to go and try it out if you can.

Which a lot of things are - tower blocks, transport systems, pavilions - you name it! I managed to keep my eyes open for six days, despite the 24-hour trip each way via London and had a great time with some fantastic people and some totally wonderful food (you can’t get proper sushi and sashimi in Spain anymore since the European bods decided that fresh fish and seafood must be deep-frozen before it can be served raw…).

Thursday to Friday was taken up with the trip to Tokyo and then on to Nagoya by Shinkansen, followed  by an odd train and bus combo to the campus where the conference was held. I think my Second Life workshop that night was a bit frayed around the edges due to tiredness, but hopefully some people got something out of it. Saturday I skipped the conference to go on a day-trip to Kyoto and do some sightseeing in the early rainy-season dampness. Saw some great stuff and am determined to go back sometime for a holiday.

Sunday I did my plenary in a fantastic room at the university and that went fine since I was rested. Good audience and a great view over the campus lake behind me for those who lost interest Then on for some dinner in the town and the obligatory chance meeting with a Spanish person, working as a barman in the city.

Monday back to Tokyo for some sightseeing and more food, followed by more sightseeing on Tuesday and an excellent meeting with two charming people at Waseda University who are involved with a very elegant distance programme in cross-cultural relations with a set of Asian universities. We’re going to see if we can open it out for them into Europe and beyond for even more cultural exchanges. Excellent dinner in Azuma-zushi (thanks Prof. Nakano!) and then an early night for the romp back to Barcelona.

It’s a long way to go for six days, but the people and the food made it more than worthwhile and I’m really looking forward to going back. If only the Inbox didn’t look so disastruous after all that…

Looking at the feedback (35 people so far), I think we got an awful lot right this year, with a few improvements which can be implemented for the next one. What is immedaitely obvious is that this is now a ‘proper’ conference with a large number of people attending and speaking and is going to need a lot more people next time to guarantee it can continue to grow and serve the language learning and teaching community. We may even be looking for a third or possibly fourth sim on which to run it next year. Here I’d like to look at some of the feedback and comment on it:

1) Technical Support
Having said we would not be able to provide technical support on the day (the team was just too small) we inevitably ended up with a lot of new SL users and quite a few with problems. The biggest problems were not knowing how to deal with notecards and landmarks, and not having configured voice. I think we did what we could, but frankly if voice has worked for someone before and isn’t working at the time, then there’s little that can be done. I advised people with voice problems (provided they had used it before) to exit and come back in-world and that seemed to work most of the time. SL behaved amazingly for me for 24 hours and I only had to exit twice during that period. Next year we may need some technical support staff on hand.

2) Timetable
This year we scheduled talks over a straight twenty-four hour period and tried to get people to  speak twice in order to guarantee a spread and a decent choice. One of the questions at the end was whether it might be better to have two twelve-hour days. My response was “twelve hours for whom?” As with a f2f conference, you’re never going to be able to see everything, and if we divided it into two twelve-hour days, we would have to do something like a ‘European’ twelve hour slot and an ‘American’ twelve-hour slot. And, to my mind, that makes… um…. a normal day! I’m not sure if the 24 hour model can be improved on, but suggestions are welcome in comment.

3) Variety of talks
I’m not sure if this is an SL thing, but people going to a f2f conference usually expect plenty of PowerPoint and a lot of talking, followed by (if they’re lucky) some discussion. In SL this is often criticised as not making good use of SL, but I’m wondering why SL is supposed to be different??? We did have a lot of PPT sessions followed by discussion, but we also had four field trips, an ‘introduction to building’ and a couple of other sessions. I guess I’d like to ask the person who said that it was dull to watch presentations in SL what they would do - and if they’d be prepared to actually come along and do it next time. Having said that, I think more workshops would be good. What’s holding that back is, of course, the skillset of a lot of the participants. I managed to get sixteen people with no experience of building to produce a notecard giver, but that’s hard work, and risky - people can get disappointed easily.

I think those are some of the more important issues, and there are things to do to improve on the event… Things we definitely got right were the sign-up process and the support website (thanks Howard!), the clear timetable, the social events and the variety of speakers. I think it’s now time to sit down and see how we can take this conference to new heights next year.

It’s all worth it, however, when you get feedback like this:

• I guess it’s been perfect from my point of view. Very carefully thought, organized, varied, etc.
• It was awesome! Two days non-stop educational conference? Where else???
• As an ESL teacher in Canada I know that this would just rock my colleagues.
• It’s been the best organised conference (in RL or SL) that I’ve been to all year!
• I think this is THE conference for language educators in SL.
• I learned more about SL in the few hours I was in this conference than the whole of the rest of my time in SL so far. In fact I signed up in SL to have just these types of experiences, so I finally felt that I got what SL was all about (finally)!

So, pretty good, I reckon. Lots to improve on - the one area I think we could definitely work on is getting next year going sooner with more information for speakers and presenters, and building the interest earlier. The other area is obviously more practical sessions - more building, more design, etc.

Time to start planning SLanguages 2009…

This is a short one after almost 36 hours awake and the 24 hours of fun that was SLanguages 2008. I hope to have time to reflect once I’ve had a sleep, but if you were there and you have ten minutes, please feel free to pass by the short feedback questionnaire on Survey Monkey and let us know what we got right, and what we didn’t…

Everything is now set for Slanguages 2008… over 25 speakers, over 300 people registered, two island, four venues and a great potential for mayhem. Hopefully Second Life will behave for 24 hours. If you want to come, take a look at the website and sign up.

Many thanks to Howard Vickers (Howie Yoshikawa in SL) and Avatar Languages for the support in the planning stage and also to Iffaf for offering to volunteer. If you have a few spare hours and wouldn’t mind doing a bit of virtual stewarding, please get in touch.

Having seen what the pre-pubescent CEO of Facebook has in store for me with regard to ‘improving my user experience via targetted advertising’ in a BBC documentary the other day, and the outcry over credit loan adverts on Facebook targetted at young people, I got to thinking about social networks - and my networks - and what they mean to me. Of course the video by Idiots of Ants doesn’t improve my feeling of the slightly absurd in all these networks…

I got to thinking about Facebook and all the clones, and then to the useful groups I’m on (Webheads being a classic example) - and the difference between them. Essentially I join networks for a few basic reasons:

• To (re-)connect with friends
• For professional development
•  To keep up with what’s happening out there on the InterWeb ™

But Facebook is like roadkill on the information highway - I don’t have time to be poked, to have my wall written on, take cinema quizzes, find out who the best kisser is, throw pies, send a virtual parcel, buy a friend, or countless other mindless applications that Facebook would have me install. I’m busy, see? I work, I go out, I see real people.  I just want Facebook to keep me up-to-date with my friends and colleagues. I don’t want to poke them all…

So I have changed my profile - all the information is now useless or untrue. My friends will know this, my colleagues too. Facebook presumably won’t, but at least the adverts might be amusing. What does a ‘moderate Spartacist’ deserve in targetted advertising, I wonder? How will my favourite TV show of ‘Strictly Come Bricklaying’ translate into a richer commercial user experience? Only time will tell.

For the time being, I think I’d rather be in more networks like the Webheads - supportive, friendly, useful, interesting - a mix of personal and professional that works… and without the annoyance of a wall to write on. I can see Facebook going down the pan eventually, along with a lot of these things: they just seem a little pointless and more than a little intrusive in the end. I haven’t had a ‘rich user experience’ on Facebook ever…

Corwin Carillon, Self-directed Team Learning in Virtual Worlds
Saturday May 17th 2008 at 15:30 - 16:30 PDT

Is self-directed learning something you are passionate about? Does self-directed team learning in virtual worlds grab your imagination?

Virtual worlds as learning sites provide a number of potentially rich learning opportunities for students. One of these is project work and another is control of the learning environment. At the moment, the virtual world that probably offers learners the greatest degree of control of the learning environment, and probably the lowest barrier of entry to that creation, is Second Life. Alongside the often noted increased sense of presence, coupling project work with student control of the learning environment seems likely to be a high-value exploitation of virtual worlds for learning.

Come join us for a discussion of self-directed team learning in Second Life where we will share ideas and practices for giving learning teams greater control through inquiry-driven projects.

This is the fifth in a series of free talks at EduNation in Second Life. For more information, see the website…

Well, the week in Exeter was as busy as expected - loads of people to see, meetings, dinners, a few sessions, etc. My session went well, as did the Pecha Kucha (in which I took part) evening entertainment, with plenty of heckling and some excellent performances. What was astounding was the difference between the performances of the four men (out of breath, racing along, lots of jokes - basically playing for laughs more than anything) and the four women (slow, deliberate, reflective, intelligent - using the limited time in a very elegant way). I particularly liked Rose Senior’s method - if she ran out of something to say before the slide changed, she simply stood there with a finger in the air, as if to say ‘mark my words, which are coming soonish…‘ Anyway, it was good fun.

The book I wrote with Nicky Hockly (How to Teach English with Technology, Longman 2007) won the Ben Warren International House Trust Prize for the ‘most outstanding publication in the field of language teacher education’, which is a great accolade, but which also comes with a nice GBP 2,000 cheque for the two of us to share. Being sensible, Nicky has spent it on something practical and much-needed…. Me? I spent mine on a set of Roland drums which I’ve had my eye on for a while. I used to play drums a long time ago, but living in a flat they just aren’t practical. These however sound and (almost) feel like the real thing and you can plug in an MP3 player and a set of headphones and bash way to your heart’s content without annoying the neighbours. My kick drum foot has lost any sense of rhythym, unfortunately, so I feel it’s going to take a bit of time.

Inbetween Exeter and this weekend I’ve mostly been lying around taking antibiotics and sleeping due to a viral infection which I brought back to Spain with me. Not sure what it was, but exhaustion played a part. Got to love a fever, though - all those lost and weird hours. On the mend now, and back to work normally tomorrow before a trip to the EAQUALS conference in Paris on Thursday.

The British Council and IATEFL are pleased to announce the official launch of the Exeter Online website in the run up to the IATEFL Annual Conference in Exeter, 7th – 11th April 2008. The Exeter Online site allows remote participants to take part in one of the world’s biggest ELT conferences through a variety of resources including:

- video recordings of selected sessions
- audio recordings of selected sessions
- live streamed plenaries and events
- moderated special interest discussion forums
- chat sessions
- blogs and photo albums

To visit the Exeter Online website, go to: http://exeteronline.britishcouncil.org .

The first time you visit the site, you’ll need to create your own free user account - http://exeteronline.britishcouncil.org/login/signup.php

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The next session in our monthly seminars for teachers (EduCation@EduNation) will take place next Sunday 30th March at 12:00 PST (Second Life Time), 19:00 UTC or 21:00 CET. The session is entitled “Watching Teachers Watch Themselves” and will be led in-world by Dirk Beatty.

Many of you will not know Dirk, but if you’re involved in English Language Teaching (ELT) you will most certainly be familiar with the person driving the avatar: Jeremy Harmer, best-selling ELT author, international speaker and all-round expert in all matters related to English teaching in the real world.

This is a real-world talk (rather than being about education in SL itself) looking at teacher observation and how teachers perceive their work and their teaching practice. This session concerns the teacher observation Jeremy carried out whole preparing the new edition of ‘How to Teach English‘ [ Pearson Longman, 2007 ]. More about this project can be found in the DVD that accompanies the printed book.

We look forward to welcoming Jeremy in-world next Sunday and also to a lively session which ELT teachers worldwide will undoubtedly enjoy and benefit from. If you’re not yet registered for the series, visit the sign-up stands in-world on EduNation III.

I finally got my beta application for Twinity approved and gave it a whirl earlier tonight. First, it’s a whacking big download compared to Second Life and then, after install, it downloads updates which are similarly huge. Question one, therefore, is why can’t they distribute an up-to-date installation?

It finally installed, updated and I managed to log in. Nice clean interface with a map of the world. Twinity informed me I was being teleported, then promptly froze. Restarting it, I managed to get myself teleported to the welcome area, in this case a dark apartment with some grim furniture and someone who works for Twinity sitting in it waiting to say hello.

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It’s one of those moments you dread - all the lights go out on your laptop and then it refuses to boot. Not only that, but it doesn’t even attempt it. The lights don’t come on, the fan doesn’t whirr and it does nothing whatsoever. So, you unplug, remove the battery and do that a few dozen times and eventually you give up, thinking that maybe it will have recovered in the morning. Except it hadn’t, and I had to come to the conclusion that the motherboard had gone, and this was confirmed with some diagnostics carried out by a fifteen-year-old at the local CompuMart (or whatever they call it).

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Just a quick note… our fourth session in the EduCation@EduNation series will feature ELT author Jeremy Harmer and will take place this month. More information on the series and the archive on our website…

So suddenly I’m knee-deep in organising events (virtual and real) or going to speak at them (real) - some connected with, and in, Second Life, and a few - mercifully - in real life.

First up is a last-minute invitation to speak at a conference entitled ‘Intercultural Dialogue’, organised by the European Language Network [ more here… ] . I’ve decided to do a talk on real-life places in Second Life, and the impact they have on cultural awareness and the opportunities they present for language learners. As a side issue, I’ve also been ‘invited’ to do the technical side for someone else who’s doing a presentation on SL using Adobe Connect. So that makes two visits to London in seven days [ the other being the ELTONs ].

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Call for Papers - SLanguages 2008

Following on from last year’s inaugural SLanguages conference, we are pleased to announce a call for papers for this year’s bigger and better event, to be held 23rd May 10:00 PST to 24th May 10:00 PST on EduNation II and III.

The conference aims to bring together practitioners and researchers in the field of language education in Second Life for a 24-hour festival celebrating languages and cultures in Second Life, and will include a variety of social events as well as an exciting mix of plenary and simultaneous sessions throughout.

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Sat down today to work out how much I *might* have made if I’d charged for the tools I currently sell for L$0 on SLEX, ShopOnRez and in-world. Putting a putative price of L$200 on each item (currently US$0.75) I would have made US$2,781 between the 1st October 2007 and the 16th February 2008. Which is actually a lot more than I expected. I suppose it made me think exactly how much some of the big sellers (Moopf Murray, as one example) must make on a monthly basis.

Doesn’t mean I have any intention of charging for any of the objects - I’ve already ruined my market by giving them away for so long - but it’s interesting how quickly micropayments can add up… something my former employer never really did get his head round every time I proposed it.

The free tools are available here:

http://www.theconsultants-e.com/edunation/edunationtools.asp

Well, having been too busy to write for a couple of weeks at least I can do a quick posting about our next free educational event in Second Life.

Join us on EduNation II on February 29th from 12:30 - 13:30 PST for a session on games in Second Life with Jeremy Koester. Jermey’s biodata goes as follows:

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