Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

While many universities deploying Second Life have constructed learning spaces that replicate their real world campus counterparts, USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (http://iml.usc.edu/) has worked to imagine a completely innovative learning environment .

This session described the IML’s design process, the interrogation of the relationship between virtual and physical spaces, creating new forms of spatiality and social interaction within a pedagogical context, and designing learning objects such as an immersive syllabus and spatialized audio texts, with an emphasis on understanding the structuring mechanism of spatial infrastructure .

Holly Willis, University of Southern California

My Thoughts

I liked this one. Holly has the right mindset here. Define your needs first, then decide on the technology and methods needed.

This session made me think about with media/info literacy is and will be. We really need to get a handle on this at PSU. It's not just using Word, It's not just REALLY using Word - in fact, it's beyond the use of ANY particular tool. There are just too many tools out there and more on the way every day.

Instead, we need to prep students to be able to hit the ground running in info literacy. We have to stop teaching a particular tool and start teaching them how to approach any situation that requires the use of IT so they can succeed at their tasks. This is way beyond skills training. It dives down into self-awareness of learning styles, use of metacognitive strategies, and knowing how to access Just-In-Time learning resources. We have to reach our students on the affective level - they have to buy into this concept, believe it's critical, and embrace it.

We've made some steps here. The iStudy modules is one. We have a long way to go. What's the plan at PSU?

Notes

Prior August 2007 - Time to think about Virtual Spaces

Remediation (Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin)

What can the design of virtual spaces do for enhance the re-thinking of teaching practices?

Inst. for Multimedia Literacy
Annenberg Ctr. for Communication
USC

Honors in Multimedia Scholarship Program - Students learn mm/info literacy. Backchannels in class encouraged!
Building a sense of community beyond the classroom.
Second Life things - resisting the traditional "Let's rebuild our campus in SL" mentality.
We need to look at virtual spaces as the social interactions that occur, a setting within which we act, institutional relations and power structures.

Infrastructures
 

• frame our perceptions of the world.
• operate invisibly until they break down
• are relational
• are embedded in social structures, but are also part of the structuring mechanism

Trialectics

Space is
 

• perceived
• conceived
• imagined

also
 

• sociality
• historicality
• spatiality

Brad Kligerman's Ars Virtua Project, 2006
http://transition.turbulence.org/AVAIR

http://metaverseterritories.com

Interactive art space in SL.

Carvable Architecture
Jon Brouchard

Michael Ditullio
Emergent Architecture
interactivearchitectures.blogspot.com
 

What's Happening Now at IML

Creating Open Source Learning Projects
Creating Tutorials

Sudent Projects in SL
Rivenscyr - Matt Lee