edubuilder.net

I found a fantastic little resource in public beta… it generates a variety of worksheets in several subjects - math, geometry, language skills, etc.. Whatever engine it uses is great - a new puzzle or worksheet is generated each time.

 http://worksheetworks.com/

I have long argued that the popular impression that the last two generations are ‘digital natives’ who automatically move into adolescence and adulthood knowing how to handle technology is flawed. The truth is that it depends entirely on exposure. Younger people are more frequently exposed to technologies at an earlier age, but if the opportunity for exposure is missing, so will the technical knowledge be missing. A new British study seems to show that our younger ‘digital’ generations do not actually have a greater degree of web literacy than other ages. That’s the good news nugget in this - the implied divide is false. Unfortunately, it seems that the ‘digital’ generations are lacking in the critical thinking skills that enable web literacy… bad news for society.

The worse news is that ALL ages have been shown to have decreasing levels of tolerance for a protracted search for information, which distinctly will impact any critical thinking or analysis that can be done with information found on the web.

http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20080116.html

Hooray! OMET’s Cadre 9 sent this announcement for an event they’re hosting, which I will repost here:

Press Release:  Give Education a Second Life

Look Around. 
The world is changing. 
Think of how you learned 10 years ago - are you still learning the same way now?

Look Around. 
Humans are dynamic, ever changing, and growing - why isn’t education doing the same?
Change starts with your voice.  Do you want your voice to be heard?
If you could give education a second life - what would it look like?

Join educators and other life-long learners to discuss how we can make a difference in education. 
Join us for a dynamic evening of discussion and reflection.

Meet in Second Life at the “Quad” on Teaching 2 at the NMC   Campus on July 8th, 5pm (PST) or July 9th 8pm (PST).
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/135/124/22
Go to http://secondlife4education.org/ for event details.

Who are we?  We are K12, Higher Ed and Corporate educators who want to give education a second life.
Our focus is on learning.  We want to empower educators of all ages to give learners meaningful experiences through choice.

Win an iPod.
We want you to help us create a vision for CHOICE in education. 
Share your idea of best practices that you have used with learners in your environment to empower learners with CHOICE.
You could change someone’s perspective of learning forever!
Go to http://secondlife4education.org/ for contest details.

Look Around.
There are other educators like you who care about education today.
Our event will feature an interview between renowned ed tech blogger Steve Hargadon and distinguished learning theorist Gary Stager, PhD.
Our goal is to start a conversation.
We need you.
It’s time for you to make a choice.

Give Education a Second Life. 

We hope to see you soon on the NMC Campus!

Not a new journal, but a wonderfully accessible one.

Journal of Learning Design

http://www.jld.qut.edu.au/

My husband left me this week. Well, sort of.

“I made a wall around my teleport pad,” he said cheerfully out of the blue the other day. “The winds are a lot stronger on the new continent, they can knock you right over.”

“What?” I said? “Did you buy more land?” I thought we’d agreed on limiting our Second Life land ownership.

“No, I moved,” he said.

“What!”

I felt like the ground under my feet had taken a sudden dive, like we were on two ends of a pontoon bridge and he’d just started jumping up and down. We had adjoining land parcels in our Second Life neighborhood, and for some reason it had been comforting to see his brick office out of the corner of my view while I was puttering around, even if he wasn’t in it. People always left his door open, and Second Wife-like, I’d go and close it for him. Now he’s gone, and I’m struggling with an awkward and irrational sense of loss.

My (was our) next-door neighbor came over to chat after I tangled with the security script that prevented fly-overs of his land. “Sorry,” he said. “I added you to the list so you’ll be OK now.”

“I see you’re buying a lot of land in the neighborhood,” I commented. Our neighbor had bought my husband’s land almost as soon as it went up for sale.

“I was surprised to see that Mr. G moved,” he said.

“So was I.”

“I thought he was your husband?” my neighbor asked.

“He is,” I answered, grinding my teeth. “He just didn’t tell me he was going to move.”

“Oh,” said my neighbor.

Facial expressions aren’t all that sophisticated in Second Life yet, but I could have sworn my neighbor’s avatar shot me the same kind of wary, hesitant glance a sudden public exposure of marital difficulties gets in real life. I could have imagined it - probably did imagine it - but it’s interesting that I did. I expect my neighbor to react the same way he would if he’d been standing in front of me in his physical body. Obviously, I also expected my husband not to suddenly move to another continent, just as I wouldn’t expect him to do it in real life.

“Oh, look,” my husband said earlier tonight as he logged in. “New continents.”

“Are you going to go move there now?” I asked nastily.

“Honey…”

“Never mind.”

“Honey, I live in the same house with you! What does it matter?”

“I don’t know. You’re not next to me anymore. You left.” The weird thing is that I’m not clingy. You’d never hear me sulking about anything in RL - I don’t play dopey emotional games - we have the least troubled relationship of nearly anyone I know. So why the ongoing sense of loss?

“I didn’t leave! I’m here. I live in the same house with you in real life, every day!” said my poor husband. “If I’d known it would hurt your feelings, I wouldn’t have moved!” Obviously, though my husband spends many, many more hours logged into SL than I do, he has his head on much straighter about it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I’ve realized through this incident that I’ve given up the sense I had originally of my avatar being someone else - a dolly, a mask, a role - and have fully identified with it. With her. With me. Likewise, I must also accept my husband’s avatar as being another him, or an extension of him, somehow. I think this conversion happened when I started using my avatar to attend events related to my real life profession. I reshaped it to look a little more like me, chose clothing that wouldn’t embarrass me professionally, and identified myself as an online educator to others… and “she” became “me.” I doubt I would have taken my husband’s virtual move so personally prior to this.

Anthropology in Second Life: You know if I’m thinking about social roles in any situation whatsoever, I’ll hit the research thirty seconds later. Once an anthro, always an anthro.

http://www.anthro.uci.edu/faculty_bios/boellstorff/boellstorff.php

http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2007/05/dont_stand_so_close_to_me.html

http://metaverseterritories.com/?cat=23

Today I found TeacherTube, the education version of YouTube. These are all teacher-created videos. Really nice, I must say. There’s a wide range available in terms of topic and audience.

I’m trying to think of what I can put up.

Here’s a link to a Photoshop tutorial on creating curved vector edges.

Download: Posted by jblack at TeacherTube.com.

I attended part of the Eduserv Symposium the other night via SecondLife. It was held in a double venue - in real life in London, and via 2-way broadcast in SecondLife in three different in-world locations. It worked incredibly well, I have to say. SecondLife attendees watched a live streaming video feed from the real life event. Speakers could see the SecondLife venues in their monitors, along with the IM chat taking place, and could respond to questions The SecondLife announcer was able to provide a certain amount of support/guidance to virtual attendees as well as announcing the program and directing questions. And, exactly like a real life conference, there was a lot of meeting and greeting going on - though I have to say it was easier to do than in real life, since you can look up attendee profiles and find out common interests at a glance. There was a lot of back-chat during the speaking that couldn’t have happened without disruption, too, which made it a very lively conversation.

The only down side was making the synchronous meeting time - 10 AM in London is 2 AM Pacific / SecondLife time. Oof. However, the fascination of attending a European conference and chatting with instructional designers in Slovakia, Moscow, Berlin, and Italy as well as the UK and Australia more than made up for it. I’d do it again in a minute!

I was really only able to attend the first two speakers - Jim Purbrick from Linden Lab, and Roo Reynolds from IBM.  Purbrick’s presentation was a great introduction to SecondLife for those who might not have a clear view of what can be done there. His presentation, though great, leaned a bit heavily on geek-interests, which I personally appreciated, but I think could have lost some educators on the fence. He had a thorough grip on the strength of the real-world skill sets that must be learned to build, interact, or start a business in SecondLife, skirted by the virtual museum idea (only mentioned what looked like the Spaceflight Museum, but might have been a separate rocket museum) and only touched briefly on some of the research being done there - noted an artificial behavior experiment, but only one. Just mentioning immersive experiences like the historical recreation sims (Renaissance Island, among others) or the schizophrenia simulation would have (arguably) captured the attention of less geeky educators.

I took a few screen shots for interest, and I’ll upload them to the space as soon as I can. Conference videos and proceedings will also be made available.

I keep thinking I’m going to make the time to set up everything ‘properly’ before I start posting… nah. When am I going to carve out so many minutes? I’ll just jump in and start winging it - it’s nearly always what I do in any case. Read a little bit, then start to play.

Random fun: Steampunk mechanical vehicles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlJLqvrlsLs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMaS4pB9rw

I love the steampunk aesthetic.