Gaming & Virtual Worlds

These were not new topics to me as both my (now) adult children are gamers and I have viewed 100s of hours of gaming at home both them alone and with friends and participated when allowed! I was new to Second Life however and I found the experience fun but the navigation around was a bit clunky. At home I prefer games like (challenge your friends to) Quiz games and of course on-line Scrabble (which I am very bad at). Of the games suggested I tried Runescape but quickly got bored as progress was so slow. Which leads me to my only real criticism of gaming and virtual worlds -it does take a big chunk of time out of your life.  Any parent or educator who has some experience would agree that real experience is better than virtual experience. The virtual experience has sprung  out of parents and educators no longer having the time to expose students to more real world experience. This was part of what Robert Winston was discussing in his talk at our AwayDay- exposing students to real experiences rather than second hand ones.

Our virtual medical examination was a case in point. I have to declare inside knowledge here and say that my husband teaches beginning health service/medical students and has for double decades. Every year in the end -of term evaluations students seem to consistantly express two things: one-they like the older professors with their traditional methods two- they want more real experience (lab or otherwise) as that is the way they learn fastest and it sticks with them. The virtual medical exams was more like going through a question and answer book or a simptom sorter than it was examinaing a real person so while its was “fun” it shouldn’t be considered a substitute for the real thing…

Ning

I accepted an invitation to join the Ning group and viewed the page. It looks similar to a facebook page and has similar function. I uploaded a photo here at Imp. Then I tried to do more from my home computer. Ning required me to sign -up again so I was a bit impatient with that. I can see clearly that a closed area where a group could share ideas on a topic would be very useful educationally especially since no matter how uncontroversial you think your discussion topic is you can always get your “Wall” space highjacked by some silly argument. My history group on facebook was recently highjacked by two such folk having different opinions on if one should go to war with Napolen Boneparte should he miraculously come to life and want to lead an army in the modern world…very silly. On the other hand I don’t like the idea of any educational information being in a “members only” space because you learn much more by viewing others questions and dialog on topics than you do if access to info is restricted. I think that open access to all dialog on educational topics is very, very important …so I don’t like Ning.

Catch Up Week

I used the catch up week to put some Web 2.0 learning into practice. I made a facebook group for Harrow Nature Conservation Forum (a group of volunteers which maintain many of the woodland areas where I live) and am hoping to get some younger volunteers by listing events on the facebook page. Most of the people actually doing the conservation work are older- many retired -and have been doing this for years. They need to develop a younger group of workers they can eventually pass on the work to and although young people are very interested in the environment and conservation it is sometimes very difficult to “connect” with new volunteers that will actually commit to working outdoors on a semi-regular basis. I’ve got events listed through the end of October and I’ve uploaded photos from a recent moth night. I’ve added some recent news and I’ve got 6 members at the moment. I’m hoping the “joining” will be spontaneous but have also looked into running a facebook “ad” directed at London members who have listed volunteering and conservation in their profile- in case it all stalls at six members! This would not be free but it might be interesting to see if it proves effective. I might just have created a facebook group that looks too “square” for many to join…we shall see. I’ve also added a link to the main website for HNCF at http://www.harrowncf.org and a few others dealing with the opposition to some local housing initiatives (Agenda21-protecting the Green Belt) and a couple for insect identification or just for browsing. Hope it works…

iTunes and podcasts

I have been looking more closely at podcasts in the last few days. First I added some podcasts subscriptions to my Google Reader. These were from the BBC and very easy to do- after that I tried to add some interesting book related podcasts to Google Reader but found that Google reader wouldn’t support them so got frustrated. With the time available for me to search- I could not find podcasts with content that I wanted to add to Google Reader. At the same time I picked up to read the July-Dec edition of UCL People which had an article on UCL lectures on iTunesU. Since we had just had our nice talk by John about the way lectures and teaching material are being presented now I wanted to go have a look- and ended up downloading iTunes and subscribing to The Library Channel podcasts from ASU Libraries. This kind of content was much better and actually worth spending a bit of time to sort through. I am also looking at the language and history podcasts from various universities. This could be good!

Embedded music attempt

I hope you enjoy this small audio clip of some classical music. I downloaded this from MFiles because I couldn’t find anything I liked on the websites suggested. Then uploaded it to my husbands website- with his permission and all seems to work okay. I would think audio embedding would be very useful for using perhaps audio clips from authors on library websites or to help blind or partially sited people during induction- to name just two uses. Sorry the music sounds a bit like it’s being played by Kazoos!!