Bronwyn Stuckey

Hi I, Bronwyn Stuckey here in Sydney Australia. I have worked for the past 4 years on a 3D multi-user game environment developed for kids out of Indiana University - Quest Atlantis built on the ActiveWorlds platform - working for Sasha Barab. I have a great interest in MMORPG as potential spaces for community and identity building, as my main area of research and practice is in Internet-mediated community of practice development. I manage online Professional Development Workshops for teachers Quest Atlantis and support schools using QA across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Europe (new workshops starting mid April).

I was a guest blogger a in February on the 21st Century Organisation Blog where I raised a few issues about games and virtual worlds. Like Therese I am not expert but on a journey and am very glad to join you in here for some new dialog and discoveries.

My questions about games and virtual worlds relate to the skills learned in them and the transferability of skills and networks beyond the games themselves. I see kids lacking in self esteem and confidence carve out strong identities online and I wonder how those boosts to ego/skill/knowledge translate into the student life worlds.

I am looking forward to the next few weeks although I will be travelling to the USA next week and may have sporadic connectivity.

I would like to join in - the issues you're likely to discuss are relevant to the Foundations workshop and the other events that I work with and maybe I can contribute some too (having taken your workshop). So if I can stay awake I will be there!

Hey Kaj,

Great to find you here. Yes we are just completing an online workshop for teachers disctibuted about the globe where we have used the 3d multi-user environment Quest Atlantis (built on Active Worlds 3D engine) and using Skypecast for our audio. I find facilitating in the 3D spcae with the voice was a great way to introduce a new and dynamic technology and address a myriad of questions people had along the way. The synchronous nature of the workshop was a challenge (time and new technology) but with synchronous tools growing more accessible and user-friendly we will see much more real time facilitation and support.

I agree totally Sylvia. So much of the finesse in facilitation is not learned from books, theory or even online discussions like this. It is in the actual to-and-fro of the job. I do have to say though that theories make so much more sense when you have been engaged in the practice. I remember reading Amy Jo Kim's Community Building (2000) only a year ago and nodding as I read parts of it.

I put myself out there volunteering to facilitate groups and do view these as continued learning experience. I worked in Listening to the City and Fly into the Future and K-12 Online as opportunities to explore faciltiation and different community toolsets. I do have to say that I find some people like myself actually 'discover themselves' online. For some people these were not skills people knew they had nor had an opportunity to demonstrate before they went online.

I too took Nancy White's Facilitation course and The Foundations of Communities Practice which I now coach in. But the workshops most made sense because I had a real need in a community I was trying to facilitate (and because I had just had a monumental failure in a previous effort :-( ).

I do worry about the use of podcasting as a purely broadcast medium and the pedagogical implications of that. This technology has the potential to further our pursuits as teachers for enhanced or even new pedagogies. 15 years ago you could get an audio cassette to play in your truck or while jogging. I know it is a good start, but if we only use podcasting to assist in the mobility of learning is that enough? <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />