Moira Hunter

Hi Janet,

What time zone have you used in the doodle scheduler? Thanks.

Hello Janet,

I too am really looking forward to this discussion and have just ordered the book which will apparently only arrive on 6 February for me.

Sorry, the end of my posting 'disappeared' so here it is :-

Then the educator 'came back' and the ‘lesson’ continued. Again, I asked myself ‘why in SL?’

I am still learning about SL but like any tool, the question to be asked first is who are your learners, why do you need it and what will its use bring to the learners, and if you need it, how are you going to employ it, and then you can think about moderating it.
BTW, the example I gave was an informal observation of an EFL instructor.

  

Hi Bronwyn,

I agree with everything you have brought up. You say

"moderators need to be super lively, engaging, attentive and highly responsive - and all in real time. They have to learn to effectively use and model one-to-one backchannel communication, while facilitating the whole group, to ensure they can support everyone. They have to be thinking on their feet". These are the same skills a facilitator or moderator needs in the web conferencing environment but here is where I get unstuck: once the learners are in the web conferencing platform, you don't have to worry "about why an avatar is stuck on the other side of a wall and what might be happening when a participant says "I can't seem to sit" ". This implies that you definitely must have co-moderators or producers with you to take care of those hurdles in real-time. You also say (as Emily implied when posting about PPT) that " There is NOTHING worse than sitting your avatar on a seat in an auditorium to listen (whether chat or audio) to a lecture style performance by a static avatar at a podium." Again, I can only agree. I have not 'lead' learners in SL but have participated in various sessions and activities to 'see' and 'feel' what is going on there. On many occasion, I have found myself (or my avatar) sitting around a log fire or sitting in an auditorium watching PPT and every time, I ask myself 'Why am I in SL? I don't NEED to be here for this'. Although I am a very experienced moderator in live online training using web conferencing technologies, I personally find SL so immersive that I can't do much else than concentrate on what is happening there, whereas in a conferencing platform, I can happily multitask. Consequently, this is a wonderful experience if the purpose for being there is well founded. On the other hand, when I feel that I don't have to be in this environment for the said purpose, I just want to escape and do other things. Hence the need for rich, deep meaning interaction and learning opportunites. My 'richest' experience so far in SL was the following: I was invited at the last minute by an educator to observe a session with her learners. I didn't know who the learners were. The educator often 'disappeared' to help other learners get in to SL or 'bring them back' when they'd got lost. Consequently, her avatar often 'died' (head down, slumped shoulders). The students kept asking me 'Why are we here?' 'What are we going to learn today?' 'Where is the teacher?' etc. Their frustration and feeling of being abandoned was really acute. I myself was asking myself the same questions and beginning to feel both frustrated and bored. I didn't have much in my inventory at the time, but I did have a cocktail, a Bloody Mary. So, I started a conversation and then offered the learners a drink (the only one I had). This then led to a great discussion about cocktails, ingredients, restrictions on drinking of alchohol, other learners offering drinks they had, etc. I had some nice audio files in my inventory, so we started to dance and shared the files. Then, feeling tired, I sat down, whilst they continued to dance and exchange music. Whilst I 'sat' in SL, I thoroughly enjoyed oberving how the learners were learning on the spot how to exchange files: the peer-to-peer learning was very rich. The the educator 'came back'

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Hi,

A greatly needed topic in a very confusing environment - online!

Who am I? Moira Hunter, living in France where I work most of the time online in the corporate sector and some of the time teaching f2f on graduate and post-graduate programmes.

What do I own? I honestly have no idea! I don't own my cats because they can just wander off one day and I don't own my children or husband. As for the material things, I suppose if I got divorced, that would also be an issue.

In f2f teaching, I've seen other colleagues just delete my name on work which took me hours to create and put their own on it and in the online world, a friend introduced me to copyscape a long long time ago due to one of her own sob stories where her whole web content had been copied.

As for ideas, I often think they are copied before I can get into action but is that illegal? I suppose that if I haven't put it down in writing somewhere, dated and stamped, it's not but it is morally incorrect. But who cares about morals online? Not many, I think.

A long time ago, I looked into companies that provided 'protection' for online content but you had to repay the whole initial sum of having one piece of content protected if you made the slightest change to the content. So basically, it was a protection for static content which is of no use at all, at least it wasn't for me.

So I'm looking forward to learning from you Dan and this forum :-)