ISTE Speaker Series Strikes Again!

From an email from our pal KJ Hax (Kevin Jarrett irl) about an event you may not want to miss. Pop into ISTE Island (SLurl below) for what looks to be an informative hour this very evening!
Just a quick heads up regarding tomorrow’s ISTE Speaker Series session, targeted specifically for the higher education community … join Marcius Dowding (RL: Larry Dugan) and Crash Thebaud (RL: Terry Keys) who will be presenting their work on the SUNY LIVE (Learning in Virtual Environments) project, which was created to give the opportunity for up to 64 campuses the opportunity to investigate the uses of VLE’s. 22 campuses signed up and participated in this year long project, utilizing this “donut” approach to island developing and training. The results, trials, tribulations and successes will be discussed at this presentation, which will utilize voice. Please ensure you have a working voice setup prior to the event. Location: ISTE Island Bandshell: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/128/128/25

Date: Tuesday, 10/7
Time: 6:00 pm SLT (click here for your local time zone)

See you there!

While you’re there, mosey on up to Headquarters and take a good gander at the new SL entry portal resources that have been baking up there for a month or so. I blogged about it a while back, and it’s come a long way since, due to the dedicated efforts of ISTE volunteers who have tirelessly realized the joint vision of Linden Lab and ISTE. You might take a minute to click on that big ol’ FEEDBACK sign there to offer your opinion and suggestions about how the entry might be improved.

From fearless ISTE Second Life pioneer Kittygloom Cassady, “Currently, an educator visiting the education page of the Second Grid web site (http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/education) can sign up for Second Life using a simplified registration process and at the end will be dropped directly on ISTE Island for more resources and educator-friendly help.

Cheers, all! And see you tonite if you can make it!

Posted by Scottmerrick Oh

Crossposted from scottmerrick.net and Oh!VirtualLearning:

Here’s an email I sent out to my colleagues at University School of Nashville Just a minute ago. Think it’ll work? If you wish, feel free to copy it to send to your own school’s teachers (substitute your own example, of course, and delete the reference to helping with the resource room. Oh, heck, edit it any way you want!).

If you’re not in the “oh, god, how silly” camp in conversations about 3Dinternet virtual environments, and you want to investigate Second Life beginning at a safe and informative entry point, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), an 85,000 member organization with well over 3,000 of them using SL, has created a new way to enter the environment, accessible at the webpage at http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/education . I helped a very little bit with the design of the resources room and I’m very proud of the work ISTE’s doing.

Just visit the site, follow the directions, and feel free to Search “Scottmerrick Oh” and offer him (me friendship.

EXAMPLE:
I dropped into ISTE island for a bit just last night and made a new friend, a teacher from New York, who has used two relatively new computer programming tools (Scratch and Storytelling Alice) with her students for years, and I’ll be picking her brain as I move toward helping introduce those tools for our K12 students at USN. Whatever your professional interests, SL is a way to extend your learning about them in collaboration with teachers on a global scale.

Here’s a screengrab:
Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”–Kurt Vonnegut, from “Cold Turkey”

http://scottmerrick.net

The New Media Consortium (NMC) announced today the call for proposals for the 2008-09 NMC Virtual Learning Prize, a $100,000 competitive program of awards intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences that make use of the unique attributes of a virtual learning environment. (See the press release.)

As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of inworld services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

The NMC is committed to pushing the boundaries of how we collectively view teaching and learning in virtual space. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

"Projects funded under the NMC Virtual Learning Prize program will be those that make learning fresh or novel, or that illustrate concepts that are usually very difficult to teach," explains Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC's CEO and director of NMC Virtual Worlds. "We are seeking immersive learning experiences in particular, as well as tools that support the craft of teaching. We hope to see a number of proposals with broad applicability across disciplines as that will allow us to maximize the reach of the shared resources that are to be developed under this program."

As a requirement of funding, all materials and content produced as part of the program will be licensed for broad use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Proposal authors will retain full copyright to finished products, and all funded materials will be made available to educators and educational institutions at no cost via either the NMC's Educational Resource Center on Learning in Second Life or via the NMC's website, as applicable.

For the 2008-9 award year, funded ideas will be limited to those that can be implemented in the virtual worlds of Second Life or Project Wonderland. In future years, the program may be expanded to other virtual world platforms.

Review of proposals will begin on June 16, 2008, and proposals will continue to be accepted until all funds have been expended.

For further information, or to download a proposal submission form, please see the Virtual Learning Prize website. Questions related to the criteria or the submission of an application should be directed to virtual-learning@nmc.org.