If you need a break from your first life, consider Second Life!

Friday Karu paints as Olivia Hotshot looks on.

Second Life (SL), a 3D virtual world that is created by its millions of residents from around the world, is providing ever-engaging opportunities and situations for educators and their students. There will be two 3-hour preconference hands-on sessions at MIC ’09 (Thursday, August 13) to provide attendees with skill development and educational use in SL. Ann Steckel and I, representing California State University, Chico, will conduct these sessions inworld as our avatars, Olivia Hotshot and Friday Karu respectively, and as our face-to-face, good-natured selves in real life. I guess you could say that our sessions will be held in mixed reality! You Have Your Second Life Avatar. What’s Next? (9-12 noon) is geared for educators who have an avatar, but aren’t sure where to begin. There are several interactive tasks planned such as modeling  communication and social skills of SL. We will take a field trip to help you get your avatar looking professional and then visit some SL settings as a group to see educational examples in use.  The afternoon session (1-4 PM), Next Steps in Second Life: Creating Quality Experiences for You and Your Students, is designed for those who are considering or are ready to begin implementing a bit of SL in their teaching and/or professional development. Participants will experience several activities including some building skills, establishing SL groups, use of multimedia in SL, and  how as an instructor you might share and disperse information and content in a SL setting.

Olivia Hotshot and Friday Karu look forward to their two MIC '09 presentations!

Both sessions have prerequisites. You need to have an avatar created, you need to have SL installed on your laptop, and you need to bring your laptop to the session(s) you are attending.

Our intent with these sessions is to present examples of Second Life use in higher education,  refine the Second Life skills of the participants, provide investigative and immersive experiences in SL educational environments, and conduct and model SL educational field trips. We believe that SL offers creative teaching and professional development opportunities for teaching and learning for instructors and students and we are excited to share!  Participants will receive some SL freebies we have made such as MERLOT T-shirts and books for their avatars!

Ann Steckel brings her instructional technology skills, teaching experience and well known SL expertise to these sessions. I bring my own high level of curiosity and over a decade of recognized online teaching experience. Together we think we have planned some highly engaging, immediately useful, and downright fun sessions for participants. We are able to take 15 participants for each session. We hope you will consider joining us for the morning or the afternoon, or both during the preconference workshops at MIC ’09. We look forward so seeing you inworld and at MIC ’09!

Here are some related SL links to whet your interest.

What is Second Life?

Educational Uses of Second Life

Virtual Environments Enable New Models of Learning

Olivia and Friday are interested in your use of Second Life and invite you to participate in this poll.

Conference Presentation Preview: From Chit Chat to Discourse

I teach graduate courses in education. Many of the issues we study come in the form of ill-defined problems, and discussion is one tool to clarify issues, work toward common understanding, and use the combined knowledge, experience and energy of a like-minded community to address possible solutions. In the online environment where my classes take place, this kind of communication happens in an asynchronous threaded discussion. The ongoing written conversation can result in a dynamic presentation of clear thinking written in well constructed sentences of well chosen words, but it usually doesn’t. Many participants are uncertain of the quality of their offerings, both in terms of the strengths and the weaknesses of those postings. Even with rubrics and exemplars, they seem to struggle with finding the magic balance of examining a topic, supporting the community and maintaining economy of effort.

As I searched for ways of providing more and better feedback and encouragement to students, I found that the participant rating tools now found in many learning management systems provide another way of addressing the value of every posting in its ability to support understanding and learning for all those engaged in the discussion. 

• Students reach agreement on specific characteristics of discussion postings that both help and hinder their learning.
•  Students then use the rating system to identify postings that were helpful to their learning and those that were not by awarding stars as they read each one.
• Writers are then asked to review and rate their own work and to compare their ratings with those received by the class as a whole.
• Students are also asked to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of both the top star winners and their own writings, to compare the results, and to set goals for increasing their own ratings throughout the course.

In “From Chit Chat to Discourse: Improving Online Discussion” I will share how students in two different classes used this system, what they liked and did not like about it, and how they used it to increase the quality of their own discussion participation. I will also ask others to share their innovative and effective strategies for increasing discussion quality.

2009 MERLOT International Conference: Tips for Language Educators

As a language professional going to the  2009 MERLOT International Conference, I would definitely target sessions that highlight websites and technologies that would enhance the teaching of L2 listening, speaking, reading and writing. Additionally, I would be looking at concurrent sessions and workshops that emphasize multicultural themes and communication and collaborative activities that would get  students talking, interacting and using the target language. Perusing the program online, a few sessions that pique my interest so far are:

1. Frenchnology – The site that inspires this session, www.frenchnology.com, uses popular You Tube music videos to teach French grammar  points .It is an engaging way to get students to observe language structures in an authentic context. The author writes about the videos: “Though they span the full spectrum of French and Francophone music, the songs are equally useful in displaying what the students consider to be “real French.” The authenticity and variety of material, in addition to the precision of the language lesson, maintains interest and achieves the pedagogical and cultural goals of using music to teach language. Although the examples will be in French, all language educators should be able to get some good ideas from this approach. (Friday, 11:30)

2. The Children of Argentina’s Disappeared- This session combines a social topic that many professors of Spanish cover in their courses with an instructional format that many language educators use with success, the webquest. MERLOT contains many award-winning webquests in its collections. This session promises to be a practical “how-to” session particularly useful for Spanish and other language teachers. (Friday, 11:30)

3. What Makes Them Talk- One of the big challenges for language courses online is getting students to interact with each other verbally and in asynchronous and synchronous discussion.  This session promises free classroom-tested materials online that make this practice easier. This seems like a must for language educators. (Friday, 5:30)

4. Voice Thread Workshop – This is an application that many language educators I know already use and that deserves much more attention. The MIC will have a hands-on workshop on Voice Thread, a tool that allows users “to comment on media (images, movies or documents) in voice, text or video.” It is free and extremely easy to use. (Saturday, 1:30)

5. A Collaborative Approach to Online Course Design- Who could not benefit from hearing about the challenges of putting foreign language courses online? This session will outline the experience of the University of Colorado at Boulder. It should provide good food for thought. (Saturday, 4:00)

6. Using Learning Objects in Foreign Language Teaching: Some Fresh Ideas. – These presenters promise a “customizable” language experience through the use of various types of learning objects. They will show how these will promote interaction and communication. (Saturday, 5:30)

7. MERLOT Chile Community Project- The Center for Innovation on Education of Technological University of Chile – INACAP is collaborating with CSU to build a MERLOT collection for native Spanish speakers. The site www.merlotchile.org
will have learning materials available for anyone who visits the site. Language educators should find this very interesting. (Saturday, 5:30)

8. C’est la Seconde Vie- Teaching French Literature in Second Life is the topic of this session that will undoubtedly be interesting to language teachers in any language. (Sunday, 10:00)

9. Creating Culturally- Relevant OERS Across Cultures – Open Educational Resources are the focus of this session that highlights collaboration between CSU and India. This should be a very motivating look forward into a world where OERs provide access and opportunities for collaboration between teachers and learners worldwide. Language educators will play a crucial role in this work. (Sunday, 11:30 a.m.)

10. Networking with MERLOT World Languages throughout the conference- At any of the networking activities provided at the conference, MERLOT World Languages editorial board members will be there to meet fellow language educators. If you want to set up a meeting in advance, contact Laura Franklin at
lfranklin@nvcc.edu

Compiled by Laura Franklin, Professor of French, Northern Virginia Community Colleges and  Editor, MERLOT World Languages

Wade Ellis: an Outstanding Keynote Presenter

I have known Wade Ellis for over a decade and have attended almost a dozen talks that he gave at local and International conferences.  Wade is a gentle man with a powerful message.  With mathematics as MERLOT’s featured discipline this year, Wade Ellis is the perfect person to deliver a keynote address at the MIC.  He has had a long and fruitful teaching career and is a national leader in technology.  Each time there is a new movement in mathematics education, you can find Wade asking and researching the tough questions of how new technology can be implemented in a way that most effectively improves student discovery and learning.   He is a master in identifying areas where the focus is on facts and rote memorization and challenging the education community to develop technology and other pedagogical tools to deliver the content in such a way that replaces the emphasis on thoughtless absorption with new curriculum that develops exploration and problem solving skills.  It will certainly be a treat this year to attend the MIC.  Wade Ellis’ keynote address is one to look forward to.

by Larry Green

MIC 09 – San Jose, California

The planning committee has been gearing up for the MERLOT International Conference in San Jose, California, August 13-16, Teaching and Learning in a Networked World.

Our keynoters:  John Wilbanks from Creative Commons; Wade Ellis, representing our featured disciplines, Math and Statistics; and Carl Berger, an old friend of the MERLOT community, will wow you each morning at the plenary sessions.

Additionally, you’ll find a variety of sessions geared toward faculty members, administrators, librarians, professional developers and others in the K-12 to higher education communities.  The MIC is a great place to network, both figuratively and literally.  We are looking forward to exciting pre-conference sessions as well as a host of workshops, presentations, and learning circles that will encourage you to think about technology and its impact on learning.  Be sure to register for the conference at http://conference.merlot.org/2009/registration.html.  You can access information about hotel and travel arrangements at http://conference.merlot.org/2009/hotelandtravel.html.

Jane Moore, Conference Chair

Welcome to 2009 MERLOT International Conference Blog

Members of MERLOT will use this blog to let others know more about the 2009 MERLOT International Conference.