Atelier-D

3D Virtual Learning Platforms

Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the eMadrid project are studying how to use three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for teaching. 

Read more about the project here: www.uc3m.es/Virtual_learning

Elluminate Live Good Practice Guide

Designing for Participant Engagement with Elluminate Live

A good practice guide to using Elluminate Live to support teaching, learning and assessment, co-operative working and conferences.  The JISC e-Learning Programme recently commissioned Peter Chatterton to produce this guide.  

Further information and links to this guide can be found here: www.jisc.ac.uk/elluminateguidance  

Google Wave

I was playing around with the new Google Wave application. I believe this is something the OU's SocialMe project wants to achieve, too. By the way, I heard that SocialMe will go public mid next year.
 

Google Wave is a convergence tools for any kind of collaboration i.e. meetings, brainstorm, organisation, synchronous or asynchronous. Similar to Google Docs, you can edit a document, which they call Wave at the same time others do. The same Wave can be used as a Chat by simply replying to a statement.Or you simply highlight a term or picture and start a conversation on this item within the document. And it is similar to Gmail, in that you can see all Waves in your inbox read and unread, and you see who is participant in this Wave, you can save it on folders and so forth.

Have a look, its quite amazing.

This might be a way for our students to collaborate within or across courses?

Flock browser

Mozilla recently introduced a Social Networking Browser that allows you to see and act on activities and news of your preferred social networks in one view. More than that, it allows you to create blog posts offline in its own editor, allows you to immediately upload favorite links and pages to an online service such as de.licio.us, or allows you to store links and pictures in a storage space for later use. There are many more, very interesting features. I am going to explore it and tell you if this is something to recommend to students or have in mind when doing the programme design/delivery innovation.
http://flock.com/tour/features.php

Here are some of my first observations:

I have been disappointing that I cannot use the block editor. Somehow Typepad advanced accounts and Flock don't work together yet as smoothly as they said. So I am still writing this in the conventional way :(

BUT

Every thing else is a joy to use. 

I don't have to keep open 10 tabs at all time to see activities of my email accounts and social network sites. Its all easily accessible either via my world or via other buttons in the Flock browser interface (i.e. mail)

Regarding how services are accessed and represented, the user interface might have some inconsistencies, but I am sure they will be attended to in further versions (OR I get used to).

The most enjoyable component for myself is the way you can handle snippets from the internet, such as links or pictures to store them intermediately and use them i.e. in blog posts or to send them on to yourself to other people. For instance, pictures you drag from a website into this web clipboard are stored on a separate server. You can send on the link to this particular picture or use it in any other way on the web. I find this genius! This will simplify a lot of my blogging, not needing to download everything onto my computer, it simply stays online when it is used online.

I also enjoy using 'my world'. I have always been an advocate of all information on one view. I do use this overview page to quickly see what is happening in the news, in my social world...

I still have to explore more about all other features. the media browser seems also very interesting.

I in fact adopted the browser within one day and set it as primary browser. I think this speaks for itself. I keep updating my experiences here.

W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

In January W3C came together to discuss the future of social networking. 72 position papers were presented and most of them are rather "technical" or "organizational" in nature. However, I think its worth looking over them just to know what the newest trends and developments are.
http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/

For instance, many mention the Open ID which enables one to sign into many SNS with one ID, or the social graph:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php

Ice breaking exercises online

I guess all of us need to start with some simple, fun introductory tasks to get students used to communicating online and with each other. I was looking for some ice braking exercises that can be done online. Actually, I found a few, but this one was most helpful:

http://twt.wikispaces.com/Ice-Breaker+Ideas#toc2

After reading through some of the examples I found that many applications (i.e. which Philosopher or Barbie are you) in Social Network Sites, such as Orkut or Facebook, work as ice breaking exercises.

Video conferencing

I’ve been introduced to an interesting web-site that we could possibly use in Atelier-D. It offers an online video conferencing facility.

The site is 

http://www.mebeam.com/

Steve