As I reflect upon Kris and my seminar on Virtual Worlds, I can say that I breathed a sigh of relief, but am also excited about my next adventure with Virtual Worlds.
Let me start with our seminar. Kris and I decided that we would initially meet on Blackboard Collaborate (https://www.blackboard.com/platforms/collaborate/overview.aspx), show our slideshow, get our group to "play" a little, have Gord Holden speak (thank you Avi for introducing us to Gord) , then have a discussion, give the assignments, and that was that. Well….Kris and I decided that we would use Second Life (https://secondlife.com) as our meeting place. That was a bust as we both spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I think we wasted at least a couple of days. In hind sight though, it wasn't really a waste, I think we both learned that maybe asking about using virtual worlds from an expert, namely, Gord, would have saved us a huge amount of time. Gord then spent a lot of time showing us the ropes of virtual worlds. We went through a few blips when we were trying to get our slides up and running and my Vivox (http://www.vivox.com),(voice enabling plug in for Virtual Worlds) working in Active Worlds (https://www.activeworlds.com) in CyberNet Worlds (http://www.cybernetworlds.com). We also discovered that the slides needed to be shortened, so thanks to Kris, the slides for the presentation were whittled down to the bare minimum so that we could talk to to the slides instead of reading from them. After finally working most of the bugs out, we were ready for our presentation! Yay! Gord suggested that we walk our group through the world before the presentation just to make sure they were able to get in and that everything was working. Good thing too, as it gave everyone time to "play" and Ben discovered that he could do everything except get into the buildings. Good thing we did a dry run as poor Ben would have missed the presentation. The funniest thing was watching everyone testing out running, jumping, and flying, especially Avi. I don't think Avi stayed in one spot for more that a second. One minute he was running and jumping one way and then a few seconds later he was running the other way. It was hard to get him to slow down long enough to get him in the building.
The next day we met via Skype with Gord before we went in-world. The reason for this is, as Kris and I learned earlier, was that if everyone is using Vivox, there was a lot of echo. Using Skype (http://www.skype.com) enabled everyone to talk, thus avoiding the annoying echo. Presentation day went off without too many hitches, other than a few in the group, you know who you are, who couldn't sit still. imagine standing at the front of your classroom and all of a sudden a student starts flying all around. Well, we experienced that in our virtual classroom. Kris and my presentation was fairly short because we wanted Gord to have as much time as possible to speak. It was amazing. He showed our group some of the virtual worlds that he has helped develop.
After the presentation, Gord showed us the BCNexus (http://bclearningnexus.ca) worlds. Kris and I are now, thanks to Gord, setting up our own worlds in BCNexus. We hope to connect our two classes via our worlds. I am soooo excited and can't wait to get started!!!
I must say a huge thank you to Avi. Thank you Avi for getting us in touch with Gord. I have had so much fun, as well as frustration, while working on this project. All has been well worth it and I can't wait to see what my students create in our world.