About 116 people registered to attend the Alpine Rendezvous this year – 10 workshops, almost every country in Europe represented and several attendees from outside Europe. Report from Workshop 1: Orchestration How do teachers orchestrate events inside and outside the classroom? First model – started with a very dry mathematical model. How does the teacher […]
Games are important when building communities. They help to develop trust and an understanding of each other’s skills and personalities. In terms of language, wordplay helps us to establish register – to work out what we mean and double mean when we use language. Can we create online community without the use of word games? […]
It’s usually acceptable to have lurkers within a community – it’s never acceptable to have lurkers within a team. (Retrieved from my notes on the Virtual Doctoral School back in 2007)
I must admit, I don’t remember ever hearing the word metalepsis before. And when I google its meaning, I then have to google the meaning of the words used to define it. ‘Trope’ and ‘extradiagetic’ aren’t part of my day-to-day vocabulary – though they might have been if I’d stuck with language and literature instead […]
Advantages of a blogged research journal Hyperlinks Link your research blogs to useful information sources Personalisation Use emoticons and images to personalise entries Categories and Search Find your notes quickly and efficiently Blogroll, RSS feeds, trackbacks and permalinks Link to other researchers. Ideas for a blogged research journal Community Posts Collaborate and link with other […]
Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog. This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an […]
An exceedingly late write-up of a talk I went to on Moshi Monsters at Handheld Learning earlier this year. At that point, Moshi had seven million registered users and was adding over a million a month. About a third of these were based in the UK, a third in the US and a third in […]
While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots. The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s […]
More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor. http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/abstracts Astrid Ensslin, one of the organisers of the conference, reported on a very interesting piece of research, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the real world to the virtual world. Maslow identified that people have to prioritise their physical suvival needs and their need […]
You learn the strangest things at academic conferences. Not only can you now zoom around the real world via Google Maps, but you can now also view a Google Map of the World of Warcraft. Apparently, by combining information about the measurement of significant features on this map, and the distance you can cast certain […]