The lighting is strange in this lecture theatre. We all sit in dim lighting, which is fair enough so that we can see the screen, but it means that the presenter is ill lit. It privileges the screen over the speaker, which seems the wrong way round to me.

Andreia has an activity theory triangle diagream of Open Learn.

Tools: Workshops / meetings guidelines / advice
Subject: Academic
Object: Open content
Division of labour: OpenLearn team / volunteers
Community
Rules
Aagh – can’t blog fast enough.

Andreia compares the ideal situation with the implementation view.

Can’t type up all the implementation view, but here is the rules section:
Rules: integrity model / guidelines / proposal targets / steering group.

The division of labour involves the academic team, the media team and the OU staff and it is not clear who has the final sign-off.

Paper called “Is there no life in Second Life?’ Presented by Moon Eggplant.

Paul Hollins – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/pah1/- asked to give this paper in world, but the CAL conference organisers wouldn’t let him. Wonder why?

Describing briefly some work in progress.

Refers to Synthetic World (Castranova 1994) and to
Metaverse (Stephenson 1992)

participation observarion as an active resident. Structured interviews, unstructured interviews and a participant and sometime lurker in the SLED group.

Showed us the Second Life Hype Curve – see eg http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2006/12/second_lifes_ri.html – which is fun.

Shows us video of Ohio University Second Life campus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA Why do we replicate the real-world classroom rather than build something new?

The affordances are very different to those of VLEs.

Informal experiences are better than the formal learning experiences.

About Identity, Space, Activity and Tools. These are the affordances of this environment.

Effective, but challenges existing assessment conventions
Engagin and motivating – Yes, but this is not a given
Empowering – Yes, but this is challenging.

Someone raised the idea of an avatar as an eportfolio. In that case, it is a problem that you cannot move your avatar from one virtual world to another.

Here we are at Anesa’s presentation at CAL, and Gill and I are sitting side by side, blogging her presentation, which is going well. See Gill’s blog here http://conclave.open.ac.uk/acablog/

She’s got her newly revised presentation up on screen, and she’s using the script as discussed at 1am last night!

People are paying attention – all the laptops are being used to write about her presentation – I can’t see any email reading going on.

Ooh, there I am on screen. I’m fed up with this clip of me trying out black box probability software. I seem to do the weidest things with my mouse.

Someone asked about visiting the participants yourself. He seems very keen on doing this. But, as Anesa says, it’s going to be difficult to visit 36 students spread all over the country and maybe all over the world.
Someone else asked about stimulated recall – asking students to watch the videos and to comment on them as an alternative to the think-aloud protocol.
The chair asked about the experience of not wanting to get in the way, but wanting to get as much information as possible.

https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/r.m.ferguson/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/gillc.jpg
Hey, I’m blogging Gill while she’s giving her talk. It was a tad complicated getting my laptop to take the photo, then getting it cropped and here via iphoto, but it does work.
Gill’s talking about ehr data analysis, and she’s got some images up that were taken with the pda. They come up very well on screen, particularly the lower one which has become quite Monet-esque.
Lots of people in the session taking notes. Those with laptops have them closed except for a couple of people – but they seem to be concentrating on the talk even so, so I reckon it’s going pretty well. Gill has got the room with her – they all laughed together at ‘The Mushroom Challenge’.
I think it’s distracting for Gill to have her talk up on a computer screen in front of her, because she looks at it a lot, which she wouldn’t if it were on the screen behind her. It’s also keeping her in one place, she’s always by the computer terminal, whereas I think otherwise she’d move around more. When she’s not looking at the screen she Gill is using arm gestures, and I think this sort of expression works well in a talk, because it seems more naturalistic and it keeps you talking at normal talking speed rather than speeding up as you are tempted to do in a talk.
Phebe asked if anything would motivate participants. Money? Chocolate biscuits? Gill thinks a deeper engagement with the subject matter.
What would your top tip be? Don’t use Caerus! Quitte frustrating to make the trail with Caerus. Creatascape might be a better option.
Smiling at the audience and laughing along with the audience obviously works well.