Second Life & Social Networks: Permeable Worldware Everywhere

Christen Bouffard, Instructional Designer, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Demo of Second life and installing various elements that display blogs, twitter, flickr, etc.   Christen doesn't teach using Second Life.  At this point, she does have property though.  Slare Board, PingFM (look up this one) and a blog tool as well as RSS feeds were used in the demo.

Ritchie Boyd, Teaching and Learning Technology Specialist, Montana State University

• Technology-rich learning   How we use it is far more important than what tool.
• 55% online teens use social networks  85% myspace 7% facebook.  Almost half check it at least once per day
• Fully half of the teens could be considered content creators
• Technology intrudes deep into lives, 15% americans stopped having relations to answer a cell phone!
• Medial Hauntings - trying to use a new tool similar to the way they use old tools and not seeing any difference.  For example, someone used to a typewriter that still hits hard-returns at the end of each line.
• The trouble with Twitter - no scaffolding, no guidance,
• A whole series of conflicting articles from well-known sites shows how little we really know what is going on. A tiny sampling that showed students prefer real classroom to a Virtual World.
• I liked the chart demoing appropriate place for tools that looked somewhat like

Smart People
(arrows pointing up/down)
Tools
(arrows pointing up/down)
Me

Disrupt vs Assimilate -  new tools do one or the other.