SSTL2006

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School‘s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching & Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).

Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?

On the schedule is…

• Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures? (Eric Gordon, Emerson)
• Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World (Rebecca Nesson, Harvard)
• Electronic Constructivism: Inspiring and Motivating Students with Thought Provoking Questions and Emerging Technologies (Dr. Maureen Brown Yoder, Lesley University)
• Social Computing Tools in the Curriculum (Katie Livingston Vale, MIT)