2009 NMC Conference
published 16.Jun.09 by Beth Sachtjen
NMC Conference Program: The Metalic Version, originally uploaded by cogdogblog.
We’re back from the 2009 NMC Conference in Monterey, California and as with every year it was an incredibly engaging experience. While every year allows us to meet individuals with Second Life projects on the horizon and those we’ve collaborated with throughout the year, it is always an extreme pleasure to see what is going on in other realms of new media education. As with the rest of NMC, the NMC Virtual Worlds project is committed to pushing the boundaries of innovative uses of technology for learners and educators and absolutely no virtual world developer on earth could have a better organization in which to feed and fuel that dedication.
A few favorite moments:
* Exploring the concept of a learner’s “suck threshold” as Kathy Sierra so eloquently outlined to us in her keynote.This concept is one that is particularly poignant and will be lasting throughout the year for me as a Virtual World Developer! I will continually be asking myself how to create virtual environments that move learners from a noobie avatar to an engaged, involved, collaborator before they feel discouraged by the sometimes complex notions of virtual spaces. We’ve often discussed how important it is to remove finer grain technical aspects from a Second Life educational experience so that the real learning is in the content, but somehow the “suck threshold” strikes a stronger more encompassing chord!
* The marachi version of Star Wars’ “Catinia Song” shared with us by Marco Torres during his keynote session, which subsequently stayed in my head the entire day!
* Meeting the Adobe Training staff and realizing what a waste of CS3 Master Collection it is that I am focusing only on Photoshop!
* The absolutely amazing pictures produced by the Point Lobos Photo Workshop lead by Bill Frakes and Don Henderson.
* A conversation with Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve University and Ruben Puentedura of Hippasus in which a highly intriguing idea bout Second Life evolved: Would Second Life be more engaging if your presence or lack thereof effected the environment in sustained projects? I can’t wait to find a way to put this concept into action this year.
* Doug Engelbart: Inventor of the mouse! I couldn’t possibly think of a better candidate for this year’s Fellows Award.
* Bryan Alexander’s (NITLE) session on Gaming on the Liberal Arts Campus. I’ll admit it, I attended mostly for personal reasons as an active gamer, but the concepts and ideas discussed were not so far removed from things that we experience everyday in virtual worlds development. For instance, the methods of assessments being based not on how well one plays the game (interacts with the world), but based on the critical analysis of the experience within. While we’ve been saying for years now that “Second Life is not a game” (the argument even arose in this session!), I am ready to throw up a white flag and continue absorbing all the information I can in anticipation of a truce on the horizon once the two are less mistaken for each other. Another bonus to this session: I added a few new books for the summer including Bryan Alexander’s “Gaming in Education”, “Videogames and Education” by Harry J. Brown, and “Understanding Comics” by Scott Mcleod.
As soon as we have a chance to catch our barings, I’ll be posting more information on NMC Virtual World’s session, “How to do an Educational Build in Second Life”. For now, I’m happy to be back home to the good old virtual world!
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Reader's Comments
June 17th, 2009 at 3:07 am
Thanks for the thoughtful responses to my gaming and liberal education session, Beth. I appreciate the virtual worlds perspective – or, rather, your amphibious perspective, since you admit to being a gamer.
One question: what gaming strategies or practices do you think would best help newbies get into a virtual world?
One confession: I have not yet written a book called _Gaming in Education_. I have published a few articles. But I do like the idea!
Harry Brown’s book is excellent, and I look forward to your thoughts.
June 17th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Thank you for clearing up my confusion on the book. No wonder I couldn’t find it on Amazon!
As to what gaming strategies or practices would best help newbies get into a virtual world, I obviously should be asking you!
My fear is that an effort to distinctly separate the two mediums that virtual worlds have literally lowered the “suck threshold” to the very first experience one can have. In educational virtual world development, specifically, we have an audience that hungers for more and more knowledge and so traditional “station” based orientations have served a great purpose. However, I know from my experience in developing corporate and government virtual world projects that this is not the general norm.
I certainly do not read the manual when I play a game and the experience rarely suffers because of this. Are gamers so different than virtual world users in that they will figure out what they need to know as they need to know it and not a moment sooner?
The difference comes in that when you need to figure out how to defend yourself in a game it is because you are being attacked. When you need to figure out how to walk in a virtual world it is to move to the next station of information that you hardly know if you’ll need to know in the first place. I’m not so convinced that because a virtual world experience can be anything means that it needs to be everything. The openness of what lies ahead in the virtual world experience as compared to a game is well understood at this time, so why the need to prove that by generalizing the first experience? Separating the virtual worlds experience from gamer theory in an effort to appear more professional or to distinctly point out that virtual worlds are not games is doing a great disservice to learners; especially in light of the growing acceptance of games for education!
Thanks, again, for commenting, Bryan!
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