The jokaydia May Unconference 2010 is coming together and we’ve only 2 more sleeps till the fun starts!!! Check out the jokaydia Unconference Wiki for full details on all the sessions! There’s some really interesting discussions planned, and I must say a HUUUGE thanks to all the facilitators who’ve volunteered to participate! Yay everyone!!!

Events include discussions, tours, workshops and presentations across Second Life, Reaction Grid, jokaydiaGRID and World of Warcraft and I’m sure it will be lots of fun!

How to Participate!

The Draft Schedule on the wiki includes links and information to the various venues and how to get there, the time for each session in Sydney, Second Life and GMT Times and any information on additional communication tools. Please note that for some sessions we will be using Skype Bridge and Ventrillo and instructions will be provided on the wiki.

For newbies – check out the following guides for signing up and getting started at our various venues:

• Getting Started in Second Life (jokaydia Virtual Worlds Wiki)
• jokaydia at ReactionGRID – Instructions on setting up, logging in and finding the jokaydia Sim
• jokaydiaGRID Support Site – All the info you need to signup and login to the jokaydiaGRID
• World of Warcraft Session Instructions – All the info you need to signup for the World of Warcraft 10 Day trial and join in the fun!

For Volunteers and Facilitators!

Most of you will have heard from me via email or IM now, and we’re going through the process of confirming and doing final prep for your sessions. If you have any concerns, please email me!

I’ll be hanging out in Second Life on Wednesday evening from 8-10pm (26 May, Sydney Time) and  Thursday evening 8-10pm (27 May, Sydney Time) to meetup with anyone who needs help, wants to check details or would like prepare for their sessions. Feel free to drop in for a chat and we’ll solve any issues.  You can meet me at the jokaydia Landing Point (SLurl).

Tagging the Event!

Please help us tag and record the jokaydia Unconference online! We’d love to see your tweets, images, blog posts etc! We’ll be using the tag #jokaydiaUnconf .

Seeya at the Unconference!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on cleaning up the Islands of jokaydia in Second Life, preparing our new environment at jokaydiaGRID and generally giving the jokaydia Virtual Worlds presence a little makeover! Over the coming weeks you’ll start to see lots of new resources and tools popping up around the place, and I invite you all to click on things, try things out, explore and share your comments and feedback!

So without further ado, I introduce our new jokaydia Rental pages!

You can visit them at: http://jokaydia.com/rentals

I’ve used an opensource tool called ‘Open Realty’ to set this up, and hopefully it will provide much easier ways for both prospective and existing tenants to get an idea of the spaces available.

Also from an administrative perspective it makes things much easier for us to manage, especially now we are working across multiple spaces in the metaverse! (woot!)

Additionally, now we have decent html on a prim tools with Viewer 2, these listings can now be easily viewed both on the web or via the viewer at the jokaydia Landing Point (SLurl)

You’ll find listings for both the Islands of jokaydia and jokaydiaGRID here, as well as information on our rental services and the jokaydia Covenant. Check it out and lemme know what you think!

One thing to note – the new jokaydia Rental deal provides that all Second Life residents on the Islands of jokaydia receive a ‘Pioneer’s space’ on jokaydiaGRID. This means you get a new virtual worlds space to play in for no extra cost! I hope everyone will enjoy these spaces and use them to explore options for using OpenSimulator spaces, and especially our multigrid experiments!…. and you can use the jokaydia Rental pages to find one!

For further information check out the jokaydia Rental Pages or contact jokay Wollogong inworlds!

Cross-posted to blog of proximal development.

I am delighted to report that the Virtual Classroom Project that I started last year on the island of jokaydia in Second Life is back in full swing. An Australian educator, Annabel Astbury, has been selected to be Educator-in-Residence on jokaydia until the end of February. Her residency was launched on February 1st at the jokaydia mini Unconference (you can download the audio recording of the sessions here).

Annabel (SL: Annabel Recreant) has been busy creating a very unique project. As a teacher of history, she is interested in creating a virtual learning space where visitors can learn about “settlement / colonisation in the south east of Australia.” Specifically, she is interested in creating a space where students can explore and experience “the impact that colonisation had upon indigenous communities in Australia.”

Annabel wants to create a space where the students can interact with the virtual land, where they experience the life of early settlers:

My idea is that when someone first visited the site they would be faced with a simulation of the Australian bush as it appeared pre settlement. Uncleared. Perhaps with evidence of Indigenous inhabitants. Features of the natural landscape.

Visitors may have read documents in class (hence the working with not around) or read some of the documents provided in another part of the space regarding elements of Frontier life such as the process of settling on a new land, difficulties faced, the ways these were solved (if at all) etc.

Once armed with some of this foreknowledge, visitors would be invited to clear the land themselves taking into account the topography, geography and physical elements of the landscape. Provided with a ‘box’ visitors would be invited to build their own hut, or settlement.

What I like about her project is that Annabel wants her virtual learning space to be a place where the visitors can build and create, not just view, watch, or listen to whatever has been prepared for them. She wants the visitors to not just read about early settlers in Australia but also to interact with the virtual landscape, to make it their own and, in the process, learn about issues faced by settlers. This idea emerged from some very critical questions about the educational potential of Second Life:

[...] I think I became a little disengaged at the end of last year with Second Life … because I had reached a ‘now what?’ stage. Having been part of the community of learners on the Islands of Jokaydia was great, but personally I felt I had plateaued in what I could offer or do. More than that I think I started to find it difficult to see the other uses of Second Life other than that main one of being connected to a network of great teachers.

[...] what I began to obsess over was this: if anyone came to my plot .. why would they? Why would they come into Second Life merely to click on a few urls that would take them to the internet? To me, that wasn;t a good use of the platform.

To me, the problem Annabel describes here has always been a major weakness of how Second Life is used in education. It is often a place where artifacts are built for visitors and where mere reproductions of real-life lecture halls are quite common. Annabel wants to use Second Life as a place where students can build their own understanding while (virtually) building a homestead and clearing the land. She wants to engage visitors by providing them with primary and secondary sources that will then enable them to make well-informed decisions as virtual settlers. Her virtual classroom will never really be finished – it will be more of an empty canvas where visitors can construct their vision of early settler life.

Annabel envisions this project as an opportunity to show other educators how students can be encouraged to use virtual environments such as Second Life to build their own understanding of history so that it becomes visible to anyone who visits the virtual space. This is not going to be just about building a virtual space where students can click on some URLs and read secondary sources. Annabel wants to develop a virtual resource to engage students in Historical Thinking by providing them with resources they can consult and artifacts they can use to build their own understanding of history. It’s almost like creating a virtual world wiki where instead of being confronted with a carefully designed space, a student is given access to a variety of resources and tools to build that space and, in the process, demonstrate his or her understanding of the material. The wonderful part about this is that this process will make learning visible in 3D. A student who builds with the resources provided in this virtual space and by using her own understanding of the time period will create an artifact that other learners can explore, interact with, and also rebuild or redesign.

I hope that you will follow Annabel’s work by reading her blog, checking out the Virtual Classroom Project Flickr group, and exploring her work inworld.