Kellie08

Final Second Life Reflection

2010-12-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

This semester I've had the opportunity to delve deeper into Second Life. I now feel l more confident as a builder, a scripter, and have had the opportunity to explore more educational sims. With our final project, we had the opportunity to design a an educational sim about metamorphic rocks. Since this was my second experience designing something along those lines, I feel that I have seen an improvement in the quality of work. My first sim, was about SL bascis, and my focus area was on building. All information in that sim was shown through interactive poster boards. In the second sim on Metamorphic Rocks, I continued to build upon those skills by also incorporating videos, url providers, survey givers and receivers, and lastly giving objects. After viewing some of the final projects, there are some new directions that I would like to take in Second Life. One thing I'd like to try is the video game approach that was demonstrated by the Hawaiian Mythology group.

While there are some skeptics who believe that Second Life is limited, and may fall to new and upcoming virtual worlds. I still believe that there is still great potential. I hope to continue to learn more about SL and continue to improve in my abilities to create educational sim.

Formative Evaluations

2010-12-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

Last week we finished building our module and asked a few people to be our pilot test subjects. Two of the participants were SL users without backgrounds in Geology. Our third participant was our content expert. The participants were emailed on Friday asking for them to participate, and they were asked to complete the evaluation by Sunday evening so that our group could discuss the results prior to our presentation. From the three evaluations, the results were largely inconclusive. Each reviewer commented on different things. One focused on the visual design elements, another was mostly happy, and the other thought that there were a few good points but felt that it lacked interactivity. With such diverse backgrounds, this isn't completely surprising that there wasn't a major consensus. The only thing that they all agreed upon, was the helpfulness of the yellow arrows.

The questions is, what do you take from this? Do the three reviews cancel each other out? Meaning, although one person pointed something out, if it was something major, why didn't the other two share the same opinion? Or, perhaps since two of the reviewers weren't very familiar with Second Life, does this bias their views? At this point, I'm not too entirely sure what to take from it. Perhaps the next step would be to capture these responses, and see how the other respondents react to it. It could just be a case of not noticing everything.

Final Projects

2010-12-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

Our final project, up until the the very last day, was nearly in constant flux. Ideas that we thought we could do, didn't always necessarily pan out. We also had to adjust the focus of our project as when we put everything together, it didn't cover as much material as we originally had thought. All in all though, I think that we did a good job. I tried to put in as much hover text as possible to give students clues of what to do and how to use our module. Yellow arrows were also added to give a sense of flow and directions of where they should go.

After listening to the other group presentations, it has shown me how different and how diverse educational sims can be. While there were some like ours that relied heavily on simply conveying information, there were some that were more experiential. The Hawaiian Mythology group's sim was amazing. The amount of technical skills that went into the project, in addition to time too, was just phenomenal. With the phantom walls, holodeck, and the immersive qualities, it shows me how much room there is to still grow. Should this project have continued on, I would love to try some of these new skills and see how things could change and improve.

Group Projects

2010-11-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

Here in the Education Department group work is highly prized and often built into our course work. Over the last year, I've been fortunate to work in several groups, but one that was particularly successful. Together we have have written conference papers, traveled, and most importantly, still able to work with one another.

For out final project in Second Life, we are working in teams developing instructional modules. In this, I've had the opportunity to work with a new teammate, and I feel that it has been a great learning experience. In every group, there's always going some differences. From this experience, as well as groups prior, I've decided to create a list of characteristics that make good groups:

- Clear and constant communication
- Everyone participates
- Spending time together outside of projects (making personal connections)
- Establishing deadlines

Any others missing?

The demands of Second Life

2010-11-23T02:59:00.002-08:00

This semester, I've been learning how to use SL on Mac. For the most part, it hasn't been too bad. Just a couple of simple new keyboard commands to learn. On the other hand, there are some thing that have changed, that I decide is Mac related or SL viewer 2.0. One my biggest irks/annoyances has been its sensitivity headphone jacks. If I don't plug my headset in before I launch SL, I won't be able to hear anything. If I unplug, then replug in, again the audio doesn't work. Does anyone know the cause of this? I never had this problem before on a PC and SL viewer 1.0. And while only a simple inconvenience, it was a feature that I enjoyed that enabled me to take a break away from my computer for a few minutes, and still keep up with what's going on in class.

Sigh...I guess that's the way it is between different operating systems.

Collaboration in SL

2010-10-16T02:11:00.000-07:00

As we move in to our Final Project, I'm really excited to be working on a project with a real life application. The topic of metamorphic rocks I feel really lends itself to Second Life. With it, I think that we can truly do some cool things such as creating the grand canyon or some other famous metamorphic rock, and perhaps do a simulation of some sort. A lot of this will depend on our building and scripting skills though.

Even with all of this excitement, I am concerned with what it will be like to collaborate in SL. I believe my group will be having all of our meetings in SL rather than F2F in RL. From past experience, I know that it can be tricky to build together. If you need help, time has to be spent explaining the problem, or objects/scripts have to be deeded to your group members so that everyone has editing privileges. Hopefully, all will work out, and we'll have something great to show for our work.

Building in Second Life

2010-10-02T21:14:00.000-07:00

Building in SL is probably one of its greatest features. While building is a frustrating skill to learn, once you master the basics, almost anything is possible. This was really emphasized when we were playing primtionary in class.

Since this is my second time learning about building in SL, I'm feeling more confident about my building abilities. Enough so that I thought I should embrace building and use it to model something I'm thinking about building in real life. Something that I've been trying to design recently is cake for my sister's baby shower. On the invitations, there's a pictures of a bear and an umbrella, and I wanted to try recreate that on the cake. While there are many ways to achieve this, I had difficulty imagining it in my mind, and drawing it on paper. When I switched to building it in SL, it amazing how much clearer it is, and I can see why this would be such a powerful learning tool.

Ultimately I probably will not use this design, but check it out in the picture below:

Searching in Second Life

2010-09-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

For our annotated list assignment, I began with reviewing some of the landmarks I created previously with hopes of finding some that would work. As I was going through them, I realized that while some of them had stayed completely the same and others had moved to another island. When you create a landmark, it's truly just a physical landmark that doesn't follow an organization when they move to a new island. I think that'd be a great feature or script that would allow this. Since everything is virtual, I wonder if this increases the likelihood for sims to move and change.

Aside from checking out new sims, and definitely some really cool ones, something I greatly appreciated was the learning how to search within Second Life. I first started with using keyword searches within SL and keyword searches in Google, and had some very poor results. The majority of the things that I found were completely unrelated or sometimes returned with no results. It was frustrating, but eventually I started using the SL Destination Guide and searching by category. I find it ironic that some of the keyword searches were the same as the categories in the SL Destination Guide and that I didn't get the same results. If perhaps SL could improve their search results, perhaps it would lead to a greater transparency and sharing of resources.

Building and Readings

2010-09-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I discussed how different the layout of the SL View 2.0. I'm quite glad that the building menu remains unchanged. While I have built in SL before, I think it would have been quite painful to have to learn something else. This way, I can concentrate on improving my building skills, and perhaps actually become good at it. It is quite amazing how quickly I forgot how to do simple things like remove the color of a prim so that the texture doesn't have any color tint.

In the readings for Session 3, one of the articles focused the presence of Universities present in SL and discussed their methods of how they actually found them. Me, being the nosey person that I am, decided to put their methods to the test. I know for a fact that both UH and CSULA use SL in their courses so I checked to see whether or not they would be listed. My results were interesting. In the simteach.com I found that CSULA was listed but UH was not. I also found that on the SL educator list, UH was listed and CSULA wasn't. Since neither of these sources contained both schools, it makes wonder how do you accurately find all educators? Are these lists managed by anyone? Or does it require the school to contact the owners to be added to the list? I think that these are important issues to consider for future academic work in the topic of universities in SL.

Now for some randomness, it's always great to see how much taking classes and course discussions affect your point of view. Just reading the articles, I find that I pick up things that I would have simply glossed over before. One of the articles included a piece about inter-rater reliability. This is a topic that was discussed in 606, as the article utilized qualitative methods. Either in the same article or the other, they discussed the presence of games in SL. Gaming in virtual worlds is exactly what my group was working earlier this year with our game revolved around Kimo. After reading this, it encourages me to revist Kimo and perhaps continue development.

Second Life Revisited

2010-09-13T00:34:00.000-07:00

I first became involved with using Second Life (SL) while completing a course for my Masters in early 2009. At my peak, I was able to do some basic building, and attempted basic scripting, though I was never really good at it. When I started this class this Fall, I was quite surprised to the see that the user interface had changed quite a bit.

While all the essentially functions and abilities were maintained in the new viewer, key things like the pie menu had been taken out. While it wasn't necessarily the best tool, it was familiar to me and was something that I was accustomed to see. Something else that had changed, was the inventory. The inventory was now embedded in some menu buttons on the side of the screen. I like this change since it makes the screen less cluttered. Something I really miss, is the ability to quickly jump between the public chat and private messages. When the viewer was changed, these functions were no longer bundled together, and now exist in completely separate windows. If anyone knows shortcuts, or ways to mimic the old style, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm glad that we had an overview of all the SL controls, since it helped me to catch up!

Flour Power

2008-05-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

After a tedious video shooting, and countless hours spent editing, Flour Power has officially been born. Check it out!

Let me know what you think, and if I should keep it up! Enjoy!

Vlog & youtube

2008-05-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

These days, I seem to be inspired by articles written in the LA Times. This time they had written about the prevalence of cooking videos there are online. According to the article, there's a huge range in the quality of videos from amateurs like me, to those who claim to be at the professional level. The timing of this article could not be any more perfect. I think I mentioned it in a previous post, but I've been working on a cooking video entitled Flour Power. Ideally, I think it'd be great if Flour Power was a series of cooking tips or recipes, but the way it's shaping up, it's too time consuming. A 5 hour shoot turned into 30 minutes of footage, which will be no more than 5 minutes when it's published. Although cutting down the footage to 5 minutes is the most frustrating part of the process, ideally the video shouldn't be much longer. How many people would actually sit around and keep watching? Perhaps I'm just selling myself short, but I think a lot of it would just depend on the response that I get from people. Once I have finished editing it, I'll post the link up for those who are interested in watching. In case I don't post it here, it will definately be posted on my other blog.

Anyway, getting back to the original topic of the article and videos, I know cooking shows have been around forever, but I can't help but think that this recent boom in the number of videos being posted is related to youtube, and other similar sites. Youtube has every other way for people to express themselves, why not food? Food is so expressive. You can see the amount of time and effort people put into creating it, not to mention the way it's presented. The more I think/write about food, the more I feel like I should pursue cooking more seriously.

If it weren't for my video class this quarter, I wouldn't have noticed so many things. It's been the launching point for so many things - youtube, cooking, Flour Power, and my niece's birthday slide show. I am so grateful for having taken this class, and I hope to continue to refine my editing skills and purchase a video camera.

SGVCUE Technology Fair

2008-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

San Gabriel Valley Computer Using Educators (SGVCUE) put together a technology conference this past weekend. Being that this was my first conference since I stopped teaching full time, I hoped that I would learn new tools and give more insight about what it is I'm studying to become, a technology coordinator.

Overall, the conference was like any other, a mix of the good and the bad. There were phenomenal presenters, those who were unprepared, presentations that were enhanced with a hands on piece, and those that were hindered because of technological problems. My morning began with a double session on Pixie 2. I think that this software is truly aimed for students K-3. Beyond those grade levels, I fear that some of the students would find the program to babyish. For the appropriate grade levels, it has great potential to enable students to illustrate their work through technology, as well as having some publishing capabilities. The presenter showed numerous books that she created using Pixie which look great. I wish that the computers were working properly, (they executed actions at the pace of a snail!) so that I could have gotten a better feel for the program.

Our keynote speaker was Ted Lai, who is noted for being an Apple Distinguished Educator. I really loved his speech as he related integrating technology to Disney. He encouraged that we need to makes students live, love, and thrive in education. One way that he suggested to engage students is to cross promote. I feel like this is exactly what I'm going to be doing for my final video project this fall. In my video, I'm going to be linking it back to a food blog that I'm starting with my roommate. By me making that simple hyperlink to the food blog here in my technology blog, it is a great example of cross promoting. I'm so excited about this project and I hope that it comes out well.

The second session that I attended focused on Google Earth. I heard about Google earth a while back, as a means to plot the whole world. I even downloaded it recently so that I could have a picture of the earth for a flash animation that I'm working on. Anyway, the application of Google Earth, is for Google Lit Trip. Through literature, you plot the paces the character go so that students can get a sense of where the story's taking place as well as the distance that they're covering. In addition to simply plotting the places, comprehension questions can also be linked to the plots. I think that's probably one of the greater benefits to using Google Lit Trips. Supposedly there are supposed to be ways to use Google Lit Trips for other subjects but the presenter didn't give further examples.

Lastly, the final presentation that I attended was regarding using video to for Digital Storytelling. Although I am in a video class this semester, I found that the information that was presented wasn't redundant. Rather than focusing on taking raw video footage, it was focused on using still images, creating thought provoking titles and slogans. By doing this, it makes creating a video project more manageable to for students as more emphasis is placed on conveying the information, rather than the shoot.

Overall, the conference was very informational. I think that if the quality of some the presentations could be equaled to that of others, it would improve immensely and possibly attract more educators to join CUE or attend the workshops. Lastly, in nearly every presentation they kept pushing Macs and Apple products. They always say that imovie and the like are easier to use. It makes me wonder if it was a mistake to buy a PC again, and if should have bought a Mac too...

South Park - "Over Logging"

2008-04-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

This episode came out a few weeks ago, but I was up late one night and happened to catch it. This episode was hilarious! If you haven't seen it, you should definately check it out...

What I find even more fitting is the article that the LA Times published, regarding how much of South Park's episodes is social commentary about current events. The general premise of "Over Logging" is that the internet all over the nation goes out, and the people loose all touch with reality when they can't check their email, the news, and chat with their friends. People begin to flood Silicon Valley to wait in line to use 1 bar of signal internet for 40 minutes.

The fact that people would become so obsessed with the internet is so ludicrous. Or is it? I know that I am quite the internet junkie. One of the first things that I do when I wake up, is to turn on my laptop and hop online. My bet, is that although the majority of the population doesn't turn on the computers at home, they do so at work, or check the things they need to through their phones. I have so many friends who recently switched to phones that are linked to the internet like Blackberry and the iPhone. The likelihood that having a nationwide internet failure being declared as a National Emergency is highly probable. What does that say about our society, and the type of environment that we're raising our children in? As educators in the field of Instructional Design, are we feeding the nation's hunger for the internet? I think it's definately food for thought.

As I wrap this up, I can't help be make a brief comment about South Park's solution to the internet crisis. Turning the router off, then on again. Completely brilliant! It's one of the troubleshooting tips that we not only covered in class, but also the answer the ISP (internet service providers) give all the time.

We Think

2008-04-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Hopefully the html works, otherwise you can view the video in link below.

We Think
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo

For my Video Editing class, we were asked to find out favorite Youtube video that could be about any subject. Youtube to me, has always been a great place to find some hilarious videos. Since this assignment is for class, the video that I found was more serious and thought provoking. Through the classes that I've been taking, one of the many subjects that we have discussed is the role of technology in education. How can technology be used to help education, or lead to more individualized learning? More often than not, one of the easiest application of technology is the wide access that it give people to information, and it's ability to allow users to share/collaborate with one another. This video focuses around this theme, and what is technology's role in society. Check it out, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

On a side note, I thought it was great that it was done completely in Flash, and really inspires me to learn how to use it.

Revival

2008-03-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

With the start of the Spring quarter, I think it's great that we're going to be using blogs again for class. Blogging is a great way to be reflective about our studies, and if we use for our own personal lives, life too. Last month I discovered quarterlife, which is a site that hosts video blogs and has their own original series about characters that are 20 something. Anyway, the show inspired me to try start my own video blog, but as my roommate pointed out, what would I blog about anyway? So getting back to just regular blogs, and having the focus of school related materials is nice. Maybe after a little practice, I might just start that video blog. But till then, I'll stick to this, and try to expand the focus of my blog into other topics than school.

Distributed Learning and the Field of Instructional Design

2007-11-29T16:23:00.000-08:00

In the text, the authors discussed the number of graduate programs that are available completely online. In theory it's a great idea since it saves on commute time, and allows the student to work at their own pace. I do feel that there is a downside to having solely online classes. As a part of BTSA, I enrolled in an online course to satisfy one of standards. Since there's no immediate deadlines, it's easy to fall behind which I inevitably did. Meeting face to face all the time can also be repetitive or class time may be used inefficiently. For these reasons, I feel that CSULA's idea of having hybrid classes sounds like a good idea as it bridges the two styles together.

At the end of the chapter, the question was raised at to whether IDT professionals should be subject to credentialing. I think that this is a good idea as it would force universities to have similar curriculum. In a field that's constantly changing like IDT, I think that it's only natural that we're continually assessed so that it forces us to stay on top of the newest trends. It just like with doctors, even after they finish medical school, the tests never end.

Trends and Issues in P-12 Educational Change

2007-11-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

In section 5 of our textbook, I really like how they split up the chapters based on the different applications of Instructional Design. Based on my background and work in the K-12 sector, I read about the Trends and Issues in P-12 Educational Change. I thought it would be logical since I have no experience with the business, military, higher education or health care. In the reading they discuss 2 methods of instituting systemic change (which can be statewide, district wide, school wide, or ecological wide). The main point of systemic change is that it has to be for the whole system, and not be focused on certain aspects of it. Of the two processes that they presented, I like the Step-Up-To-Excellence model over the Guidance System for Transforming Education simply because in SUTE they address the role of everyone, especially IDT specialists so that if I were to pursue this field, I'd have clearer idea as to what I would be doing.

I think the message that chapter is trying to send out is important. In order for the change to systemic, it really needs to be top down so that there's support from the leaders, as well as the financial commitment to help see the changes through. At the same time you need the local support because the book attributes the failure of systemic change to the reluctance and inability to implement the change properly by transitioning from the old to the new.

I'm not sure if this particular field is right for me as I feel like it's too political. I'm interested in the business application of IDT and to see if perhaps it could be a better fit for me.

Electronic Peformance Support Systems

2007-11-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

Much of the information that was presented in this chapter I found to be relatable to many software applications that we use today. The text broke up EPSS into 5 categories - An Informational Base, Learning Experiences, Embedded Coaching and Help Tools, an Expert Advisor, and Customized Tools. An informational base is like researching a library or any online journals. Each is kept current with the information and is searchable. An example of learning experiences would be if a company had a section where people could post anecdotes of working for that company. Embedded coaching and help tools can be observed in most software products that have help features. Microsoft Excel also helps to coach users through creating graphs with their chart wizard. I haven't actually observed an expert advisor, but I think that car maintenance could be related. I know with cars, some companies have built in maintenance light that goes off if that car needs service. My parents have such a car, and when they took it in, the maintenance light was no longer on, so the mechanic said that he wouldn't be able to know what the problem was unless the light was on. For this reason, I believe it that mechanics must a have a machine/program that lends itself to being an expert advisor as it must guide the mechanic through the steps of diagnosing what's wrong with the car. Lastly, if you think of Microsoft Office as entire suite or whole entity, then all of the different applications like Word, Excel, and Power Point would be examples of Customized Tools. I know that all of these examples are not EPSS, however, I feel like they help me understand the concepts better.

Colbie Caillat

2007-11-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

I recently discovered this artist about a month ago when my old roommate mentioned that she wanted to see the show, since a Hawaiian Artist, Justin Young, was backing her up as a member of her band. Anyway, what started with supporting Justin, has now transfered to loving Colbie's music, especially "Bubbly". I highly recommend seeing her!

Adoption, Diffusion, Implementation, and Institutionalization of Instructional Innovations

2007-11-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Chapter 11 of our textbook focuses on how educational technology is implemented by the public. The authors focused on several theories, as well as the identification of key indicators of facilitative conditions and institutionalization. Overall, I found the chapter to be interesting as to it's IDT applications, but also to it's greater application to other fields and experiences.
For example, during my credentialing experience, as well as during my first week of orientation at the school I was working at, much of the science professional development was centered around FOSS kits. In theory, they are great for teachers and students as it exhibits some of the constructivist ideas of hands on learning with teachers taking on a more facilitative role. As a new teacher, I was excited to be able to use such materials, and was severely disappointed when I found out that the kits were scattered throughout the school, incomplete, and were not used. To me I found this to be quite baffling since 2 hours of professional development time was spent on learning about FOSS kits. Since I had such a positive experience with them, it would have been interesting to try to apply some of what the book talked about to figure out why the implementation of FOSS kits failed. Perhaps it was due resistance in the school, and if so, maybe it could be attributed to the subcategories of access or attitudinal behaviors. As the book pointed out, learning about what resistance the implementation was met with, could lead to the development of future strategies to combat resistance. Maybe after devising these combative strategies, research into a new curriculum could begin. However, before a new science curriculum could be adopted by that school, I feel that a careful examination of why the old curriculum failed and why it supported by some staff, should be done so that a clear consensus could be reached, so that the school has a better understanding of what it wants from a program before it begins to go through the first few stages of Roger's Innovation-Decision Process model.

Motivation

2007-10-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

Any teacher who has been through a teacher ed program, knows how important motivation is in a lesson plan. During my student teaching experience, all of my supervisors alway emphasized it's importance to me, and I really struggled to constantly slip a motivational piece into my lesson. I felt that it had to be some type of game that had to be incorporated to make the students interested and motivated in the lesson. With that type of mentality, I felt that it was impossible to constantly motivated students in this way, and that at some point, they needed to take responsibility for their own learning. This directly relates back to the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation debate. Throughout my educational career, i haven't really seen intrinsic motivation at work. The best I've seen is college students, because they all in class by choice. In an elementary setting, even as a sub, I still have only seen extrinsic motivation used with table points, marble jars, tickets, or class money. Perhaps intrinsic motivation only develops with age.

In the reading, I really liked the ARCS model categories and subcategories, as they really helped to show me the other ways that motivation can be tied into a lesson other than turning everything into a game. In addition to that, I found the steps of the ARCS design process to be interesting because it really forces the instructor or designer to really think about what motivational element will be included, and take into account the types of learners that will taught. I think if this was used often, that it would really lead to improvements in instruction and design.

2007-10-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog. The focus of this blog will be to explore the field of Educational Technology and Design through my course work at CSULA. I hope you find links that are helpful, and will return the favor by posting your own favorite links!