Virtual Worlds in Education, 18th March 2010
From RSCWMWiki
City College Birmingham,Tysley Campus Thursday, 18 March 2010
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Contents |
Welcome
Stuart Cutforth, Principal, from City College Birmingham, welcomed the group to the college.
Our Hosts
 Tony Shakespeare |
 JediKnight Cyberstar |
 Guide Monitor and jean Trizomu |
 Ricksaw and JediKnight talking to Chris Hart |
Tony Shakespeare introduced the project that the college has been involved with on the RSC WM Island. You can see a short video clip about it here:
Morning Guest Speaker - Professor Alan Staley
Professor Alan Staley, Head of the Learning Technology Development Unit
- Shareable, Holistic Assets and Resources, Existing in a Virtual Interactive Lifelong Learning Environment (Shareville) - Effective Practice in a Digital Age
"Rethinking learning resources, Birmingham City University"
Shareville brings ‘real world’ scenarios to students in order to prepare them for the workplace. Shareville is a three-dimensional virtual town where video resources are situated in relevant contexts and is an ongoing project which commenced in 2008 with the aim of creating problem-based scenarios, role-played and acted by staff and students, and filmed using ‘green screen’ technology so that the video can be cut out and placed within the town providing a very authentic experience for the learners.
Watch the video clip here: http://shareville.bcu.ac.uk/alan-video.html
Open up to the floor
(Jim, if you have some links, please could you let me have them?)
Second Morning Speaker - Chris Hart
Chris Hart, CTO, ReactionGrid
Chris gave a talk and demonstration of OpenSim and Unity 3D She explained that the OpenSim environment allows you to build bigger objects than in Second Life. She also described the difference between GPL and BSD Licences. See wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_licence Reaction Grid can has many virtual world solutions for educators. Please see their website for more information: Reaction Grid
To see all the photos taken on the day, please visit our flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14808491@N03/sets/72157623982897149/
Afternoon Guest Speaker - John Kirriemuir
John showed us virtual worlds in a West Midlands context. According to John, the West Midlands is the most active in virtual worlds followed closely by the North East. He then told us what UK academics are doing with virtual worlds, posed the question, "Why use a virtual world?", pondered on whether education should be embracing or avoiding Second Life, looked at the main subject areas using virtual worlds and also touched on some of the negative aspects of Second Life.
To see his full presentation, please go to: http://www.slideshare.net/VirtualWorldWatch/virtual-worlds-and-the-real-west-midlands
Open up to the floor
In this second open session, Nigel Wynne Senior Academic in Learning and Teaching, from the Faculty of Health at Birmingham City University shared with the group, some of the projects that he has been working on. They have been using different virtual environments including: a JISC-funded project using Project Wonderland, Second Life, Unity 3D and Virtual Case Creator, for online simulations.http://vccweb.health.bcu.ac.uk/vcc_introduction.asp
Dr Dave Wood, Principal Teaching Fellow, Warwick University talked about the obvious advantages that a virtual environment has for maths students, especialise for those that find it difficult to visualise in 3D. He also gave a word of warning of how time consuming creating such an environment might be! To visit Maths Island, follow this SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Warwick%20University%20Maths///
The comments from another FE College, City College Coventry, were welcomed. Rob Talbot highlighted the issues that the 16-19 sector have in accessing Second Life.
Acknowledgements
Facilitator's Contact Details
- Jane Edwards p.jane.edwards@rsc-wm.ac.uk Tel: 01902 518983
