The future of learning….
Blog entry: 28th November 2016
It’s going to be a busy day today.
The big event of the day of course for me is my PhD viva which will be taking place in the University’s main campus within Second Life. My interviewers and supervisors will be logging in from Hunter Valley, Sydney; Vancouver, Canada; and Rimini, Italy. The one thing technology can’t change is the rotation of the earth. It’s been difficult finding a time to have it – poor Sharon will still have to get up at 6 am to join in!
It’s been hard work completing a PhD on reflective practice with technology when it has been such a fast-changing arena. When I started, reflection was about notebooks, text-based discussion boards and blogs; now audio, video and animation are routine and reflection on learning is as likely to happen in LifeSpace or YouVid as in an application on a University server. Thank goodness for the new Open Source SynchLife software that enables everyone to keep track of, tag, categorise and make available any or all of their personal content wherever it is on the Net. The MyPortfolio add-on is a godsend to academics.
Who’d have thought when the BDRA opened the Second Life campus for the University ten years ago that we would now have ten times as many students in Second Life as we do for “traditional” online distance learning – and twenty times as many as on the RL campus itself. Leicester really did well to be first in this field. Courses can be paid for in Linden dollars – a currency used by nearly as many people as the euro these days!
Tomorrow’s my book launch – now that’s REALLY strange. It may be based on over two thousand contributing authors’ comments via a website, include animation and video from 83 amateurs on the web, and be a multidimensional multimedia narrative with linked icasts and free bodyset for accessing the associated virtual reality immersive environment, but it’s still called a “book”.
Still, it’s great that technology now allows me to work full-time from my favourite island in the world. That view across to the castle lifts my spirits every single time I look at it, though when I walk over there along the shore the wind tends to play havoc with my virtual keyboard as I’m trying to facilitate my students’ e-tivities.