Controversy Close to Home

One of the first people I met in Second Life was Jeff Corbin (his name in real life), a research associate in physics and astronomy at DU. He has built the Science School in Second Life, which DU will be using for classes.

Andy Guess, in an article titled "In Second Life, There's No Fallout" at InsideHigherEd.com, describes Jeff's Island: "Science School is nestled behind a three-dimensional, real-time weather map with pixellated clouds hovering above the ground, near a telescope that can be used to view constellations during the winter, when its real-life counterpart at the University of Denver is inaccessible due to snow-covered mountain roads."

With grant money from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Robert C. Amme, a professor of physics at DU, and some colleagues are going to build a nuclear reactor in Second Life as part of a master's program "in applied science with an emphasis on environmental impact assessment that will feature classes held in Second Life."

The comments on the article indicate what we face in using this technology (Second Life and other MUVEs) for educational purposes.

Renaissance Woman Wiki

I've been working on a wiki with information on writing and research--at least for starters--for my students. I also promised Desideria Stockton that I'd provide information on research for her Collaboration Station in Second Life. So far I've got the first of four sections done. The third section, on actually doing research, will be by far the most involved.

Inspiration for Teaching and Blogging

In November I read Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. At the time I was thinking about changing careers, but this book inspired me to continue teaching. In the book, Richardson covers

• the read/write web
• weblogs
• wikis
• RSS
• social bookmarking
• images online
• podcasting and screencasting

What got me most excited was reading about blogs, wikis (which I'd only learned of a few weeks earlier), and RSS feeds and the ideas I had for using them in my classes, particularly the research writing classes (particularly ENG 122 at Red Rocks) that I frequently teach.

Unfortunately, I'm not scheduled to teach ENG 122 this coming semester, but as soon as I do again, I want to use what I learned from Richardson by having the students create and maintain their own blogs to record their research and establish an account where they can track RSS feeds from sites relating to their topics. I'm also thinking about creating a class wiki about research, from generating research questions to documentation styles but focusing on reviews of search engines, metacrawlers, directories, and other internet research tools. When I taught ENG 122 last year, I had the students demonstrate search engines and metacrawlers in class. I want to expand that assignment in the future to include, at least, directories, and to have the students in groups develop criteria for evaluating research tools, select the best examples, demonstrate the ones selected, and record their decisions and reviews in the wiki.

I also intend to establish a blog or blogs for the on-campus classes (as opposed to online and blended/hybrid) I teach to communicate with students. There are a couple of full-time faculty members at Red Rocks who have their ENG 121 (essay writing) students create blogs, but I'm not ready to go that far with my classes this semester: ENG 090 (developmental essay writing), ENG 121, and ENG 131 (technical writing). I do think it would be appropriate to do something with blogs and wikis in my technical writing class; I just haven't figured out what.

As a result of reading Richardson's book, I established an account with Bloglines to keep track of blogs related to my work. I also created an account with Furl, but I decided to switch to del.icio.us and will be closing out the Furl account. I used to have a lot of bookmarks for my classes (primarily research related) in an account with MyBookmarks, but when I didn't use it for a few months, it was closed, and I lost all the links I'd collected. At least with del.icio.us, I can backup my bookmarks. I think the tags are interesting, but I'd really prefer a more hierarchical method of organization: folders within folders.