Dave Cormier from Innovate Online- Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum: (login required)
What is needed is a model of knowledge acquisition that accounts for socially constructed, negotiated knowledge. In such a model, the community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum.
We must construct our own meaning-- learning is not something that is "accessed".
I'd missed this earlier from NextGov-- Agencies getting serious about virtual worlds:
The National Defense University is building a 600-seat auditorium above an island in a virtual world. Ten days ago, the Air Force put out a call to gauge companies’ interest in prototyping a virtual base. The Transportation Department has constructed a synthetic world with IBM. Last year, the State Department held an eight-hour jazz fest for 300 avatars and chatted in Second Life with 20 others from Canada and Poland about student visas.
It’s time to start getting real about the virtual work world. In less than nine months, the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds has grown from a handful of agencies to more than 100.
It's a good read. It has some interesting things about how agencies are working to get around Federal regulations not prepared to handle something like this. For example, to get around the security issues of a .mil domain:
The Air Force training command created a .edu domain to get around the proscription, as did, reportedly, the Defense Acquisition University.
That's interesting. I thought that the .edu domain was reserved for accredited four year universities-- no exceptions? Guess that isn't true, or it depends on who is asking.
There's some other interesting things in the article about the difficulty of procuring space in digital worlds that I could relate to. When I first "purchased" an island in Second Life (for an educational project) I was surprised that it had been placed in our accounting system as a "land rental" fee. I laughed pretty hard at that until I had to suffer the pain of getting it fixed. After much effort we were able to get it categorized as a hosted service, and treated as an outsourced IT expense. But that wasn't the end of it. Just this week I was asked to explain to our granting source just what exactly it was we had purchased. Sigh! So it was nice to read in this article that there are others sharing in my pain.
From Patrick Lambe: Why Elearning Systems Will Never Rule the World
Elearning pageturners deserve all the cheating they can get. This model of technology-assisted “self” directed learning is at least half a century old.
While reading my feeds this morning I have already encountered three MediaWiki installs. Two of the three were sites where software documentation was maintained. The last, was the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
The purpose of the NSDL wiki is to provide resources that support learning innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The site maintains a digital repository of high quality materials for use in classrooms and research for K-12, higher education, and libraries. It is a very impressive effort.
This is yet another example of MediaWiki being used to foster the work of scientific communities. You see it being used everywhere. (What do these medical wikis have in common?) I'm starting to wonder how you can be a scientist, engineer, physician, or teacher without having basic MediaWiki skills? If you don't know how it works you have effectively removed yourself from the conversation.
The network effect around MediaWiki is so strong that it can't be ignored.
The final panel presentation at the Emory University Virtual Worlds and New Realities conference: Possible Futures of Virtual Worlds and Society will be broadcast live on February 11 on the Second Life Cable Network at 11a SLT. Should be good!
I'll be watching, and if you want to chat: kevin.j.gamble@gmail.com
Here's another in-world conference in Second Life that you might want to attend: The Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference.
As I've mentioned before, if you haven't attended a conference in Second Life you should definitely give it a try. The conferences I have attended previously have been very effective, and it beats the heck out of travel, hotels, being away from home... This conference costs $8000 Lindens (around $30) which is a heck of a lot cheaper than face-to-face conferences.
The Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education and Museums Conference will be held in Second Life at the New Media Consortium Conference Center (NMC) on March 8, 2008. Registration is 8000 lindens (equivalent of $30 USD) payable in lindens to avatar Valencia Lane in Second Life.
The purpose of this conference is to provide a gathering place for librarians, information professionals, educators, museologists, and others to learn about and discuss the educational, informational, and cultural opportunities of virtual worlds.
If you decide to attend please say hello. I'll be attending as Jonathan Foss.
I like to think that I am a "skate to where the puck is going to be" sort of person, and I've been thinking a lot of late about why Second Life, and environments like it, will be the next big thing in learning. Virtual worlds are the most compelling technology-mediated learning environment that exist today. We're also very early in their development, and things are only going to get better. It feels an awful lot like the Web days of 1993 all over again, and we all know how that played out.
Where this post is about my experiences from working in Second Life, this is not a post about Second Life. It's just the system that I know. There are others virtual worlds that function much the same way, and there are many more in development.
Here are some of the things that are propelling Second Life to the fore-front of educational innovation. I'm sure there are additional items I could put on the list, and I could have looked to see what others have said, but I wanted this list to be an off-the-top of my head sort of effort:
It is collaborative (not competitive) - it isn't a game in the traditional sense in that it has no built-in objectives. There is no winning or losing, killing or conquering. Where there is nothing to stop someone from introducing competitive elements it's not part of the Second Life DNA. This is an essential component for learning that should not be ignored.
It embraces creativity - it offers a multitude of ways for people to express themselves be it design, architecture, music, art, fashion, scripting, teaching... Where the Web is primarily a text driven environment where people express themselves by writing, Second Life is a place where people can express themselves in many different ways.
It supports peer-production - I'm always amazed that everything you see in Second Life has come from residents working together to create them. It is without question a social networking site. There are some incredible builds that show what people can do when they organize, collaborate, and combine their skills to express their collective talents. What is happening in Second Life reminds me a great deal of the sort of incredible productivity you see in Wikipedia. It's the same peer-production dynamic and it is nothing short of phenomenal.
It is social - It's the richest technology mediated environment to be found for interacting with other people. It supports many modalities for interaction. I like to think that I am the master of multi-tasking, but Second Life brings me to my knees. I dare you to try to multi-task while in Second Life. This is not an environment where you can run multiple tabs and bounce around. It commands your full attention. It engages.
There are few rules - there are a list of basic values that read like the Golden Rule. There is no built-in hierarchy or roles. There are few controls. People are free to explore and to push the boundaries of what is possible.
It is inclusive - it's like that old expression, on the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I can't count the number of interesting people I have met from all corners of the globe in-world. It makes the real world a smaller place. I'm not delusional, there are real people in-world and they bring their own prejudices, but it's much easier to get around these obstacles in a virtual environment.
I trust Linden - they embody the modern organization: they are transparent, have open-sourced the client, and seem absolutely committed to open-sourcing the server software. I don't believe they are interested in "controlling" anything. They are very progressive in matters of intellectual property. They know this is bigger than any one company, and that if it is to truly reach its potential they will have to set it free. We are headed to a day of many interconnected and inter-operable virtual worlds. Just like with the Web, we are going to see millions of machines connected in the coming metaverse. (See: Metaverse Project, Croquet Consortium, Open Simulator, Sun's Wonderland )
It is poised to explode - there are lots of smart people working on taking virtual worlds to the next level. These disparate efforts will be merged. This is completely related to the Lindens beginning to open up the environment. When you bring a bunch of smart people together working in an open environment great things happen. We've seen this same dynamic play itself out many times in the past. It's happening again in this space, and the results will be nothing short of world changing.
This was a quick stab at capturing some of my thoughts on what is happening. I tried to stay at a 10,000 foot level so I didn't get into things like exploiting the Z scale, and other things that can be done in-world as compared to other environments. I could also make a list of what is wrong with Second Life. That would be too easy. My old Apple II, that I purchased in 1979, and the Commodore PET I used before that had quite a few flaws as well. I can remember using the text-based Web before there was Mosaic -- that had a few rough edges too. Most of us had no trouble seeing through the flaws to the massive potential these technologies embodied. Same with virtual worlds - things are only going to get better, and they are going to get better very quickly. This is a space that you ignore at your own peril.
NEXT POST: What educators need to be doing right now to get ready for what is coming. (As suggested by Sue Waters.)
Thanks to Sue Waters and Beth Raney for their contributions to this post.
An interesting discussion will take place in Second Life tomorrow-- Virtual Worlds: Considering Civil Liberties. The event is January 28 at 11:30a SLT (which is 2:30 Right Coast time.) The event is being held at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Island:
Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will chair a discussion about the rights of users in virtual worlds. Joining him will be Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.
If you haven't attended a serious discussion in Second Life here's your chance. Second Life is a remarkably effective environment for events like this. I'll be there. If you're in attendance stop by and say hello-- my avatar's name is Jonathan Foss, and I'll be wearing a red Creative Commons t-shirt.
To RSVP send a request to: usc.network.culture@metaversatility.com
ars technica reports on the rapid growth of gaming, and how it's expanding while movies are remaining steady and music is in steep decline: Growth of gaming in 2007 far outpaces movies, music
2007 was a banner year for video gaming, and the industry has the figures to prove it. The Entertainment Software Association announced today that total sales for 2007 were $18.85 billion, with $9.5 billion of that spent on games (both PC and console) and $9.35 billion on consoles.
And it's not just young males playing games. Two of the fastest growing demographics are females, and people over age 35.
This is a difficult space to enter, especially the proprietary gaming world of the console. The online space, however, is full of opportunities. Chris Brogan in commenting on the growth in gaming asks some good questions- XBox PS3 Wii Second Life and You:
So the question is this: with all this energy, effort, revenue, and opportunity floating around in gaming, how much longer can you ignore it? Either as a player/participant, or an organization, what will you be doing in this universe?
Excellent questions. If you're in the education business what does your strategy look like? What percentage of your budget are you investing in preparation for the inevitable? What's your R&D budget? Are you living completely in the now, or are you actively preparing for the future? Are you going to the learners, or still expecting the learners to come to you?
I found this by Lion Kimbro buried deep in a discussion on a Wikiversity talk page: Thoughts from some random guy. It asks, "Who should be authoring the text books?" and makes a compelling case that it should be the learner:
The idea is that people who are less knowledgeable about a subject very much should be a primary actor in the authoring of the text. Not the sole actor- you need experienced people to perform correction, offer up alternative explanations, to make sure that it's not wrong. But I think that beginners have unique advantages in teaching other beginners. Reasons: They understand their own misunderstandings. They have strong empathy with other learners, because they are at the same place, or just a single step beyond. The beginner is motivated by the need to make their understanding more concrete. (As different than the bored expert, (this is not a criticism, just noting a fact,) who has already covered the subject material a million times over.) It is conceivable that a vast lattice or network of beginners can, if properly made to understand what they are doing and why and how, and that there are people who will correct them if they mis-state a thing, that they could make far better artifacts for teaching, than the teachers themselves.
One example I like to point people to is the "Hippo Family Club" series of books, including the amazing "Who is Fourier?" (Read the reviews!) The book teaches Fourier, from the beginning, assuming only that the reader knows what a triangle is. It's a fantastic book, people swear by it, and it's written by students who were learning Fourier. Lots of diagrams, lots of plain language explanations, etc., etc.,.; By-beginners, for-beginners, supervised by experts. No doubt the kids made mistakes as they were learning & authoring, and they were corrected by experts, to keep the text in course.
Brilliant! This is all about respecting learners. Being open to the idea that everyone has something to contribute.
You know what is best about this model? It flat scales. There are no boundaries to what can be accomplished when you turn people loose.
Another good read on Open Educational Resources from the Washington Post, Internet Access Is Only Prerequisite For More and More College Classes
Studying on YouTube won't get you a college degree, but many universities are using technology to offer online classes and open up archives. Sure, some schools have been charging for distance-learning classes for a long time, but this is different: These classes are free. At a time when many top schools are expensive and difficult to get into, some say it's a return to the broader mission of higher education: to offer knowledge to everyone.
And tens of millions are reaching for it.
It was nice to see this shout-out for Utah State, which is proving itself to be the most progressive of the Land-Grant universities.
Schools are feeling their way, experimenting with different technologies; some use Utah State University's eduCommons on the Web; some post to free sites such as YouTube and the Apple university site iTunes U. Other schools have plunged right in: MIT has 1,800 classes online, virtually the entire curriculum free and open to all.
"The idea was to have a broad impact on education worldwide and make a statement at a time when many schools were launching for-profit distance-learning ventures," Steve Carson of MIT OpenCourseWare said, "trying to redefine the role of the institution in the digital age."
Truly wonderful! We're seeing new institutions grab the mantle of the "people's university". I'm just happy to see that someone sees this as their mission.
The latest issue of Innovate Online has an interesting article on how online students are spending a tremendous amount of energy trying to game online course systems: The Loophole Generation It suggests that students spend more time and energy trying to avoid the work than it would take to just do the work in the first place.
I was reading, and smiling a fair bit when I came across this little gem on the various strategies being used. This one in particular struck a chord:
The Cheater may use a wide variety of techniques used to avoid work. He or she may copy entire assignments from another classmate, submit work posted as examples by the professor as his or her own, contribute little to no work to group projects, have someone else help with an online test, or purchase an entire paper from an online retailer. These students are fully aware of what they are doing. Even with university honor codes and instructor-developed online codes of ethics, this behavior persists.
This immediately brought back some memories of my time in graduate school some twenty-five years ago. I had a statistics course where the professor graded using Z-scores. Most of the tests were taken out of class on our own time. The professor knew that we would not help our classmates, because doing so only hurt our own grades. You have to love that collaborative learning!
Anyway, our mainframe computer files were in one big course directory and exposed to the rest of the class. If your classmates were the least bit computer savvy they could see the code you wrote to solve exam problems. I can't remember how exactly, but I figured out that some classmates were stealing my programs. Normally I wouldn't have cared, but in this situation with the grading normalized, someone stealing your stuff only hurt your own grade. I solved the problem by deliberately embedding errors in my code after solving the problems and printing the results.
I'm sure some of my classmates are still wondering how I did well on tests when they did so poorly. If you are a former classmate, and reading this today, I'm sorry! I didn't make the rules.
Anyway, the students of today aren't any different than the students of yesterday. All that's changed are the rules of the game. If we'd stop focusing on assessment, and start concentrating on learning there'd be a lot less of this gamesmanship.
I posted last month about a talk I had heard by Dr. Bugeja from Iowa State. He responded in a comment, and I thought I would pull his remarks deserved to be pulled-out and given more prominence. I very much appreciate his response and enjoy the good nature of his reply. I enjoy honest discourse. Thank you Dr. Bugeja.
I also appreciate, but will decline his offer for a free book. I will purchase it and read it, however. I'm interested in the topic, and I'm sure it will be an excellent read.
Michael Bugeja said...
Thanks for mentioning my research. The quote that you selected as a citation fairly represents my viewpoint.
There is an implication that the publicity about Interpersonal Divide somehow is unethical, and that concerns me greatly, in as much as I am a media ethicist. I also am a journalist, and I prefer facts. Here are a few:
1. Iowa State University is a landgrant university. As such, researchers are expected to give speeches to organizations and otherwise interact with groups when summoned. Perhaps the speech you attended was the most recent one I have to ISU Extension. Honoraria for such excursions usually are boxed lunches, such as I received earlier this month at this event. Sometimes I do get honoaria for outside consulting on ethics codes and the like, but I take vacation days for them and do most in the summer. (For instance, I was a scholar in residence in 2005 in another state). Also, if the organization is large enough, I might suggest a donation to our student scholarship fund, as I did with the ISU Veterinary Medicine Alumni Association. In sum, I give far more many free speeches and scholarship-based ones than I ever do on my own time consulting with universities on ethics codes or journalism associations on the state of the news media.
2. My book Interpersonal Divide was researched between 1999-2004 and predicted the culture that we now have before it arrived. That's why it is cited by most major media around the world. Iowa State University is a research institution; thus, it makes public research that has been dubbed noteworthy, as a message to taxpayers that its employees are making an impact on society, especially since our official name is Iowa State University of Science and Technology. The publicity results in more presentations, which I enjoy because I can interact with people face to face rather than what I am doing now, via Internet.
3. I don't teach, so I don't assign my books to classes, although my books have been used at Iowa State. Although Interpersonal Divide is one of the most cited books in the Oxford Univ. Press line, it has sold fewer than 1000 copies. I believe, when returns were counted, it sold 6 copies between January and July 2007. That's because the work introduces a new theory--interpersonal divide--and is a research book rather than a textbook. In other words, you can find it in libraries but not typically in the classroom.
More on text books: My How-To News Writer, which you might read--just send me an address to my email account, and I will send you a free copy--is sold to students throughout Iowa and the country. I donate all my royalties--which amount to $7 per book because the Iowa Newspaper Association published it--to our First Amendment Fund. So far I have not raised $25,000 through donated royalties, but when we do reach that figure, we can endow the account and then give students scholarships, about $1,000 per year. I would appreciate it if you would review the How-To News Writer on High Touch because it is for a worthy cause, explaining the basics of fact-based journalism while benefiting students.
Finally, it's up to your viewers to discern whether I'm a jerk for questioning why six media companies--Time Warner, Viacom, Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Disney and General Electric--have been allowed to dominate the news because of technology (as well as four new media companies--AOL, Google, Yahoo and MSN--which account for about 50% of the online ad revenue). I may be misguided as well for associating the student loan scandal with the typical digital gadgets that keep amassing student debt through iPods, cell phones and laptops, all of which take credit cards sponsored by banks making deals with alumni and other university-based associations; but I point this out because I care about students and want them to be able to explicate the motive of the interface or application so as to make an independent decision on use rather than a spontaneous purchase online.
However others may label me for my questions about technology, either accurate or inaccurate, I accept that, because we have the First Amendment, which I am using now to partially correct the record of your post--appreciating that you chose an excerpt that accurately voices my chief concern.
Terra Incognito at Penn State has a nice case study written by Leigh Blackall on the move to an Open Educational Resource model at New Zealand's Otago Polytechnic Institute.
Some of the highlights of their implementation:
Elizabeth Dunn at Small Dots, and Beth Kanter have been discussing social networking strategies for non-profits. They are discussing whether organizations should install their own white label social networking solutions, or use existing big box solutions such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They are discussing this relative to the non-profit sector, but their discussion is relevant for any organization considering using a social network solutions to connect with their community, be it a community of donors, supporters, learners, voters, etc.
This is something I've given a lot of thought, and there aren't easy options. Beth's start at a decision tree is quite interesting: Social Networks Decision Trees. I don't have much to add to the discussion other than our personal experience. Mind you, ours was a limited test but it was our reality none-the-less.
We'd just begun to create some beta communities in Facebook when we discovered the white label social networking solution Elgg. We saw how Elgg was being used in a couple of communities similar to ours, and it was obvious that it was flat working. From the perspective of an organization it offered all of the functionality of Facebook and more. Plus it was open-source: no lock-in, no advertising, it scaled to very large numbers, it had open profile data, and most importantly it could be mined for use in our other applications. I fell in love with Elgg. Sure it had some rough edges, but what software doesn't? (Don't even get me started on Facebook's rough edges). Elgg had everything we needed, and it offered solutions that we were desperately needing. Sounds wonderful, hey?
So we embarked on getting some people to help us kick-the-tires on Elgg. We "invited" our advisory committees. People we knew well and that we had easy access. And we invited, and we invited, and we invited. We couldn't get even 50% of our advisory committee members to even try it. They never once logged-in. Mind you, they didn't even have to create an account. All they had to do was login using their existing identities. We also tried to work with some of our select, and mostly progressive communities to give it a try with zero uptake.
In the mean time, we'd already started our beta groups in Facebook. With almost no effort at all our groups exploded. We saw growth that we never could have imagined. I can't begin to tell you have easy it was to create functioning and engaged communities. It was so successful that I have considered closing down some of our old ways of reaching these people. I don't think we need them anymore.
If I was adding something to Beth's decision tree it would be something about ease of creation? Building your own communities is hard work. It might be next to impossible. White label or big box? Our experience has been that you'll have far more success going to where the people are already assembled.
Geez, do I enjoy reading Harold Jarche: Putting a training peg into an education hole
Using training tools to manage learning is like using a spreadsheet to grow your garden. A waste of time and energy.
Michael Feldstein at e-Literate discusses: Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I, and the increasing tendency to create metrics to measure... heck if I know? I just know they're not measuring learning.
Of course, you regular readers know that I think these bloated and bureaucratic systems are a step in the wrong direction for institutions of higher learning. Perhaps I'm old school, but I think these sorts of things are best left between the learner and their professor. Not between the learner, some software, and their institution.
Are you looking to maximize students’ likely economic benefit from their education, regardless of career path? Are you trying to create better citizens? Or do you care most about helping the student cultivate a rich and fulfilling life of the mind? The answers to these questions have a strong impact on whether it makes more sense to look at test scores or portfolios, whether assessment instruments should be the same across courses or even across states, and lots of other critical implementation questions. Without widespread agreement on goals and priorities, there will be no widespread agreement about what to assess or how to assess it. It is nearly impossible to get such widespread agreement in many cases. And yet, there is also a sense that if we give up on assessing outcomes altogether, we run the risk that the schools that students, parents, communities, and governments invest in will produce nothing of value for anyone.
Higher education never seemed to have an issue with being considered a valuable investment before there was something called a Learning Management System. In reality these are Learner Control Systems (LCS). They have nothing to do with what's best for the learner. The sooner they can be run out of higher education the better off everyone will be-- especially the learner.
I received the following "anonymous" message forwarded in an email today. It has the classic feel of an Internet hoax. Having received several anonymous comments to this blog in the past, I've learned to be immediately suspicious of anything that doesn't identify a source. Doesn't everyone know that transparency is the new black?
I did some searches on key phrases in the document and came up blank. So dear readers, anyone know the origins of this document? Inquiring minds would like to understand the writer's true motives.
To: Deans, Directors, Chairs
From: ... Vice Provost, Libraries, Computing and Technology
... Assistant Vice President for Finance, CFO and Controller
... Associate Provost for Academic Services
... Assistant Vice President for Research and
Graduate Studies and Executive Director, *** Technologies
Subject: Avoiding use of online software tools such as Google Apps, Gmail, and Microsoft Office Live
Please share this message with faculty and staff in your units.
Google, Microsoft, and other companies are offering, at no charge, an increasingly diverse set of online, web-based software tools, many of which provide standard "office" functions such as document and slide deck production and management, spreadsheeting and communications, including e-mail. These tools run on company (vendor) servers, and user files and other content are stored on company systems as well. The no-cost option is attractive to many University units, faculty and staff. However, due to the terms of use and business models being applied to these tools, they MAY NOT be used in the conduct of University work.
To illustrate one concern, the terms to which you agree when you use Google Apps (http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en) include the following; which compromises the University's intellectual property rights and the security of University records:
"You [user] retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. BY SUBMITTING, POSTING OR DISPLAYING THE CONTENT YOU GIVE GOOGLE A PERPETUAL, IRREVOCABLE, WORLDWIDE, ROYALTY-FREE, AND NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENSE TO REPRODUCE, ADAPT, MODIFY, TRANSLATE, PUBLISH, PUBLICLY PERFORM, PUBLICLY DISPLAY AND DISTRIBUTE ANY CONTENT WHICH YOU SUBMIT, POST OR DISPLAY ON OR THROUGH, THE SERVICES. ... You agree that this license INCLUDES A RIGHT FOR GOOGLE TO MAKE SUCH CONTENT AVAILABLE TO OTHER COMPANIES, ORGANIZATIONS OR INDIVIDUALS WITH WHOM GOOGLE HAS RELATIONSHIPS for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services." (emphasis added)
Furthermore, neither Google nor Microsoft makes any promise to back up content, secure confidential or proprietary content, or provide free service for any particular period of time. If they change their minds about the business utility of this model, it may simply go away one day.
Contract terms like these do not provide appropriate protection for University business records or documents. If software tools like these are used in instruction, they may compromise student intellectual property protections. They may also adversely affect commercialization or publication of intellectual property created by faculty. Because individuals frequently do not know that they are creating University business records, including student records, in the course of doing their daily work at ***, ANY use of these sorts of online tools must be avoided.
Individuals or units contemplating use of any software tool or online service should carefully read and consider the terms of use, and seek appropriate legal or other review from University administrative offices when terms of use are incompatible with University policy or exceed the relevant administrator's authority.
CSI New York next Wednesday, October 24 at 10p Eastern will take viewers into Second Life to solve a case of virtual stalking. TechCrunch has the story: CSI:NY Comes To Second Life Wednesday
CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website. CSI:NY will have three options for CSI-related inworld activities. The first option will allow viewers to walk around virtual New York buildings and visit a CSI lab and play forensic games.
This sounds like a wonderful introduction to the educational capabilities of the Second Life environment. I personally think that Second Life is the most compelling distance learning environment we've seen to date. What you can do in Second Life so eclipses the DL 1.0 environments that nothing else compares. The problem is, the learning curve for Second Life is not insignificant. A person has to be highly motivated to get past the initial barriers before they can have that "ahhh haaaa!" moment.
CBS looks to be putting all sorts of educational and entertaining activities around this CSI episode.
The second option consists of a game called “Murder by Zuiker,” a unique murder plot which can be solved by users finding clues. The 100 people who come closest to solving the murder will win virtual gifts.
The big tie-in gives new users the ability to become CSI investigators, complete with field kit and tools, and are given a chance to interview suspects and to solve the murder featured in the actual CSI:NY episode. The episode itself will apparently end in a cliff-hanger with the solution not revealed until February.
I'll be watching Wednesday for sure. If you've been wondering about Second Life and possible educational applications this might be your chance to have a little fun, and learn about Second Life at the same time.
Let's plan on discussing this some more come Thursday morning.
I saw this mentioned on /. and followed the link through: UCSC Wiki Lab. It's basically a piece of software that analyzes Wikipedia pages and rates the text based on the reputations of its authors. Here's how it works:
In order to compute text trust, we first compute the reputation of all Wikipedia authors at all points in time. The goal is to be able to answer all questions of the kind "at 7:04 am UTC on Jan 23, 2006, what was the reputation of the user with ID 3546?". See below for the computation of author reputation.
Once the reputation values for all authors for all times are available, we compute the trust of each word of each revision. We compute the trust value of each word of a revision according to the reputation of the original author of the word, as well as to the reputation of any authors that have edited the page, especially if the edit is in the proximity of the word. We are still fine-tuning the algorithms, which will be described in a forthcoming publication.
What is cool is it tells you what specifically in the text can be trusted and what might be considered questionable. Here's a skitch of a random page.
Do you suppose now with this capability that schools will start allowing Wikipedia to be used as a source?
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