Distributing to every Internet researcher at Åbo Akademi. Feel free to forward.
Dear colleagues,
Many of us are doing Internet research, but few of us know about each other. To correct this I’m organizing a networking meeting for every researcher and PhD student conducting Internet research at Åbo Akademi, and of course anyone interested in Internet research are welcome to join us. The meeting will take place on April 24th at 2pm in ASA C122 (Lilla Auditoriet).
The goal with this meeting is to network and to learn more about each other and the research we are doing. A long term goal is to increase collaboration between the Internet researchers at Åbo Akademi, and perhaps even organize joint methods seminars and workshops in the future. A second goal for the meeting is to discuss how we should continue from here.
It will be an informal event with free coffee/tea and cake (thanks to prorector Malin Brännback) with Pecha Kucha style presentations by all attendees and with plenty of time for networking. Please prepare two PowerPoint slides for the presentation, one with your contact details and one about your research. Send the slides to me and I’ll put them all together into a single presentation.
Please register by sending an email to kim.holmberg [at] abo.fi on April 19th at latest (so that I know how much cake to get). Please mention any dietary restrictions.
Hope to see you all on the 24th of April.
With kindest regards,
Kim Holmberg
PS. If you can’t come to the meeting this time, but would like to keep posted about possible future events then please let me know.
The biggest prbleom I have encountered with education in Second Life, is that educationalists who are using it tend to think mainly in real-life terms, as a way of getting people together virtually to do what they would be doing anyway in real life lecture. As a developer, I have been asked to quote for replicating lecture rooms down to the formica tables .They’re used to being the experts and being in charge, and I think a lot of people in academia are alarmed by the lack of control they may experience in a virtual world.There is a persistent academic attitude which seems to be working hard to bring virtual education into the realm of the expert. I hate the idea that many institutions who prevent people from learning unless they have jumped through a lot of hoops in the real world, are also preventing the sharing of their information in the virtual world too. Were the archetypal alien to visit earth, I think he/she/it would have a hard time dealing with the fact that the institutions we have set up to revere learning, actually prevent people from accessing them, unless they jump through certain hoops and have sufficient money. I hope for a different future, where access to learning and information is open to all who are interested in it.I have seen increasing signs of the academization of the virtual world, and I don’t like it much. This platform, these worlds, have the potential to reach many people who are not touched by real-life academia, and I think the opening up of knowledge that is going on all over the web should also be going on in virtual worlds. In some places, they have contrived to spend time and effort putting something together in the virtual world which is open to all but have made it so tedious that it manages to make an interesting subject and a fascinating platform as tedious as watching cats moult. I hate to single out one build for criticism, but the idea of going from one area to another in Pharmatopia and having to put on glasses and white coat and possibly a hairnet and gloves too, only to have to take them all off and put on a slightly different set to visit the next exhibit along with lots of exercises in dragging stuff from one place in your inventory to another it’s just very boring.Second Life has the potential to draw in people, to excite them, to allow them to collaborate and share and create more than the sum of their parts it allows people to learn with the terrain becoming part of the memory, an aide-memoire. There are some shining examples I’d nominate the fly through of the Testis by Ohio State as one of these. I think it is amazingly well done, well constructed, well thought out. And it is open to all, too.I’d love to see lots of imaginative, open, educational builds which use the strong points of SL and which don’t simply transport the real life into the virtual and I will be waching this thread with baited breath, hoping to find some.I was impressed when I read Peter Senge’s theories that some organisations may be about learning like secondary schools, for example but aren’t necessarily learning organisations in the sense that they don’t learn from experience or change their behaviour as institutions. I can see that’s true with a large number of institutions in the real world and the virtual world I hope that’s going to change though, as I believe it must for them to make the most of a virtual learning environment, where the learning is never simply in one direction.