I attended the Campus Technology conference this year. The topic was WEB 2.0 technologies in Higher Education. I was excited to attend and learn more. Surprisingly I learned the most participating in the “back channel” of the conference on Twitter. I had never tried this before at a conference and I was pleasantly surprised by the comradarie and knowledge that developed between strangers. Before the conference, I signed up to network with people at the conference. One person on the list developed a twitter feed and google site for the group.
I found this so helpful. People would post notes and links from the various sessions they were attending to the feed. This way you really could be in more then one place at a time.
One session I found to be well delivered and informative was about Second Life use in Higher Education Sarah Robbins from Ball State University was the presenter. She posted a link to her PowerPoint file from the presentation on her blog.
She started the presentation by talking about the 7 principles by A. Chickering and S. Erhmann, as well as the belief that she has the I happen to agree with which is “Learning first and technology second!
Creepy Treehouse is a term that Sarah referred to in her presentation. Second Life is an application that students already like and use for fun, so why not try seeing how they can learn from it as well? Sarah has experienced a ton of success using this tool to teach a variety of concepts, including discrimination. I look forward to exploring Second Life more and talking with faculty on the UVM campus who have used it. We will be holding a Colleague Tea on the use of Second Life in a Higher Education course, this semester.
Cheers,
Holly Parker
Center for Teaching and Learning