Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Learning in a Virtual World

Just lately a lot of my time has been taken up with Second Life, if you have yet to try virtual worlds then let me recommend the experience. My principle reason for the whole venture is to see how this new semi-immersed virtual reality can be utilised for teaching and learning, even as an extension to our continuing work with Moodle. On Saturday 17th of Feb at 5pm I will begin hosting some presentation trials that will be looking at the Linden Script, that’s the language in SL, and comparing it with other main stream computer languages. So if you are free around that time and would like to come over for a short and small class and supply us with some feedback in another reality just click here and I will look forward to seeing you.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Video beats the audio star

At the start of this term decided to try using my PDA to record parts of my lectures, and these recording are in range of 3 to 4 minutes. The particular course that I selected for this is my High Level Programming for level 4 students, and to date I have made about 40 recordings. But I thought I would tryout something of an experiment by making these recording available in two forms, one being a straightforward mp3, while the other would feature a speaking CrazyTalk avatar. Although the speech content of the two media are identical, the CrazyTalk avatar version has attracted almost twice the number of viewings!