We Need Your Insight: Using Second Life for Education

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We Need Your Insight: Using Second Life for Education

Rockcliffe University Consortium is collaborating with the Linden Lab Research Team and the Virtual Worlds Education Consortium to gather data in order to suggest product enhancements & new features which will benefit both instructors and students.

We would like to invite you to participate by completing a short survey that should take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete although it could take longer if there are substantive comments you wish to include.

Click to go to Survey

The objectives of this survey are to understand:

  • more about who is using Second Life,
  • your experiences and challenges,
  • your views on what would make the platform better, and
  • what support systems are available to you.

The goal of this survey is to gather data for suggesting product enhancements to the Linden Research development team for consideration in upcoming product releases.

Rockcliffe will be conducting optional follow-up focus groups in August and September if you are interested in participating.

If you could share and let other educators know about the survey, it would be much appreciated.

The 2022 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference is happening March 31-April 2, 2022.
Please remember to save the date. Watch for the Call for Proposals to be released mid-fall.

Inside Avatar Studio: Season 4 Kickoff “Education In An Age Of Social Disruption”

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Inside Avatar Studio: Season 4 Kickoff “Education In An Age Of Social Disruption”

The long-awaited Rockcliffe Inside the Avatar Studio: Season 4 kicks off May 16, 3 PM SLT!  Renne Emiko Brock - Avatar Zinnia Zauber

Our lovely new co-host Renne Emiko Brock (Zinnia Zauber) interviews with Kevin Feenan (Phelan Corrimal), founder of Rockcliffe University Consortium in conversation about “Education in an Age of Social Disruption“. 

The iconic Inside The Avatar Studio (#IAS) brings together innovative leaders from the virtual technology frontier to discuss perceptions, perspectives, and predictions of what ‘being virtual’ means in today’s society. Guest speakers discuss current issues and trends surrounding the implications virtual experiences based on their own areas of subject matter expertise.

Our past guests have included: Robert Bloomfield, Beverly McCarter, Jessica Lyon, Lauren Weyland, AJ Kelton, Maria Korolov, Malburns Writer, Ham Rambler, Bernard Drax and Daniel Moshel,Terry Beaubois, Botgirl Questi, Doug Thompson, Gentle Heron, Dick Dillon, Chestnet Rau, Ian Hughes, Dave Levinson, Will Burns, Pooky Amsterdam, Tim “Digistar” Goree, Wiz Nordberg, Joel Foner, Chris Collins, Andrew Hughes, John Lester.. and panel topics such as Social Communications, Avatar the Movie, Virtual Frontier Panel and VWBPE…

Join our studio audience in Second Life https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/243/12/ or watch live on Rockcliffe’s YouTube channel https://gaming.youtube.com/urockcliffe (with many archived videos to revisit!)

Season 4 will see a re-worked format for the new season including additional perspectives on digital literacies, future technology, education pedagogy, guest hosts, and much more.

Host: Zinnia Zauber (Renne Emiko Brock) Producer: Bevan Whitfield (Elisa Butler)

Saturday – October 27, 2012: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM SL/PST Rockcliffe University 6th Open House

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Rockcliffe University welcomes you to our 6th Open House Event as we continue into our 7th year of education in Virtual Worlds. Please join us and meet some of our wonderful faculty members who will present and then follow with question and answer sessions.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/243/12/29

10:00 AM: Open House Keynote Address with Phelan Corrimal (Kevin Feenan), CEO of Rockcliffe University

Phelan Corrimal will open this event with a brief overview of Rockcliffe’s past and future and will share his view of the state of education in virtual worlds.  Phelan’s insights always provide fertile ground for thought and discussion so please come to hear his views on where we are going and what to expect from Rockcliffe in the years to come.

11:00 AM: Virtual Philosophy with Pamala Clift

Pamala Clift is the host of “The Roadside Philosophers”, a group that she started in 2007 and the author of the book “The Roadside Philospher – A Novel, Maybe?”

We enter a virtual world and are suddenly thrown into a global community with vast cultural differences and expectations. Any entrance into a computer-mediated environment creates its own culture, expectations and philosophy. Topping that off with individual engagement levels (dissociative, immersive and augmentative) and the pot of emotions and conflicting perceptions can boil over.

Is there a ‘Right and Wrong’? Are we able to engage at each other’s level to observe and engage without pain? For over five years, The ‘Roadside Philosophers’ has been engaged in learning about global and virtual philosophy, and is still exploring its vast complexity.  The key is letting go of control comfortably.

11:30 AM: The One Big Soup Project with Muze Ackland

We help advance cultural understanding using 3D web technology. Via education, we can bring balance into virtual worlds with mutual cultural respect. Balance restores harmony in ecology, economics, political power, spirituality … and extends to the physical world.

Just as in nature, if one seemingly insignificant element is missing, it can adversely affect an entire ecosystem.

Each culture has something to add to this ‘One Big Soup’ which we call the world. This project is building a diversity network/explorers game which celebrates these cultures through music, art, architecture, cuisine, fashion, legends, history and language.

12:00 – 1:00 PM: Break

1:00 PM: How to Publicize Your Blog with Thinkerer Melville (Selby Evans)

Thinkerer has taught courses in psychological measurement, computer applications and systematic problem-solving. He has conducted research in pattern recognition and cognitive systems, and operated a consulting business for 25 years.

Are you writing a blog? Is there something important to you that you want to tell the world and are you publicizing it?

This presentation will help you learn how to get your story out, how to organize your thoughts and how to collaboratively blog on different social media venues.

http://virtualoutworlding.blogspot.com/

1:30PM: Project Management with AgileBill Firehawk (Willam Krebs)

Join AgileBill on for this session of the Rockcliffe Open House where we discuss a variety of virtual world platforms.  What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?  When would you want to use each?  Should a team just use one?  Come follow our steps and we show scenes from many worlds including OpenSim, VenueGen, avayalive engage, 3D-VirtualEvents, Jibe, Sococo, and Terf.

AgileDimensions: http://www.agiledimensions.com/blog/about/bio-agilebill-krebs/

2:00PM: Behind the Scenes of Rockcliffe University with Phelan and Dirk McKeenan

From simple beginnings in 2006 to sprawling virtual campuses in 2012, Rockcliffe University has been growing and expanding its borders.  Come learn about how Rockcliffe’s partnerships have been forged through the years with organizations and our wonderful faculty.  We will also discuss our courses and classes that have been developed as well as our current and future projects.

3:00PM: Virtual Library with Mel Krupinski

Mel is a law librarian who was introduced to Second Life by the dean of her law school in 2006. She helped build Cybrary City 2, Second Lifes’s first law library. She has now made the Rockcliffe Library into one of the largest and longest sustained research libraries in virtual worlds.

Mel continually updates our twelve-room library with current information about Second Life and first life resources with a huge wealth of information concerning business, marketing, law, the sciences, education.

The Rockcliffe Library maintains links to large freely accessible scholarly research databases and focuses on the idea of open source and open access to sources of information.

The Rockcliffe Open House on Oct. 27, 2012 also takes place during Open Access Week (Oct. 22-28, 2012) celebrated everywhere, including Second Life. After my presentation, we will be doing a tour of the library.

4:00PM: Closing Thoughts with Plelan, Founder of Rockcliffe

We will close this 6th Rockcliffe University Open House with with some positive thoughts about the future of education in virtual worlds.