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Plenary session: Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium, (Marilyn Lombardi)
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
- What is the future of online education we want?
- Where is your teenager now?
- Harbinger of social change
- Pass around ideas like social items
- Multitasking
- Online socialization
- Participatory culture
- Media creators, remixing, passing media along
- Multimodal interaction (visual, textual, audio)
- Affinity-based self-organization
- Fan fiction, online games, carving out own informal learning environments, joining apprenticeships/learning/on their own
- Distributed cognition
- Collective intelligence, virtual communities (including research communities), blur line of instructor & student, controlling is shifting from power holders, bottom-up contribution
- Learning
- Online Learning 1.0: Course-centered: package, deliver, CMS
- Online Learning 2.0: Student-centered: connect, converse, Sakai/Moodle/eFramework
- Online Learning 3.0: Context-centered: coalesce, co-create, open source, 3D meta-medium, Croquet
- Context is everything
- Proximity is important, but can you achieve this online?
- Learning Commons
- Learning in Authentic Contexts
- Real world relevance, ill-defined challenges, sustained investigations, multiple sources and perspectives, collaborations, reflection, interdisciplinary, integrated assessment, polished products, multiple interpretations
- Discussed using virtual environments (Second Life)
- FERPA (may interact with anyone)
- Use screen names (not real name)
- Storing lessons, mission critical work on someone else’s servers (not yours or institutions)
- Reliability? depend on SL servers, what if it’s down at a critical time?
- Recommends going in & playing, getting used to it & piloting programs
- Then, when institutions are ready to be in there, there will be open-source solutions ready for you
- Croquet!
- Open source, scalable architecture, will run on PCs/laptops/PDAs/mobile phones, will run on different OSs
- Croquet
- Share and co-edit resources in real time
- Synchronous (how does this scale with DISTANCE learning?)
- Allows browser in the game, but can be changed collaboratively
- Allows hyperlinking to a new world
- Privacy, authentications, etc (personalized workplace worlds, where they can interlock)
- Visualizing abstract concepts
- Collaborative white-board, CAD, etc
- This is a developers’ environment, not an application
- Very easy to create new objects!
- Incorporates tagging & metadata for objects
- Can make it so that some users see more of the world (in same location) as a reward for passing one level
- Integrated VOIP power (Jabber), showed video of professor talking in corner of virtual world
- Don’t need an avatar, can be yourself
- Croquet Consortium
- Will be releasing software developers’ kit 1.0
- Institutions can consider joining
- Want: long term viability for platform that we need, not the entertainment industry