Community Colleges

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8 Comments

Comment by Fire on July 22, 2008 at 6:59am

Hi everyone, my name is Fire Centaur (Paul Preibisch) in RL. I am the owner of English Village in Second Life, and also the founder of Second Life Link for Facebook. It's very nice to be apart of this community. I am currently living in Seoul, South Korea, and am an educator here. English Village is a project of mine, to explore language education in SL. Please add friendship with me in SL, sometime, and I'll give you a tour on my Bot Dinosaurs... Cheers!

Comment by Bonswa Boucher on July 8, 2008 at 4:03pm

I work for the College Center for Library Automation in Florida. We provide for our 28 Community Colleges access to research databases, a unified library catalog and a library management system. We have had a presence in Second Life for about 18 months and provide access to many of those services from within the virtual world. You can find us here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eduisland%203/34/216/23

Comment by Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks on May 23, 2008 at 11:15am

Hi, Everyone. To address Angela's question...community colleges have been using simulations to teach since time out of mind. We outfit expensive labs, charge lab fees and hire lab assistants to give our students in the technical areas 'hands-on' learning. SL is just screaming for technical education and training; community colleges should be leading the charge in that regard. As far as gen-ed subjects, we can create and/or take advantage of the immersive, game-like quality of virtual worlds to enrich the student experience, as well as reach the at-risk student in a different way. CC's have one major barricade to really doing it right in virtual worlds: money. Oh, and time. The Uni's have money and they also have graduate student slave labor. My goal is, and ever shall be, getting together a huge group of CC's and getting an enormous grant. Our students deserve it! :) Will there ever be total buy in? No. Should we care about the naysayers? No. There are still some people who refuse to use email and are teaching from 20 year old lecture notes. Do we *really* want buy in from these people? I think not! Pip

Comment by Lana Kamennof-Sine on May 23, 2008 at 8:49am

Think much of this is dependent upon 1) sound pedagogical reason(s) for using this particular medium/tool 2) ability to clearly communicate this in a manner apropos to the audience ie geekspeak, benefits of submersive/experiential learning, costs/bottom line... 3) willingness to model the way, being an early adaptor... and you're right LV there's never total buy in (oh those generalizations) but there needs to be a critical mass (whether it's sheer numbers or those key to decision)

Comment by Angela M. Ambrosia on May 21, 2008 at 11:41am

How can Virtual worlds help the community college students?? How can we go about promoting this?

Comment by Lorraine Mockford (SL: LoriVonne Lustre) on May 17, 2008 at 5:25pm

Lana, Do you think there is EVER total buy-in for any concept within our organizations?

Comment by Lana Kamennof-Sine on May 8, 2008 at 9:44am

Hi all,
Would you say that total committment/buy in from all players of your parent organization existed prior to an established presence in SL?

Comment by Barry Joseph on May 4, 2008 at 10:19pm

Thank you Pipsqueak for starting this group. If you will start a provocative question within this group addressing the relationship amongst learning, community colleges and virtual worlds, I'd be happy to make this a feature group and promote it around the site.