LEAD Research blog
Face to face learning in Second Life
| A small delegation from LEAD met in second life to experience a virtual face-to-face situation. The LEAD group was treated to a tour at Helicon, the SL site of Helicon, an group of land-based schools in the Netherlands.The tour leaders – Angela Graat van Overbeeke and |
 click to enlarge |
| Monique Witlam – showed what Helicon has done for their students (financed by . In an environment containing meetingrooms, virtual horses, presentations, movies, a library and more, students learn to make presentations and organize events. | |
It’s obvious that SL is still a pioneering environment with lots of things that don’t really work yet, but Helicon shows what a wonderful collaborative learning environment it could be.
From the LEAD-point of view it’s interesting to see how much overhead such a virtual face-to-face system brings with it. My opinion is that for the time being face-to-face learning using technology as we’re researching in LEAD seems at an advantage for real learning. But future versions of SL might very well be able to replace some of the social interaction that is needed in education processes.
Check it out: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Helicon%20Campus/124/114/23
Michiel Klønhammer, ICATT interactive media, Amsterdam
Online research, Face-to-face learning
The month May was a very busy month for the LEAD team. At the end of May we had to deliver the research evaluation plan and the first (official) version of the software application. These deliverables required the combined effort of various people who were located in different places. In other words, the LEAD team needed to collaborate on a distance. That’s not an easy job, even with various networked computing technologies we used to bridge the distance. It made me wonder what is missing in distance communication.
A lot of things are so obvious in the face-to-face communication that we hardly miss it when they are gone. Humor is a good example. Laughing together about a joke seems to be crucial for developing a bond between partners. It is at least one of the most valuable non-task related activities during our project team meetings.
Telling a joke requires some vividness in communication. The situation is also crucial. Good timing determines the success of a joke. A face-to-face situation provides us with a fast amount of signals crucial for the proper timing. When we communicate on-line these signals seems to vanish. Happily, we can protect ourselves from bad timing. We signal when a joke has been made and invite our audience to laughJ.
Wouter van Diggelen, UU
The pieces fit together
As the LEAD consortium is heading towards its alpha version of the software at the end of May, the strength of the consortium is becoming clear. Both in Salerno and in St. Etienne developers are working hard (with a little help from Holland) towards the deadline. As a quality manager of such a project it’s very exciting for me to watch the process.
It’s obvious that not everything can be controlled at every point in time – the teams are professional and carry their own responsibilities. It’s such a reward when the parts start fitting together as they are now.
Our alpha release is the start of the new phase of the project, where the software is taken into schools and the research is done by our pedagogical partners. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll keep you posted.
Michiel Klønhammer, ICATT interactive media, Amsterdam
Welcome to our blog!After our First year of LEAD we think we have things to tell the visitors of this website about our various activities. This is the year in which we have the first prototype of the tool to experiment with, in various classroom contexts. Also, we are going to produce analyses and texts that tell about our previous year’s efforts.
This blog serves for our researchers to communicate to the world what they have been doing and what they are up to now. If you are interested in more systematic scrutiny of our project, please join our ….group.
I wish you happy explorations of our work.
Jerry Andriessen
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