Shirley Williams ponders the Communities of Practice Online Collaboration Exercise
"The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it." Quote from Stewart Brand from this Worldchanging Article
There is something about stewardship in that quote, I think. And, that's why I really enjoy being a member of Cpsquared community because I get to explore online technology tools (in this case for online facilitation/collaboration) with really thoughtful people. Right now there's a group of us trying to do some action learning about how to facilitate virtual collaborative work and learning in Second Life.
I met with the group last week. It was amazing because the participants spanned the globe - literally - we had representatives from UK, Spain, Denmark, Asia, Austraila, and US. I still can't believe that Nick and Shirley were doing this at midnight or 1:00 am their time! I was paired with John Smith and Rob Ashton. Here's the description:
The aim of this exercise is to get you use to SL and working with others in SL.
The whole of this activity should take place within Boracay, meet in the Piazza (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boracay/174/93/31)
You will be put in a team with other participants. We suggest you offer/accept friendship with all your team so if you misplace someone you can offer them a teleport to join you.
Each team will be given a different coloured box; your team's task is to hide your box somewhere on Boracay. You should take a picture of all your team gathered round the box in its hiding place. You should note the area of Boracay that you are in and write a clue to help others find the box, plus the colour of your box, on a notecard. An example clue may be: near the towels; or in sea on the South West coast.
You should then go back to the Piazza; and give your notecard to Rosie Luna.
Rosie will give you another group's notecard and you will need to go and look for their box. When you find it take another picture with all your group and the found box in it.
If there is time there will be more boxes to search for.
To make life easier the boxes will grow bigger and after about an hour they will disappear.
If you have problems IM Rosie Luna and Futura Fortas.
1. After the event please: Will you post pictures of your group to Flickr, use the tag: cp080207 so we can find each other's snaps (I've already posted one).
- How easy was it to collaborate with your team mates?
- Would it have been easier to hide the box on your own?
- Would it have been easier to find the box on your own?
- Did you learn something new about SL while collaborating?
2. If you have a blog, write something about this event! Even if things don't work well it will be a learning experience
The exercise was a great learning experience. First, as with a lot of online facilitation/collaboration it can be frustrating and a little chaotic. We debriefed about the three levels of learning. The first level is the second life literacy skills - how you move around and communicate. We had a group and teams with mixed level of skills and that be a little difficult. The next level is looking at the particularly collaborative activity -- how do we use the enviroment or the virtualness to collaborative together. What did we learn from that? On the third level, is to look at the various tools in Second Life and match them the activities.
Some questions: Thinking about the tools comes after activities/events and would be useful for communities of practices? How to break down the skills with activities?
Andy Roberts is part of the group that is now being called "Virtual Educators Community of Practice". He's written a meta reflection on some of his recent tour experience here. He's raising some good questions too:
But what can Second Life offer over and above the normal asynchronous social software tools such as listserves and web conferences? Personally I think I’ve had the best experiences through encountering small groups of two or three people in one location where I will return on the rare occasions these days that I launch the SL application. But there can be long gaps equivalent to watching the paint dry in between times. If there’s nobody else at all on that particular island, I’ll mooch about for a while then maybe try somewhere else or give up. The places with more than a handful of avatars present always seem to increase the probability of trouble though.
I’m reminded of one of the four dichotomies which emerged from my research into current thinking about distributed communities of practice last year.
Technology as tools for communities to use - as opposed to technology as environments in which new communities may evolve.
Secondlife seems to me to lend itself much more to the environment end of the spectrum.
So my ideal scenario would be to be able to drop in to a regular hanging out spot, and have a reasonable chance of meeting somebody I know, or a friend of a friend, and then most usefully random people who are attracted to the in world geographical location through having common interests, facilitated by the various related communities which used that location as a starting off point. The place in question is called Boracay Island, perhaps I’ll catch you online there sometime.
Technorati Tags: VECoP
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.