Our goal is to help facilitate discussion and insight into the serious uses of virtual worlds for enterprise, education, content development, research, and policy-making.

During our weekly broadcasts we strive for in-depth conversations with leading thinkers, researchers and policy-makers. Our goal is to bring this insight to our audience, and to facilitate conversation and discussion amongst our community. Through this highly active community, we strive to explore and advocate for the transformative potential of virtual world technology.

I joined SL two years ago and spend several house creating my avatar and exploring education worlds. Once you are in SL you quickly realize, or you should, that to really learn how to use SL will take some serious time away from RL (real life). Over the last year I have checked back in to SL and updated to the latest version. I also became a Sloodle member over a year ago, but I have not spent much time exploring them either.

This interview with Janalee has got me back in SL and Sloodle. I am going to install the Sloode plug-in on the learning2oh and the lpvec.net Moodle.

I have been working to finish the Moodle Silk Roads project I have to do for the East Asian study group and was wondering how I could make it more interactive. By developing a Sloodle Silk Roads project students could be in a virtual caravan on the Silk Road.

Marco Torres is an internationally renowned speaker, filmmaker, and author of a wide variety of digital content. He is also a high school social studies teacher in San Fernando, California, which is in Los Angeles county. Marco was named the California Teacher of Year last year, and serves on the board of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He is a passionate teacher focused on helping students become engaged in learning and acquire the skills they need to thrive in our twenty-first century digital culture. Marco believes in helping students learn to market themselves well, because test scores cannot and do not sum up the capabilities and potentials of human beings. Marco is a fellow-devotee of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and sees digital media as the tools of liberation for people who have lived in comparatively disadvantaged situations. Marco sees the Internet as the stage on which digital media content is and will continue to be published for a global audience hungry to hear the voices of our neighborhoods.

The quote above is from Wes Fryer’s blog. Wes also has a podcast of Marco’s presentation at a conference.

This podcast was originally posted on Wesley Fryer’s blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. He has links to Steve Wycoff’s blog and other links you will find interesting. Dr. Wycoff covers many critical issues in education reform so take your time listening and thinking. Wesley has several other podcasts from this conference that you should listen to.

Download audio file (2008-06-12-speedofcreativity.mp3)

The first video is “What if?” It reminds us that maybe things have not changed after all.
What if?

The next video is Fisch’s most famous, “Did You Know”. He gives us a look at the state of technology and education today.

Did You Know?

The last video is called “2020 Vision”. In it Karl Fisch takes a look at what the world may be for students graduating from high school in 2020.

2020 Vision

This is one of the first videos I saw on the Internet that made me stop in my tracks.  It is a keynote given by Leigh Blackall at the Global Summit 2006 in Sydney, Australia

Leigh Blackall lives in Andersons Bay in Dunedin New Zealand with his beautiful wife Sunshine and their dog Mira and cat Anai. Leigh’s professional interest is in education and networked learning. Leigh currently works in Educational Development for the Otago Polytechnic and specialises in the use of social media and communication and its relationship to socially constructed learning. Leigh writes the Learn Online Web Log and facilitates several online communities for professional educators. He is a contributor to WikiEducator.