I completely take your point about how important it is to remember that not all students use these social tools. I suppose Tinto was here before us; students are most likely to succeed when they feel part of a group. SL, Facebook, the pub, the SU, societies, whatever – different students find different places to get this student-to-student support. I wouldn’t call them cliques, but I agree that we should do all we can to encourage existing groups to be more inclusive and supportive as well as to create opportunities for a wider variety of groups.

Just throw in a different RSS feed and… pages for a presentation about robotics

I questioned Ed at the end of his keynote, because he wasn’t talking about play – but about games. I think a great deal of educational activity in virtual worlds is playful, but only a small amount is actually game based. I don’t think we need to turn everything into a game to make it valuable or engaging – and some things might actually be diminished by trying to force them into a game structure.

#Liam – when students do set up networks, electronic or otherwise, they can be very effective means of peer support. Sometimes they are anything but – and I’ve known recent examples of both kinds, and of groups of students who simply fail to form cohesive communities at all.

My reason for not trying to join them on Facebook or Bebo is not because I think my presence will destroy the dynamic of the group – like you I don’t want to invade ‘their’ space, but more importantly only a minority of the students we get actually use Facebook and Bebo and I don’t want to find myself supporting an in-clique and ignoring the outsider students falling by the wayside.

Because *some* students do a good job of creating their own support networks, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to reach & support the students who for whatever reason are excluded from those networks. This year a colleague set up a Ning network, and this we hope will bring some of the benefits of student-created networks (they can still create their own groups and forums) while being more inclusive. It seems to be working fairly well, and we’re getting used to seeing our faces superimposed on game adverts and screenshots…

Does anyone know where I can find events like these? Especially anything specific to the scientific or healthcare sectors.

I do take your previous point about it being hard to start relationships at virtual events, but perhaps then conferences and classes should be less frequent with more virtual and followup exercises using other media. I am sure that education has changed a lot even in the 10 years since I was at university, but I imagine that they still use lectures a lot and probably even more powerpoint than they did then.

I wish I’d attended the ReLive08 virtual event to see whether my premise is true. Having some of the videos I feel I at least got some good learning and have made a good contact in intellagirl.

I think much of this will be academic soon. Companies will be cutting back on conference spending sharply with the global downturn and virtual spaces of all persuasions are going to be bubbling up the list of people’s “find out abouts”.

Ian: thanks. Your teleprompter / takeaway document / delivery amplification model is very helpful, and your (excellent) examples of avoiding death by powerpoint definitely helped me in rethinking my own approach last year.

Rain: thanks. Sorry you missed it, but I’m very glad that the conference provided streaming video (and now, archived video) for the keynotes, panel, and some of the talks. The wireless at the conference was impressively good too. Well done to Anna and the other organisers for making it a properly online experience.

Where I have enough prep time, I’ve taken to writing in longhand prose a version of the talk in the slide speaker notes. I rarely actually say exactly what’s in there, but at least there’s something coherent there for people to look at later. The exercise of doing it, though, really seems to help with the overall coherence.

If I may indulge in a moment of self promotion, I have talked a fair bit about all this in my video :)

Barry Joseph, of Global Kids, gave a talk at the Second Life Community Convention this fall and gave me a handy way to think about the issue. He said we have to think about three audiences: here, there, and then. Here is, of course, the audience in the room. There is the audience watching from a distance via a stream. Then is the audience who watch the stream later or look at the slides later.

This “Then” audience thinking is powerful but really tough. We want to be sure we create materials that are useful later but it’s so tough to recreate the context in which the slides/notes/photos make sense.

I’ve thought a bit about how to do this and I almost wish I could find a way to capture and present multiple forms of media at once. I want to share the slides, the twitter chat, the photos, other backchannels…everything that is necessary to really give folks a full picture of the moment in time. To turn the Here and There audiences’ experience into a time capsule for the Then audience. My slides alone don’t present the full picture and they leave out every voice but mine which I think is tragic. The dialog is so key.

Hmmm…still thinking but I think we’re on to something. :-)

Sarah/Intellagirl