Barriers Be Gone: NMC and the Andragogue

I not only have my hesitant moments in SL because I'm just an insecure avatar (Can you say, late blooming Digital Immigrant?). And last week I got to teach in Second Life as part of a course I'm taking called Teaching in Second Life.. Because we weren't able to use voice, I also compressed my text-delivered remarks about the slide show I was giving. Then I froze up. I mean I just couldn't get my avatar to move and other avatars did not appear to be able to move either. So I quit Second Life and re-entered. My co-presenters were admirabley proceeding with our intended lesson. Then I froze up again and had to leave. And return again.

Even though I know the Second Life environment is not always stable, I was disappointed. I mentally started re-visiting Patricia Cross' and others' writings on the adult learning barrier literature--institutional barriers (SL?), situational barriers (like adult lack of time or money, babysitter, car, headset, microphone...), dispositional (lack of confidence), and epistomological (real or learner-perception about the difficulty of a subject--does that include navigating in SL?).

Only a few days before, my friend and colleague Phyllis had sent me the link to New Media Consortium's response to (adult) educators' experiences with SL Orientation Island--Interaction with avatars who were less than appropriate and confusion.



http://sl.nmc.org/2007/10/10/nmcs-orientation-island-honors-the-home-of-linden-lab/

I am happy to see a proposed solution for reducing barriers for entry and comfort level w/ Second Life. Comfort level and enough practionar knowledge to know how to prepare for a Plan B (if the grid gets wonky, for example) will add to how educators use and identify the value of the virtual environment.

Netizens--reaching across worlds

So I was looking at Stephen Downes’ e-letter again today and he was talking about his wiki book project on the history of the internet:
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?AFolkHistoryOfTheInternet

He invites people to contribute and says it eventually will become a book and contributors will be credited. So I begin by orienting myself to the index/categories that are listed there. It links years to certain categories and some of them seem random. But I do glom on to one and that is Netizens: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?action=browse&diff=1&id=AFolkHistoryOfTheInternet/Netizens

Michael Hauben’s 1992 article defined people who realize their connectedness to the world community via the internet as “netizens”:
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/hauben.html, a nomenclature that has the effect of several smart coffees with extra shots.

And by 2007, the netizens belong to more than one world.
They are Stephen Downes, http://www.downes.ca/; there is Jayne Cravens with UN and other world volunteerism: http://www.coyotecommunications.com/me/aboutme.html, Andy Carvin across the digital divide: http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/acarvin; there is Alan Levine presenting in Australia last week Live with Ustream, Twitter, and SL: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/Being+There;Mali Young, Intellagirl Tully and Lyr Lobo and both Second Life grids; and LeRoy Jenkins a folk hero in WOW (which my DNative colleagues called “The New Golf”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins. And there is Norman Coombs in work with accessibility: http://www.rit.edu/~nrcgsh/; Badrul Khan in his wish for affordable global education models: http://www.badrulkhan.com, AND my family simultaneously online in Skype in the US, Bahrain, and China: http://www.skype.com.

And I have to say, all are between and among worlds and some are between real and virtual worlds, but like all about the power is in connecting people from various quadrants.