“While it is possible to make a 3D virtual immersive environment (VIE) look exactly (or pretty darn close) to your actual office building or training room or college campus…what’s the point? The real power of a virtual immersive environment is the ability to transport the learner or collaborators into an environment that is ideally suited for the learning or collaborating that needs to take place and this usually requires an altering of the spaces.”
Too many universities are creating their campuses in Second Life and hope students will come. But why sit in a desk in a lecture hall, when you can create any environment. And then when you visit the campus, no one is there. Second Life is meant for immersion in a particular environment, not to recreate an environment that is failing.
Researchers found four regions in the genome which dramatically affect the risk of autism or schizophrenia. Called “copy-number variants”, these are stretches of DNA with seemingly accidental duplications or deletions. Crespi’s team found that the presence of a particular variant – a duplication, say – was often associated with autism while the opposite variation – a deletion of the genetic material – was linked to schizophrenia.
Bernard Crespi says “The results fit with other evidence that autism may be caused by overdevelopment of specific brain regions and schizophrenia by underdevelopment”
Life 2.0 is a movie by Jason Spingarn-Koff, has just been accepted into the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
“It tells a powerful story of the evolution of virtual communities and how such an immersive virtual world like Second Life has transformed millions of real people’s lives around the world, giving the audience a visionary glimpse of the future.” Andrew Lauren adds, “It’s a film about personal connection that illuminates a poetic hope in the strength of human interaction.”
Dr. Alec Couros also teaches at the University of Regina and one of his students wrote this song.
As we teach these tools, we will find there are many multimedia ways of student refection. Movies, blogs, and songs. Another student reflects upon what he learned by a movie.
"Every time we made a mistake instead of having a witch hunt to find out who had caused the mistake we all got excited about how we fix the problem, and we didn't spend any time looking for who was responsible. Because if you spend your time looking for who caused the problem all you do is create an environment where people are scared to make any move unless they can be 100% sure that they are going to be right. Now when you are in pioneering territory there is no way you can be 100% sure that you are not going to come unstuck".
Sail's Pedagogy 