Valiant Val Evans
Oct 18th, 2007 by alexanderhayes
[ image : mobology ]
Val Evans from the NSW LearnScope Managers team met with me in SecondLife a few nights ago to explore Boracay Island and parts of joKaydia.
Here’s how we did it.
We agreed on a time to meet each other via Skype. Val downloaded and installed the Secondlife application to her computer.
Val then rang me on Skype and we had a brief chat.
Val went to the front end of Secondlife.com and we hummed and harred and then Val chose her screen name. Val then opened the Secondlife application and tested the microphone setup - voice in SL.
I then hung up the Skype call and we proceeded to discuss things live in Secondlife whilst Val got used to the movement keys and flying.
That’s all.
I teleported Val to Boracay island and we went hang-gliding. An hour had past.
The NSW LearnScope Managers group, the Explorers team with Viv Evans and the VET Pedagogy team will all be sent an email soon that invites them to join Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald, me and a whole host of others in SecondLife in three weeks time after E-learning 07.
We hope you can join us then to explore the SIT TAFE NSW space and the NSW LearnScope domain lawns 
My foray into Second Life was awesome. The most difficult and time consuming part was choosing a name - it was worse than having to choose from more than one outfit in a boutique, or a multiple choice question! I ended up with Valiant Vita.
Learning to use the arrows to move around was a bit of a challenge for me also. I’m not one to play games on the computer so am not use to that aspect - I kept reverting to the mouse and realising it wasn’t doing anything, but I will learn.
And I went through my worse nightmare though - I fell off the platform into the ocean - really scary! Thank goodness Alex was there to pull me out. (Actually, being surrounded by snakes is my worse nightmare, but this came close.)
Learning to fly was fun although I had a tendency to come down to earth with a thud. I must lose weight!
It was a brief session but enough to expose me to a whole new world of possibilities. I’ll be in there again very soon. Thanks Alex for your patience, once again:-)
Val did extraordinarily well in her first hour! Really does help to have someone there coaching you through it. I was lucky enough to have Jo Kay there to give me a hand.
Please dont forget to include the MLearning Leadership Network in the SL orientation sessions - there are some great applications that link SL to mobile phones, the teaching and learning opportunities are endless - see my blog post on http://www.participatecontributelearn on this topic!
…..and by the way - will you put my blog in the NSW Learnscope blogroll?!:)
What NSW LearnScope blogroll ?