Eduserv/ 2nd life

Next Thursday I'm off to the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 Virtual worlds, real learning? "This year's symposium will attempt to look past the hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life and evaluate whether they offer real opportunities for learners at UK educational institutions." It is full with a waiting list, and is also being streamed into 3 venues in 2nd life (though with only 40 avatars allowed in each venue: shouldn't virtual lecture theatres be expandable things?) Evidently we are expected to be blogging, flickring and twittering away, using the tag efsym2007 and they've already tagged some relevant items on del.icio.us Website is at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/

Since I was attending this, I thought I ought to join 2nd life. Above is the obligatory photo of my avatar in 2nd life. She is still dressed as a standard Harajuku Female, since every time I tried to edit my appearance (4 times), the computer crashed into the blue screen of death. Be interesting to see what they say about the nitty-gritty technical issues on Thursday. When technologies start being just part of your pedagogy (rather than some whacky cool experimental thing) students (and I) expect the technology stuff just to WORK. This was a problem with LAMS last year - it just wasn't reliable enough, and I didn't feel why the students should feel experimented upon. Obviously I won't condemn 2nd life on one try though and I was happy enough bumbling around on Info Island, though I didn't pluck up courage to enter into conversation with the fellow-info-library-folk.