Sunday, March 2, 2008

We made it. Midwives met in Second life


Thanks to everyone who who supported this initiative and came along to our midwives and educators meeting in second life on Kiwi educators Koru Island. I am still feeling a bit tired so just a brief feedback from this session at this time and I will write more comprehensively later.


I am particularly grateful to the following people
Claire Atkins (Arwenna) has been wonderful supporting me to learn more about second life. Setting up the slide show and redoing the whole thing at the last minute when I wanted to change things. Claire also helped me keep an eye on the crowd and helped me to make sure everyone had a chance to participate. The meeting would not have been nearly as successful without her.

Merrolee Penman (Koru Bracken) . Merrolee is and Ocupational therapy lecturer and is a leader in blogging for that profession. She also has an interest in exploring Web 2.0 uses in tertiary education. Merrolee was keen to come along and I co-opted her to keep some notes, rough minutes, of this meeting. She did this job superbly for me. I will finalise these soon and post them in Google docs, linking here very soon. These notes of the meeting are available now in Wikieducator with a link also to the transcript of the meeting which is available in google docs

Sarah Sewart (Petal Stransky) who has encouraged and supported me to get to this point. Sarah came along and contributed to the conversation keeping this alive when I was busy concentrating on other things.

Brownyn (Branwen) and Leigh (leeroy) who ran the course on 'facilitating online learning communities'. I have learned so much from this course and would never have explored second life at all had it not been for this course.

The meeting was a great success, most particpants were from the UK, one came from Michigan where it was 3am when the meeting stared. Arwenna and her co-owner of Koru Island Isa Goodman gave everyone Kiwi Educator status which means they cna return here and can practice constructing things here also. We have been welcomed to return and hold further meeting here. Everyone was keen to meet again in one week. It was suggested that we make it Morning for NZ and evening for UK. This would make it midday or afternoon in North America and a better time for North American residents to participate. There were several midwives from North America and Canada who were interested but were not able to attend. I had met one Trinny Dreamscape from Vncouver a little before the meeting. also met up with Aastra Apflebaum who had difficulty with her computer crashing in second life. She popped in and out a couple of times but had to quit in the end.



Here is the slide show presentation that I gave to the group to initiate discussion about the usefulness of second life for professional networking and midwifery education.

2 comments:

catkins_in_nz said...

Just wanted to say that I thought it went really well and although there were a couple of teething problems for people using voice for the first time by the end of the session I think most people were feeling much more comfortable and beginning to really enjoy it! Thank you Carolyn for organising it and keeping the flow of the meeting going - I know how tough that can be and how tiring too.
Just wanted to correct one thing though - The island of Koru is owned by NMIT (Nelson Marlborough Insitute of Technology) Isa and I are just the lucky ones who get to administer and enjoy it! I founded Kiwi Educators at the beginning of last year to create a focus for NZ education and educators and all are welcome to join. NMIT is generous in allowing me to use Koru to support the wider NZ-SL educator community.
See you all inworld sometime!

Cam said...

Hello mate great blog.

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