Innovations in Online Learning Conference

Great news! Erin's proposal for the Innovations in Online Learning conference was accepted. The conference is being held in Austin, Texas on May 22-23. The conference is sponsored by the University of Texas Telecampus (UTTC), and supports "innovations developed by faculty, staff and students of the University of Texas System." Unfortunately, it is being held during the first week of classes at the University of Texas at Dallas, where Erin works, so she won't be able to attend the conference in person. However, she will conduct the session from a distance along with her supervisor, Darren Crone (manager, UT Dallas School of Management E-Learning Team). Their presentation is titled The University of Texas at Dallas School of Management in Second Life. The session goals are:

• To discuss the development of the UTD SOM island in Second Life
• To present and discuss the current status of the island: its projects, users, and issues
• To present exciting plans for the future of the UTD SOM island.
• To discuss developer-educators’ experiences with building, teaching, and community building in Second Life

With luck, we will also be able to discuss our unprecedented partnership with the Dallas County Community College District in Second Life.

As soon as the presentation is complete, a copy will be made available on the HigherWorlds wiki.

For those of you attending the conference, we look forward to "seeing" you there!

Survey

We would like to announce a new survey for virtual world educators, students, and administrators. We are hoping to learn more about your experiences teaching and learning in virtual worlds. The results of the survey will be used to create a report on best practices, which will be made available on the HigherWorlds wiki as soon as it is ready. We appreciate your participation.

Delicious!

We have created a HigherWorlds del.icio.us account so that we can share our virtual world and education resources and references. You can easily search the tags to find what you're looking for, and even subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when the page is updated. We'll add more resources as we come across them, and invite you to share with us, as well. If you would like to suggest a resource for our list, please email us at higherworlds@gmail.com or send it to us through del.icio.us.

Conference Update

We had a great time at the ITC E-Learning conference. We attended sessions on web 2.0 tools, virtual worlds, serious games and simulations, best practices in instructional design, and podcasting (and spent a little time at the beach, too!). We received a tremendous response over our own presentation on Second Life for Administrators, and we were happy that we could share our experiences with interested educators. The presentation is available on the HigherWorlds wiki, and notes for each slide will be made available soon.

Here's one last photo from Florida:

Greetings from ITC E-Learning 2008

Today was our first day at the ITC E-Learning Conference 2008 in beautiful St. Petersburg, Florida. We attended several engaging sessions presented by educators from all across the country. We'll write more about it tomorrow -- for now, we're off to finish prepping for our own presentation. Before we go, we'll leave you with a snapshot of St. Pete beach (right outside our hotel room!)

Wiki Update

A new slide show has been added to the presentations page of the HigherWorlds wiki. The presentation is Second Life for Administrators, and will be presented at the ITC E-Learning conference in Florida on Monday, February 18th.

The presentation focuses on the issues, pitfalls, and benefits of Second Life in higher education. It is meant to inform administrators before they decide whether or not to invest in Second Life.

After the presentation on Monday, we hope to upload audio. If technical difficulties prevent audio recording, we will upload some notes for each page instead.

Please let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Erin

Welcome!

Welcome to HigherWorlds, a blog dedicated to higher education in virtual worlds. We will discuss virtual world news, institutions, presentations, instructional design, and more.

Visitors are invited to comment on blog posts. If you are interested in becoming a contributor, or would like to submit a content suggestion, please email us at higherworlds@gmail.com.

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