Goals to achieve using the SL environment

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Our main purpose for using Second Life is to give folk 'a lived experience' of learning that is significantly different to their real-world educational experiences and might help them think more creatively about their vision for schome.

This might/should involve supporting folk in doing things they want to do - and then acrediting them in some way. Hmm that sounds kind of vague - might be broken down into steps (I'm thinking aloud here again so this may be twaddle ...):

1. Help folk develop a goal/target they want to achieve

'New folk' will need more support in this than more experienced folk cos they will need help in understanding the possibilities - question is what sorts of things might we do (in SL) to achieve this for different folk with different levels of expertise and different interests?

2. Help folk work towards their goal/target

This might include supporting them in developing new knowledge and skills that they need in order to achieve their goal/target - question is what kinds of support could realistically be provided

3. Help folk reflect on what they have done

This is important both so that they can 'see' what they have learnt but also as a way to help them think about what they might have done differently (making things explicit can extend one's understanding - metacognition and all that) - question is how can we do that in SL in ways that people find engaging?

4. Help folk document thier achievements

We need to have some mechanisms - perhaps a bliki page or series of notes in SL?? - through which their achievements are documented (this might need to include external evaluation (eg peer review?) as well as the learner's own reflections about what they have done) - again the questions are about what are the best mechanisms for documenting this evidence so that the process does not become a barrier to learning - this kind of maps onto the notion of a repository of evidence within a portfolio (see the Wikied page in WikiWorks - though this clearly goes beyond the scope of what we can achieve in SL at the moment ...)

5. Help folk provide summaries of their achievements for particular audiences

This kind of maps onto the notion of 'tools' within a portfolio for extracting summative subsets of this evidence (from your repository - see item 4) targetted at particular audiences (like a cv) - but you also need the skills of knowing what different audiences will value as good evidence.

Hmm - still very vague - with any luck the projects we come up with will help us understand what these might actually look like in SL.