Negotiation Training in Second Life

ISTE SL Tour - Sunday November 15 9-10am SLT

We met with Marc Wizenheim (aka Mark Jankowski) for a training session at which we learned to prepare for negotiations. The skills were applicable to business and personal life.

Marc taught us 4 concepts having to do with negotiation preparedness and to do so he led us through a series of scenes. In each he told a story that illustrated one of the four points. He took us to a corporate office of a baseball team overlooking the ball field, at the Santa's village of a shopping mall, in an orchestra pit, and on a mountain side. Throughout we were to consider a case study of negotiating the purchase of 1200 computer monitors. At each phase we had to solve a problem and explain our solution. Visual, interactive, place based.

ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING!
Thanks to Praxilady for organizing this.

http://www.shapironegotiations.com/virtualtrainingregistration.html

Albany Class Meets for First Time

Antics with Sal's toys. So much easier to have a group of 10 than the small group at Marlboro. I want to find a way to bring the groups together. While it is nice to be able to give individual attention, within the small class, the momentum of the larger group is helpful. And each person is anxious to share what they know with those that don't. In some ways that takes the pressure off of me. We toured ISTE, we practiced voice, we played with navigation.

Building

From left to right are Barbara, Elizabeth (in distance), Eru looking the lady liberty, and Mandie.
Today I got to learn from a good teacher. Phicra, a guest instructor, gave our group a lesson in building snowflakes, one prim, one texture, one script. Seems simple. This task had it all. A comprehensive beginner building class in one prim. The snowflake encircling Eru's head did not belong there, but demonstrates what students who are allowed to multi task can come up with. Along the way we wore them as circular saws through our chests and other body parts. In the end we reduced them and wore them as broaches.

There is a gated garden in the classroom sandbox now where full perm builds sit to copy, deconstruct and improve upon. (Please tell me if they are not copy and modifiable. I have such a time with permissions.)

First Class Summer 09

Today was the first day of the new term. Small class of 4, compared with last year's 16. Former student and current friend Eru is helping out this time around. Today I am going to reflect on my goals and maybe accomplishments:

My goal for today was to project warmth and welcome in a cozy, engaging learning environment.

I used text only today for several reasons:

• Past readers know that I don't like using voice - so any chance I can, I avoid it. :-)
• Text is force-ably slow, so I believe that gives newer users time to keep up and experienced users time to reflect. (But I am not sure about this - maybe it just makes it slow and boring.)
• Text has a lot of uses and skills associated with it that take time to learn, so I immerse the group in those skills right away (local, group, IM, cross chat, back chat, abbreviations)
• Voice often takes time to set up.

While this course is not about SL per se (it is about issues related to teaching), the first class is necessarily about the basics of SL. I encourage and hope that more experienced users will use this time to think about teaching practice, how one teaches the newly initiated, what strategies I use and what strategies they would employ.

Here's a little shopping list of the techniques and activities we sampled:
mini lecture - with a couple slides
explicit instruction
group discussion
"Esme Says" game - yep like Simon only with yours truly in the lead
Eru's agility exploration - lots of walking, running, flying and bumping fun and chat
Touring the college island - our home, and ISTE island

Here are the tools we used:
local and group chat
friending
the map
the mini map
environmental settings (to brighten to darkening day)
inventory
teleporting and landmarks
sl how-to books with notecard givers
Mysti tool follow chairs for touring
ISTE TP board
Angrybeth's community white board
two seating arrangements
Eru's amazing agility toys (mazes, slolom challenge, dino ribs, flying tube...)

My challenge is to balance my conflicting desire to create a cooperative, activity-based, learning environment with my desire to impart lots of information NOW. (I don't think of myself as being didactic, but certainly have that impulse.) This group promises to make this easy - as each is curious and all are helpful.

Now that the first exciting hurdle has passed, I anxiously await for the activity to begin in Moodle. Oh, and yay, barbarathelibrarian has started her blog: http://dragoninthelibrary.blogspot.com/

What is it about a HOME?

A recent inquiry on the Second Life Researchers list inspired this post. "...why [do] people feel the need to put walls around themselves in SL when a 'home' is technically not necessary?"

To have or not to have a home in SL is a surprisingly important question and one that many people return to at different times in their SL residency.

When you arrive in SL for the first time, you don't have a home.

Some new residents notice the massive Frank Lloyd Wright houses, towering apartment buildings, small skyboxes, rustic seaside capes and consider themselves homeless. These residents might see home ownership as a goal, and set about raising $L at the nearest camping site. Or they might wear their new found status as a badge for months or years.

Others would notice how frequently these buildings are empty. They might remark on the absence of the effects of weather, and ask themselves, "Why would I need one of those?" These residents might consider themselves free spirits, or practical, or cheap. "I will never spend a $L in SL."

I was proudly homeless for about 6 months. When I was given a gift of SL property, I became an avid homeowner. Now at almost 2 years old, having gained membership in many land-holding groups, working on a university campus, and having favorite sandboxes, home ownership is less important to me.

I now provide a platform for each of my students to call home for the duration of the semester. Here are some of the reasons why:

An SL home is:
1) A place to land when logging in. - Landing at welcome centers gets old.
2) A place to go to change clothes. - As you begin to identify with your avatar this can be important. Later tnew residents will learn other strategies like flying up to change, or keeping outfits in folders that can be dragged onto the body. For others this is not important at all.
3) A place on which to build. - Sandboxes have auto return limits. Being able to leave something out (especially something that has lots of unfinished pieces) can help the creative process.
4) A place through which to express yourself. - My students have set up gardens, music studios, pubs, Martha Stewart parlors, and sometimes just an out-ventory (meaning they have dumped their inventory on the platform).
5) Gives you the sense that you belong. - Many rentals are in communities through which you make friends, engage in community run functions, participate in decision making...
5) Offers you privacy. - This is important if you offer tutorials, counseling, meetings with students/employers/employees or if you are involved in on-line dating.
6) A place to which you can retreat. - Sometimes you need a quick getaway from a griefer or an uncomfortable interaction. Sure you could sign off, but you might just want some privacy in which to regroup.
7) Familiar. - Most of us enter SL and are boggled. It's weird, exciting, clunky, limitless... But what does a person, a resident, know? We know homes. We start with what we know. We buy, scrounge or build the familiar. Then as time passes we explore and expand. Wait there is no rain. And we can fly. No need for a roof. We are in control of three dimensions. Privacy can come from being 300 meters in the sky. No need for walls.

There are alternative solutions for almost every concern on this list. And many residents will be quick to find them.

For others, in a world where the laws of physics are applied in new ways, a home is a desirable bit of sameness. In educational terms it might provide a scaffold on which to hang new understanding and try new ideas.

And then again, if your home is a spaceship, well, it just might be part of the fun.

Guidance not protection

I was thinking about sex, predation and harsh winters the other night. Bear with me.

I live in rural Vermont in the USA, where winter temperatures range from +30 to -15 F (-1 to -26 C). Like many homes in Vermont our is heated by a wood fire. A wood stove is the central focus of our living room.

The extreme cold temperatures of the out of doors and the extreme hot temperatures of the exposed wood stoves indoors would seem to present real dangers to young children in Vermont. And though both have the potential to kill, less than 1 death per year of a child can be blamed on burns or exposure. Even the few incidences of frost bitten or burnt fingers in children is more likely to occur among visiting relatives than native Vermonters. From infancy Vermont children are taught to dress for the cold and to steer clear of the hot stove. They go outside and they play in the living room without injury because adults guide them

What does this have to do with sex and predation? Internet sex and predation are seen as significant dangers to children. The US federal government has created the child's Internet protection act. State and local police forces employ undercover cops to act as young children to snag predators. And schools are mandated to filter the Internet so that children are not exposed to obscene words, images, and websites like YouTube. We are trying to keep children away from something that is as ubiquitous as weather.

Protection is unrealistic and is no replacement for the wisdom of guided experience. As educators we have an obligation to provide children with opportunities to play near the wood stove. We need to have students stumble onto the inevitable naughty page, or talk with a stranger on line. It is only then that we can demonstrate the choices a child has and the benefits of each option. A parent's attempt at explaining the intense heat of a fire cannot replace the experience of being allowed to stand uncomfortably (but safely) close to the intensifying heat. Talking on-line with unknown "experts" and "students" provides a real opportunity to discuss the knowledge we have about others online, not to create fear of the unknown - to give students the skills (like layers of insulating clothing) to make good decisions.

We cannot always be with a child to protect her from weather, fire, images or Internet interactions. So we need to take advantage of the time we are with her to give her guided experience that leads to the wisdom to keep herself safe.

Touring San Antonio - A Metaphor for Teaching

Or What I Learned at NECC

There are three ways to explore San Antonio Texas.
1. In a riverboat
2. Along the Riverwalk
3. On the Street

If you walk on the street you find that San Antonio is like many urban cities. Messy. It is hot on the streets of San Antonio. It is culturally rich, ethnically diverse, wealthy and poor. There are lovely green spaces with sculpture and there are dark alleys. And if you take a dark alley you will wind up someplace unexpected - a restaurant off the beaten track, a cinema that can be gotten to from a more obvious route, or an even darker alley. Here you can have a genuine San Antonio experience.

If you walk along the Riverwalk you will find a tourist's paradise, the stuff of Chamber brochures. It is tidy: a partially below ground, cool, well shaded and garden festooned pathway along the water on one side. Along the other side you find a seemly endless (maybe because the river walk goes in a circle) array of restaurants for everyone's budget. Everyone is well dressed, either in holiday comfort or employee uniform. Here you can have a pleasant tourist experience.

Taking the riverboat (4-foot-deep-man-made-canal boat does't sound as good) provides you with a view of the garden festooned pathway along the water's edge and the restaurants. From here you can not smell the flowers or taste the food. You will learn the history of the Riverwalk as invented by the seasonal employee who motors the boat.

As a teacher I can opt to offer any of these three experiences. If I teach from the riverboat I can ensure my student's safety, at the cost of engagement with San Antonio. From the Riverwalk students can interact with a simulated San Antonio. While I don't mind taking a break with my class in the cool and pleasant underground passageways, I want to spend most of my class time up onto the hot and messy sidewalks of the city, where the residents are, authentic events occur, where the unexpected can be found.