Including more resources for students

Over the past few weeks I have been creating many presentations to introduce my students to History of Design and Visual Culture. These slide shows are related to themes that are covered in the module. Other information is also available relating this subject to specific areas of interest ie animation. It took me quite a time to upload all the relevant imagery and to optimise it for the best results.



There are two copies of each presentation to allow more than one person to use them at the same time.



Each presentation covers an important aspect of the History of Design module whilst trying to take into account how it relates to animation and multimedia.



There are several posters including timelines for art movements.

“Now in Second Life, students can create their own content graphically as well as textually. The immersiveness of virtual worlds allows for exploration and interaction with elements in that world. Simulations, role-playing, creations of educational materials, and testing dangerous situations safely are all possibilities in virtual worlds. All of the higher order knowledge skills from Bloom’s taxonomy are possible – applying knowledge (e.g. moving about in Second Life), analyzing (How can I build some-thing realistic with a low prim count?), evaluating (is it best to build a cathedral ceiling to show support sys-tems or to leave it off to allow avatars to fly in?), and creating (use SL building skills to build a complete cathedral). Bloom’s learning characteristics correlate well with the exploration and interaction inherent in virtual worlds.” (Cheal C, 2007)







There is plenty of space to add further interctive displays and presentations. I hope to include student work in the future to promote the resource centres use.



Many of my students love computer games and especially first person shooters so movement and navigation through the resource centre should prove intuitive and fun.





Presentations are positioned to make best use of space and to catch the eye.



Upper floor resources.



Stairwell for upper floor.



Imagery used on the displays is of a suitable size to be viewed from distance.





Areas of common interest to both animation and multimedia are also included such as Ident design.





There are many presentations asking students to do work in their own time, on tasks related to their choisen areas of study. This will hopefully improve their academic, career and theory based language, as well as providing an understanding of the relevance of the module.

“The reason that Second Life is important for instructional technology is where it stands in the continuum of learning methodologies from lecture to active/experiential/problem-based/constructivist learning. It is now becoming general thought that lecture-type teaching results in a passive audience, while methodologies developed over the last 20 to 50 years, whether called active learning, constructivist learning or any other more specific term, allows students to be responsible and actively involved and responsible for their own edu-cation.” (Cheal C, 2007)





The displays and presentations should encourage my students to share knowledge and discuss key concepts relating to theory and practice. This has been diffcult for many of them in the past as they have had no prior experience of using this type of knowledge in their work. From the tasks I have set them and the student behaviour I have witnessed within SL, the platform has proven very succesful at facilitating colloboration and peer mentoring.

"It's really difficult to understand new media or cyberculture or the ways the internet is transforming our culture without actively participating in it," he said. "The thing that's appealing about Second Life is that it's a shared virtual experience, and so it has that common element that the classroom brings." (Delwiche A, 2004)











Many of the displays are there to provide the students with the language and terminology to express themselves before the module begins.

‘The foundation for all learning is basic literacy. This means more than the simple decoding of words; it also requires the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words and, eventually, to infer meaning from patterns of information.’ (Gee J, 2008)



Bibliography

Cheal, C. (2007). Second Life – hype or hyperlearning? On the Horizon. Vol. 15 No. 4, pp 204-210
Gee, J.P. (2008). Getting Over the Slump: Innovation Strategies to Promote
Children’s Learning. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.
Terdiman, D. (2004). Campus Life Comes to Second Life. Wired.com. Retrieved May 3, 2008 from http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/09/65052