I was pleasantly surprised by a flurry of faculty interest in Second Life earlier this week. Normally, when faculty express interest in integrating technology into teaching and learning, I am thrilled. However, I have to admit, this time I was less excited, and here’s why.

I have been in and out of Second Life (SL) for several years. Each time I engaged SL it was to explore its potential for teaching and learning. Admittedly, there was much in SL which interested me. But, I came away each time feeling that the teaching I experienced in SL was “ho hum”, or worse. Nevertheless, I keep going back thinking that I would discover one more thing that will really make a difference in my opinion of SL as a teaching tool. My latest visit of SL in December 2009 was kind of fun. But, again I walked away scratching my head. This week I started digging on the Web to find experimental research evaluating SL’s effectiveness as a teaching tool. I have not found much useful research as yet, but I am just getting started. I will begin searching scholarly journal databases this week. At this time however, I am claiming my right as a bona fide geezer to take the “Harrumph!” position towards SL.

Can you think of one popular online tool or technology that hasn’t been touted as the newest way to engage students, and improve learning? I think we as educators are just too ready to adopt and promote the latest & greatest technology for teaching and learning without evaluating its true effectiveness. Don’t misunderstand me. I LOVE technology; I make my living with it. I simply feel that teaching using something new (even though SL is no longer “new), is not as important as teaching well.

As I move deeper into my research on SL, here are the thoughts running through my head:

• In a learning context, how do I square what the research suggests about cognitive overlead with a rich, busy, complex environment like SL?
• What topics/subjects/disciplines are most likely to benefit from learning interactions within SL?
• How should teaching in SL differ from a classroom approach?
• Who does SL include/exclude?
• In a learning context, does the use of avatars actually make communication more authentic/personal?

If you know of experimental research on SL, please let me know. I’ll report my findings as I go along.

Not that long ago Google announced the availability of a  new service connecting Google apps to specific Moodle courses. This enables faculty to integrate Google apps directly into their Moodle courses, and to require students to use the Google apps to produce course assignments.

The integration of Google apps into a Moodle course if fairly robust. Creating user accounts in Google apps automatically creates a Gmail account for each user. Further, each Google app displays the course  name, reminding users that they are connected to their online course.

Having direct access for my students to Google apps within my online courses is exciting since I love the Google apps for online collaboration. But more than that, I see this new partnership as another indicator the idea of the LMS is being redefined, or re-imagined. What might this mean for Blackboard?

The Potential & Dissapointment of iTunes U“. My greatest disappointment was the fact we could not reliably upload any file with a size greater than 100Mb. Often it took 2, 3, 4, or more attempts to successfully upload a larger audio or video file. In one case it took us 3 weeks of trying to upload a large video.

Recently, Apple updated the iTunes U backend providing new functionality and flexibility. Yesterday I decided to test the “new & improved” version of iTunes U by uploading the video file that took us 3 weeks to load. Call me jaded. Call me skeptical. But, I did not expect it to work. No one was more surprised than I to find the file actually uploaded successfully on the first try. No “time out” errors, no error of any kind.

So after a year and a half of investing, configuring, tweaking, and a lot of hair pulling, perhaps we have turned a corner. Don’t remind me that Apple iTunes U forum experts assured us there was no problem on their end. Don’t remind me that we invested heavily in an end-to-end Apple solution to get reliable uploads to iTunes U. I will be doing additional tests to see if my first success was a statistical outlier. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Apple’s upgrade of iTunes U has finally addressed a critical reliability issue. I’ll let you know the results of further testing.

If you do more than a small amount of audio recording you will eventually run into the problem of the “popping p’s” and the hissing of sibilent s sounds. A pop screen is the perfect solution, but the expense of a pop screens may be hard to justify in a time of shrinking budgets.

Jake Ludington posted a brilliant little “how-to” article on building a custom pop screen for under $10 USD! It’s amazingly simple, and worth the read.

Tom Kuhlmann (Rapid eLearning Blog) provides some excellent basic pointers  for recording high quality audio.

It’s not surprising that paying attention to the “basics” of audio recording results in a good recording. However, it is surprising how few people know the “basics” of good audio recording. Fortunately, as Tom shows, they are simple and easy to do.

I stumbled across a link to xtranormal.com in an Alan Levine presentation, and was intrigued with the concept of creating presentations with animated characters. Even more intriguing was the claim that all I needed to do is type the script. I couldn’t resist, so I took my previous post on “Post-LMS Era” and used it (with very minor modifications as the script for my xtranormal “movie”.

The movie took about 45-60 minutes to complete, including adding camera angles, actor gestures, etc. While my blog script does not make for riveting dialog, it may be a useful way to demonstrate the potential of xtranormal’s online tools. I can see the potential of this tool for creating fun, engaging learning objects.

Check out the xtranormal site, or view my movie below.