EdTrack: Cognitive-Skydiving for Educators – Beyond the Traditional Limits

Lesele Dawg will be leading the workshop “Cognitive-Skydiving for Educators: Beyond the Traditional Limits” on Saturday, August 15h from 11:30 – 1pm. The description of this workshop is:

What would you do in your classroom if there were no barriers to you creating the optimal learning-focused environment? The virtual classroom is often used as simply a meeting place for people in a traditional instructor-led environment, yet the potential for education in Second Life moves well beyond lectures and virtual tests. This workshop begins with a discussion of the tools in a teacher’s toolbox, current learning theories. We will cover the mechanisms and strategies that people use to learn, and how effectively virtual reality learning can be. Now that the tools have been brought out to provide a framework for thinking outside of the status quo, the workshop becomes a think tank for creative educational strategies.

The workshop then moves from learning theories to the application of those theories to the specific content areas of the participants. Small groups of similar-subject educators will then apply the learning theories to possible teaching strategies in the virtual environment. Guided brainstorming will encourage thinking outside of the proverbial education box while giving rise to collective creativity that will move the discussion to the next level of teaching within Second Life.
The final stage of the workshop is to take these ideas and make them realities through operationalizing them in sufficient detail as to provide programmers and developers the required specification to actually construct the needed functionality within Second Life. The goal of this workshop is to support educators in recognizing that the status quo for education is seriously out-dated. The educators will be guided through the process of removing the box of traditional teaching in a virtual environment into the realm of pure imagination, and onto the path of implementing those ideas.
At the end of the workshop, participants will not only have a wealth of ideas to work on in their own virtual classrooms, they will also have provided some well-thought out ideas that move Second Life education to the next level.