June 2007 – Virtual Canuck

I’m tempted to make this post just another in a growing list of whines from the edublog community about what I don’t like about SecondLife. I could talk about the terrible support – prepare to restart the whole process of building your avatar if you ever forget your password. Or I could note the disappointment when 20% of your class can’t even use the system due to hardware or connectivity restrictions. I could also whine about challenges of keeping any sense of social order, or facilitating a collaborative walk around in SL without loosing half the group, but some of these complaints are due to my own newbie status and lack of practice.

Mostly, I’d like to note that SL doesn’t allow users to synchronize their real life and their second life. For some this is just fine and the reason they go to great lengths to develop a fully featured secondlife. However as an educator, I want my students to develop insights, explore new information and apply this learning in their real lives.Read More

New tool to mine the collective knowledge

Thanks to the DownLoad Squad I bumped into a very interesting tool to mine collective knowledge. Avanoo is a social software tool that allows members to query others through simple Likert like scale items. Nothing too new here except that everyone gets to view and segment the results according to demographic criteria including gender, nationality, age, income level etc. For example I can create a questions and then determine if Canadians answered that question differently than non-Canadians, men differently than women or the wealthy differently from the poor. If I want I can augment my response to any question with a comment or explanation. Again nothing too new here, except that this type of analysis and results are usually costly to gather and remain the property of the survey owner, not the recipients.