Learning Kiosks

Thursday, I visited the Ohio University Second Life Campus Learning Kiosks the http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses#visualisations presented me. Those kiosks are tools to bring video, text etc. to anyone who consults them. They also allow a user to send text to a central person/administrator.
Setting up learning kiosks are a way to bring content (be it learning content or other) to a passer by. What is being presented is more like the essence of the message you are bringing as a teacher, than any speech in a classroom-like SL surrounding. Reason for that is, of course, that text/video in SL is no different to other means of presenting text/video. SL, it would seem, brings no better way to bring the message, than classroom teaching or books or video at school.
On the other hand, SL does present a stronger feeling of concern to the user: social interaction motivating him to bring a good show. That is a good thing for exercises or for learning content the student already knows about. The student can shift his focus to something else then: practice, for instance.
The Ohio University Second Life Campus Learning Kiosks, for me, stresses the fact that a learning experience in SL, to be any good (no waste of time and energy of teacher and student), should be a mix of bringing content and using social interaction, in a way to ask a student to actually do something with the message being taught.

teaching tools

Yesterday evening I went about a bit, looking for teaching environments in SL. How to bring asynchronous teaching, has been on my mind for the last few weeks now. Training, not bringing theory, is a posibility, I suppose. Also, letting students interact between them, synchronous, can do the thing. That of course may be a solution for adults, not perhaps for children.
Looking for places that provide training in Second Life, I came across the Starboards Yacht Club. I overheard some 20 minutes training of 5 to 7 people. Setting was a teacher in front of a class, slides illustrating the story of his teaching. Subject was SL sailing: you can buy yourself a boat, go sailing: from leisure sailing up to regular regatta’s. You make use of an object called sailing boat. The boat comes with a HUD (HeadUpDisplay) supplying you with data of wind angle, speed to the water, wind speed, ... I could not make out if you really set parameters for operating (sailing) your boat (helm, sails, .. ) with the HUD as well. Finding that out would be subject for further investigation.
Teaching practical skills needs little theory and a lot of practical exercises: the student learning to master the equipment, the tool ... Even mastering lines available for a proper reply, can be a matter for training. In any of these cases a HUD can be part of the training. If you can bring mastering the equipment down to combining a proper set of parameters, these can be displayed on the HUD. Every new setting by the student can trigger an algorithm recalculating the remaining values. If not an algorithm reacts to the students' behaviour, more like another person or another object, the HUD can serve as cheat sheet helping in the task. In this way an exercise can be set up as a dialogue between the student and ( part of) the tool and natural surroundings that the teacher wants to confront this student with.
Also, I was at MUVEnation island, trying out Anna Begonia’s (RL:Antonella Berriolo) and Carolrb Roux’s letter cubes. Knee high cubes with an alphabetical letter on it; you can drag and turn to make words. It made me think that a student doing easy things (like manipulating letter cubes) while thinking about more serious matters (like grammar) is an neat way to spoon in rules that need to come to mind ‘just like that’. Being busy on the matter long enough, in an uncomplicated way, does the thing. That is what needs to be introduced in our SL teaching tool exercises.