Second life

Hi from Georgina Allardyce (alias Jeannie Sirona) I have had a brief visit to the help island in second life and will return to another location tomorrow and visit a library. I have no experience with computer screens and blundered and bumped my way around the screen. I wish that some of the avatars could take me by the hand and lead me to the library or take me for a swim. Ki told me that she is unable to leave Help Island and that I needed to get a swim script to be able to swim. The sea looked very inviting. I asked Ki to take me to the library and she took me to the freebie shop. Will explore tomorrow and visit a library.

Yammer

Because we are spread wide and far in TAFE Yammer is useful for communicating with colleagues. I was invited to join Yammer a few months ago by a 23 Things participant. It is useful to keep an eye on and I found the post from Trisha McLatchie re the Gordon TAFE study skills link. I would like to be able to turn off the "your colleagues have posted and we haven't heard from you"! Big brother and sister at work.

Yammer and Twitter

I did wonder why people would use Twitter since it only allows 140 characters. That changed after I read that a group surgeons were performing ground breaking surgery techinque and they twittered through out the operation to colleagues. Hospitals are keeping relatives informed of patients progress via twitter. And what can we do? We can twitter the new edition textbooks and for publicity.

Library thing

This could be useful if students want to save their books so they can refer to the bibliographic information for referencing purposes. I will send the "Library thing" link to the ELICOS lecturers because the students have to keep a reading log and they could do this online and write a review and share it with their classmates.

Online Communities

I am making this post via my iGoogle page which is finally working. I have two iGoogle pages, one freezes my computer and this page which has a link to Google reader and Google docs and one to my blog. I am much happier when I can multi task from one website. However there is a warning voice stating, "you're putting all your eggs into the one basket" . I have a monogomous relationship with Google! I do have a facebook page which is connected to my gmail account and I cannot link it to this iGoogle page which uses my work email login. The world has many religions and spiritual practices to suit the myriad of cultures and belief systems. So too does the online world of network communitites. I was invited along to a dolphin cruise on the Port River and was asked several times have you been on the "pink sofa"?I listened to women having conversations about their chat sessions via the pink sofa. It seems that there is space for the 18 year olds to chat, the fity plus and a forum for all to contribute. It struck me that it is very similar to "blended learning" eg the Harvey Norman room (TAFE SA South) where the marketing students engage with a face to face lecturer and participate in online games and second life as part of their learning. The pink sofa women talk online and follow this up with face to face social activites.
In answer to the question, can you think of ways in which the social- or fun-oriented applications of a site like Facebook can be adapted for our professional purposes? Perhaps we can investigate these building blocks that were on the DFEEST innovation website. I will post the link in another blog, once again I am having trouble logging into to this website!