Sarah Stewart

I had a very intense, disturbing experience in Second Life last night.

I went to see the Virtual Hallucination simulation that has been developed by UC Davis. It has been designed to give us a better understanding of what it feels like to have schizophrenia. Based on the stories of two people who have schizophrenia, it aims to provide an auditory and visual experience that simulates how schizophrenics see and hear the world.

To my mind this is the most powerful teaching/learning experiences in Second Life - it moved and disturbed me. If you have any interest in mental health, especially if you are a health professional working in the area I would recommend you visit this place. But be warned that it is an intense experience.

If you cannot access Second Life, have a look at this video which will give you a feel for the place.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s33Y5nI5Wbc

I have just been introduced to a nice alternative presentation tool to PowerPoint by @carlosrizo: vuvox collage. It's very easy to use and looks really nice. The only thing I need to work out is if I can download the collage so I can use it if I haven't got access to the Internet.

Here's a collage I have made about Flickr and Creative Commons.


http://www.vuvox.com/collage/detail/0196513e3b

It was very exciting on Friday to meet people who actually read my blog. I don't have a large readership and use this blog primarily to process my own thinking and learning. But it's lovely hear that people find my writing interesting (although goodness knows why!?) and get some useful information out of it.

So a big 'hello' to Susie Lepage, Yvonne Rika and Jean Jacoby who are nurses and educators interested in exploring Second Life for nurse education. Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you'll find what I have written to be of help as you plan your Second Life project, especially my experiences of working on the virtual birthing unit.

To anyone who reads this blog: please don't be afraid to leave a comment to say 'hello'. It feels very lonely here at times and is always nice to hear from people, even if it's just a quick word or two :)

I was invited to a meeting of nurse educators in Wellington on Friday. They were from a number of New Zealand educational institutions and were very interested in the potential of Second Life for nurse education. Needless to say, they were especially interested in hearing about the Second Life Education New Zealand project and in particular the virtual birthing unit.

Nursing and medical resources in Second Life
There are few avenues these days for educational funding in New Zealand so these nurses are going to have to think about how they can utilize resources that are already available in Second Life. So the first step in their collaborative project is to review how nurses and health professionals are using SL.

• Projects in JoKaydia
  
• Health education in Second Life
• Top 10: Virtual Medical Sites in Second Life!
• SLENZ virtual birthing unit
• Land of the Long White Cloud - virtual hospital
• SL Health - email discussion list for health educators using SL
  

My advice
My advice to nurse educators looking at Second Life is to:

• find a SL mentor and learn as much as you can about how SL works;
• network with other nurse and health professionals using SL using online communication tools such as blogs, YouTube, Slideshare and of course, Second Life;
• develop learning activities in SL that require little or no development to keep things as cheap and easy as possible;
• work alongside your educational institution to ensure you have full access to SL;
• collaborate with each other using virtual tools such as wiki, Google Docs, Skype and SL.
  

I would love to hear from you if you are involved in nurse education and Second Life - what do you teach in SL? How effective have you found it? What would you advise nurse educators starting out in SL?

I feel very honored to have been asked to help facilitate a forum for aboriginal and Torres Strait aged care staff in Cairns, later in November. This forum is the last element of the eMentoring project I developed for Aged Care Queensland.

What mentoring support aged care staff require
Whilst the eMentoring project was aimed at indigenous aged care staff, very few people volunteered to take part. It goes without saying that we should have consulted more thoroughly with indigenous workers before we even started the project, so we're doing things back to front. Nevertheless, what we would like to know is:

• what mentoring support do indigenous aged care staff want and need?
• how can Aged Care Queensland facilitate mentoring support, if it is required?
• how would staff prefer to receive mentoring support - face-to-face, electronic or a mix?
• what are the barriers to eMentoring?
• how can Aged Care Queensland break down the barriers to eMentoring?

Plan for the forum
We are developing an agenda for the forum with indigenous advisers. Our plan is for an informal discussion, focus group approach to seeking information. The other part of the forum is to run a computer skills workshop.

Seeking ideas and advice
I have not worked with aboriginal and Torres Strait people before. The last thing I want to do is offend anyone or go about things in an inappropriate way. In particular, I hope to make the computer workshop as user-friendly as possible. So I would especially appreciate any ideas or advice about how to approach the computer skills workshop.


Image: 'Great Barrier Reef, Cairns, Australia' The Lightworks
www.flickr.com/photos/22385963@N00/340751615

I have been thinking about where I stand in relation to Second Life now the virtual birthing unit project has more or less come to an end. If I want to continue to develop the birthing unit and become involved in more SL projects, I need to develop my SL skills. At the same time, I am not sure if the future in education for SL merits the time it will take me to upgrade my skills. And the contradictory opinion about SL of education experts doesn't help me in my decision-making.

The problems with Second Life
Clearly there are barriers to the use of Second Life in education, especially in New Zealand. Lack of Internet access, inadequate computer technology, institutional firewalls and policies can make it difficult for students and teachers to engage with SL. And the time it takes to learn SL skills can be prohibitive. Stephen Blythe is one of my students in the online course Facilitating Online - his story is a typical one.

Dr Alan Cann, a lecturer at the University of Leicester feels very strongly that SL is expensive, cumbersome, poorly designed and time-consuming. He says:

There is, above all else, one thing that Second Life is unsurpassed for. If you need to generate a large amount of cash from a naive grant-awarding body over-eager to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, offer to build, for a preposterous amount of cash, a virtual representation of something that already exists in the real world but that no-one will ever use in SL. Something like, say, Belgium. You'll be quids in. Careers have been built on it.

Second Life and Gen Y
I was talking to Dr Erika Pearson this week about how young people use the Internet. Erika is a media studies lecturer at the University of Otago. She believes Second Life will not become main stream with Gen Y students because they are only interested in communication tools that are cheap, quick and easy to use like Facebook and cell phone text.

The future of education lies in virtual reality
Nevertheless, there are educators who believe the opposite - that students do better learning skills in Second Life than those who do not use SL. John Waugh, of the Second Life Education New Zealand project says it is vital that educators become familiar with Second Life and other virtual worlds and realities - educators who ignore virtual reality do so at their peril and will be left behind in the very near future. Whilst SL may not be the preferred virtual world of the future, skills learned in SL will be transferable.

My love-hate relationship with Second Life
If the interest and enthusiasm by New Zealand educators is anything to go by, I cannot ignore Second Life. So whilst I continue to have a love-hate relationship with SL, it's clear I need to develop my skills so that I can continue research on the virtual birthing unit and evaluate learning outcomes, and become a resource for educators wishing to explore virtual worlds.


Image: jokaydiaunconf-SLENZ_001 kerryj.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerryank/3957681375

Every spring my hubby and I have the same argument about the garden. I want to have a go at growing vegetables but the truth of the matter is we just don't have enough room. I grow a few tomatoes, but I'd really like to have a decent allotment or something like that.

I understand there are a couple of community gardens in Dunedin, but I'm not too sure what they entail, and I'm too selfish to want to grow a lot of veggies that then get pinched by the 'community'. I also know that Horty Kim is running a permaculture garden at Otago Polytechnic, so I need to go and have a look there.

But what I would really like is for someone to 'lend' me a patch of their garden that I can turn into a veggie patch. If you have a garden that you're not using and would be happy to let me potter around in it, please let me know as soon as possible.