Report on RezEd's First Virtual Conference on November 17

[Rik Panganiban]

On Monday, November 17, RezEd.org, the hub for virtual world educators, held its first virtual conference with 70-some participants from around the world in the virtual world of Second Life. Entitled "Dropping Knowledge: How Virtual World Educators are Changing Lives" the conference opened with a panel discussion featuring :

• Lori Bell, Alliance Library System / Info Island
• Ryan Clemmens, Arizona State
• Patty Purcell, Bel Aire Elementary School
• and Barry Joseph, Global Kids (moderator)

You can listen to the audio from their presentations here:

After the discussion, we broke into "birds of a feather" groups on different parts of the sim to talk about different topics suggested by the participants, including:
• Using SL for Online Classes

• Approaching Learning Outcomes in Virtual World Education

• Pedagogical uses of Online Virtual Worlds

• Ways to Get Others Involved in Virtual Worlds
• Introducing Codes of Conduct to Students and Faculty using Second Life

• Features of Other Virtual World and Possible Migration

A slightly edited text chat log from the event can be read here.

Here is a slide show from the Flickr set of screenshots from the RezEd conference:

Thanks so much for everyone who attended, to all of our great speakers, and to the MacArthur Foundation and the USC Network Culture Project for working with us on the development of this conference and the parallel launch of the MacArthur Foundation island in Second Life.