VWBPE: ISTE-on-Sea

I contributed to a panel chaired by Sheila Yoshikawa on subject-specific aspects of teaching in SL as part of the Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference. Unfortunately, Sunday nights are the worst for me in terms of bandwidth and, as the picture shows, a quarter of the sim vanished and voice started to die on me (as it all too often does). I tried to use voice but this died on me completely on testing so I had to relog. Rather than risk this happening again, I decided to go with text but it appears that there was no chat relay in the auditorium, something I should have checked in advance. I failed to spot the cue from the Sheila that things were amiss and that I needed to shout. As a consequence people at the back could not "hear". My apologies to them and for their benefit, this is the gist of what I said:

I'm Peter Miller, lecturer in Microbiology, University of Liverpool
I've only been teaching for less than a year so am still learning
There's some overlap with the other speakers
I'm pleased to acknowledge Desi as an influence
And I have an interest too in molecules, albeit big ones, proteins
So Horace and Hiro Sheridan have been v helpful
Finally Max Chatnoir in the audience should be up here - she has been an inspiration :)
If you want see what I've been doing most recently, see
http://tidalblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/tb-build-video-with-subtitles.html
That was a build I did recently to mark World TB Day
And I'm blogging about it with a large class of Year 1 students
One of the aspects of the build is its use of multiple levels
I'm a microbiologist and its a subject that cuts a lot of ways
If you look at the build, it starts with people at the top level
A chance to discuss diease -- the history of the subject, its transmission, its real importance
At the next level down, I've been looking at cells
Their growth and some of their components and their significance
The final level is mapping data
There is now a vast amount of sequence data and I'm looking at novel ways to represeent and investigate that in SL
I'm very keen on the shared presence aspect Horace mentioned and really want to see collaboration in use of the features
More generally, there has only been a limited use of existing content in SL
I've borrowed ideas from people and sometimes tools but the amount of microbiology out there was v limited
I wanted to develop some tools that were immediately accessible and that was the genesis of StoryMachine
That is an evolved form of Eloise Pasteur's spidergram that Milton mentioned
Except it reads from a notecard so there is no need to hack prims to generate a 3D display
of a spidergram
There are some places inworld I can recommend
The excellent Max Chatnoir has some resources at Genome that are tangentially pertinent but probably of greater relevance to colleagues teaching genetics
It is certainly worth looking at how she does things though because her stuff is tried-and-tested
Like Horace, I haven't been doing virtual labs but I wouildn't rule that out
There are some govt organisations too
Although the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) sim has some microbiology labs, they aren't really suitable for teaching use
I think CDC and some of the commercial folk are maybe missing a trick in terms of engagement here
Some of the talks and meetings held on Second Nature and some of the resources on the American Chemical Society sim are potentially useful
I wish UK learned societies were a little more open-minded given the costs associated with remote meetings these days
If I'm missing anything obvious, hopefully folk in the audience will let me know :)
If I include myself as a learner, then I have to say that the biggest opportunity is in networking and collaboration but I haven't done a good job on exploiting that yet
As far as limitations are concerned
A lot of science content in SL is directed towards the public understanding of science so is at rather a basic level
It isn't clear that using content on other sims is a strategy that is robust and scalable in the long-term
There is perpetual change and flux in SL and that makes it hard to plan
I think I want to finsih there and take questions when the time comes
Apologies for using chat

And, after a few minor contributions, I ended with thoughts on research:

Modelling bacterial cells is a topic that has some currency: the most recent Annual Reviews of Biochemistry has a review paper on it
One small example is a class where I got students to rez components of the bacterial cell wall and then mount them in a (very basic) model cell
It illustrated quite nicely that one component was so large, it could only fit in one plane
That is an observation that is to the best of my knowledge original and might have consequences for that protein's role
You could reach the same conclusion on paper, of course, but model building in SL should hopefully stimulate a more questioning attitude
That's all :)

I thought the contributions from the other speakers were very interesting and certainly gave me food for thought.