Posts from — October 2007

I was immensely privileged to participate in the first ever Teen Second Life College Fair. The event was on the Eye4You Alliance TSL island. At least 18 institutions were represented (see some of the booths in the image to the left), and approximately 200 teens attended.

I gave a short presentation on my own educational experiences and the incredible possibilities for careers in technology, but my favorite part of the college fair was the casual conversations that took place outside of the sessions and in the booth area. We talked about everything from education in Europe vs the US to tagging to SL building and scripting to politics… you get the idea!

For educators and recruiters, this was a fantastic event for connecting with young people who are excited, passionate, and resourceful. The students were able to talk directly with representatives of various institutions, and were not shy about asking difficult questions and getting the answers that they were interested in. I’m looking forward to the next one!

The event has been written up:

• Daniel Voyager’s Review of the 1st Teen College Fair
• SLNN: Second Life Teen Grid hosts first virtual college fair
• Johnson & Wales Professor Recruits Second Life Teens (the uncredited video in this article was created by fantastic now-alum Kyle Pouliot)

I’m teaching a basic web design course this term that covers design concepts, XHTML, and CSS. The students are from a variety of backgrounds – some have knowledge of HTML, some are non-majors or non-credit students looking to pick up a useful skill, and many are complete beginners who are required to take the course as part of their degree programs.

Only a few students knew what a wiki (distinct from Wikipedia) was before beginning this project. The students were given a month to make their contributions to the wiki. They were each assigned primary responsibility for one page at random, but were graded both on the success of their page and their contributions to other pages.

43 students across two sections of the class participated in the project. Of those, five (or 11.6%) didn’t participate by the due date, which is a higher than normal percentage for a homework project. Eleven (or 25.6%) contributed only to their own pages. Another thirteen (30.2%) maintained their own pages and made meaningful contributions to other pages, while fourteen students (32.6%) made numerous contributions well in excess of the requirements.

I will be continuing the project for the second phase of the class – CSS – and I’ll see if participation increases as the usefulness of the wiki as a resource increases. I also plan a project postmortem survey at the end of the course to see what the students thought about it.