Head Teacher holds forth at the conference
What is the function of the classroom in a completely virtual learning setting? Does it even have a future? These were questions I set out to answer reporting on over two years of English and Spanish language programme development with Languagelab.com inside Second Life. My conclusions? Well, the classroom certainly needs redefining and recontextualising within the new possibilities of learning programmes which take place in virtual worlds. However the issue is is much broader than “Do we need the classroom or not?” The real crux is to define a valid teaching or learning space is and match it to the specific needs of your programme.
We started with recreating the ‘traditional’ classroom and literally thought ourselves out of that box. Two options. Slide show with audio below. If you don’t want to listen to the audio use the hover over the notes to get the background information per slide.
Full session recording
Otherwise you can watch the original filmed at the conference here. Many thanks to Ivan Matellanes for this – post here and to Virtualriver Cazenove for supplementary recording.
You are welcome! It was a really nice conference and I wanted everybody who could not assist to,at least, have the opportunity to have access to it.
Hello Paul,
Could not attend your presentation at Slanguages, so great it is available here. I am also including it in the resource section for my colleagues at the NIFLAR project http://www.niflar.eu.
A request in this context: are your speechnotes also available digitally?
Thanks in advance, Ton
Hello Ton
thanks for the link to Niflar – shocking acronym but very interesting project which I’ll keep track of. Meanwhile will post digital notes here in a couple of days when back at my desk.
Why are we even talking about the classroom? I prefer to use the terms finite and infinite learning space. A classroom is finite and was designed to provide a controlled environment in which the focus is on the teacher most of the time and the experiences you can create there are far less memorable and thus effective than those you can create and manage outside of it. It’s all in the design of the course!