Demelza working on her SL presentation delivery at the podium the night before the Library 2.0 lecture...
On Monday 3rd March, Professor Mary Burke (Akiiki Vella) gave UCD's first ever virtual lecture to SILS students. I rushed home after Ian Cornelius' lecture to use my laptop at home. (Having home SL access is great, and it meant that someone else could take my place in the Information Skills Room.) I felt a great buzz at being part of a ground breaking UCD event, with a journalist in attendance, no less!
At the start, there was a bit of a scrum, with students jostling for position, and one winged avatar ploughed straight into the presentation screen. Some students still haven't discovered the delights of IM-ing, and I could cheerfully have murdered the student who kept repeating "Get Lost" from their gestures inventory! Again, as with the Ann Seidl talk, I could feel some 'performance anxiety' about participation assessment, but this soon dissipated as the lecture got going. This time, I was better able to block out irrelevant 'noise' from other students, and concentrate on the lecture itself.
In a RL scenario, the lecturer talks, has a PowerPoint presentation, and asks and answers questions. This format works equally well in SL, but with added value, I think. It seemed so appropriate to be approaching the topic of Library 2.0 from within a virtual environment! I was able to 'take' the links to del.icio.us, the Library Success Wiki, Flickr and WordPress, etc. straight to my desktop.
I believe that the SL setting encourages quieter classmates to contribute a lot more. Maybe there is something liberating about adopting another persona or perhaps it's the 'otherness' of SL that allows students to take on an active, rather than somewhat passive, role in a class.
What did interest me was that during a lecture about Library 2.0 in Second life, argument still rumbles on about who will control information. One student spoke of gatekeepers. While I'm no anarchist, and like my books at home to be in alphabetical (fiction) and subject order (non-fiction) just as much as the next librarian, I've been hearing the term gatekeepers, and people worrying about a loss of control of information, since 10th September 2007, and I'm a little tired of it! I did manage to squeeze in a comment to the effect that the term 'gatekeepers' tends to negate the term 'access'.
SL seems to have a positive effect on me in a heated debate, as I tend to be more measured in what I type, than what I might blurt out in a RL discussion. Also Demelza's face remains serene no matter what happens, so nobody need ever know that I'm groaning aloud in the privacy of my own home...
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