I must concede defeat: I’ve spread myself too thin. For over a year I haven’t managed to write a post here. My education and research related blogging these days all takes place on our school’s e-learning blog, elerner.de or on my German/English Wikiversity pages.
If you’re interested in my literary pursuits: I publish a blog in English and another one in German only. Hence, no more blogging here, alas.
I was quoted in the New York Times today with speculations about the impact of social media on the finance world where I worked for a while, an avalanche of arguments created by David Rubenstein of Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Rubenstein predicted unprecedented “social media activism” remaining somewhat vague on the exact shape this change would take. A new article by Frankfurt-based journalist Rhea Wessel cites a number of interesting examples.
On 18 March I, or rather, my trusty centaur Avatar, gave a talk at VWBPE 2011 – “Virtual Worlds – Best Practices in Education“, which took place in the virtual 3D world of Second Life where the Berlin School of Economics rents two islands. Like last year, thousands of avatars came to discuss and learn more on how to use virtual worlds for teaching and learning purposes.
Presentation Area VWBPE 2011
My talk, titled “Transfer of Physical Classroom Techniques to the Virtual Classroom During a Practice Supervision Course” is based on recent research (with A. Gallo) on a virtual course, which I have discussed before.
The possibility of transferring processes from the real into the virtual world has occupied me for most of this year in the context of teaching during the first course of HWR Berlin in Second Life, an industry practice supervision course of four hours length per week.*
This was a thoroughly gratifying experience – the students were marvelous too and very patient, which helped – and, in the end, said things like: “I thought the course was really really cool.” It hardly gets better than that: this is what I’d like my twenty-something year old students like to say about my classes!
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As readers know, I’ve got a first self in the real world and a second self in Second Life where I’ve been active since 2007*. So far, the second self was only engaged in teaching and learning. Now I’m ready to transfer some of my coaching into the virtual world of Second Life. I believe there is real value-add especially for group work like organisational constellations (download article).
In our second attempt at role plays (see last week’s post for the ambiguous response), we had more luck with the students – or perhaps our preparation was better. This is what Jutta/Naomi and I did:
Carefully and competently facilitated by Jutta Dierberg (aka Naomi Greenberg in Second Life®), we made our first attempt at in-world role playing in yesterday’s meeting. After a short warm-up with a guided imagery exercise designed to get the students in touch with possible “stories” that had happened to them during their internship, we needed, and fortunately found, one volunteer who was willing to share a brief experience with us that had stirred him up and that he was still concerned about.
…I am officially in the same relationship I’ve been in for the past 16 years and still happy. I do not play Farmville or Mafia Wars and I do not allow spying, viewing, sharing, networking, blogging, supervising, laughing, giving, taking or shaving applications access to my facebook profile. I still maintain said profile so that I see what my “friends” (mostly ex-students) are up to. I am still not using social media as an entertainment channel. Instead I prefer to (1) talk to my wife, who can crack me up, (2) read a book or (3) watch a movie in the cinema or listen to music that I have legally obtained.
Who remembers CDs? Who remembers CD sales? The publishing industry is nearly as scared of new technologies eroding its profits as the music industry was – once: since they did the wrong things too late their profits are down for good now and their business models are mainly of historical value.
