Elaine Plybon’s Blog

I received official notice that I have been selected to be part of a panel presentation at NECC 2008 in San Antonio! I’m very excited. I’ve never been to NECC before, and it is wild to me that I’m going to be presenting at a National conference! I’m going to be presenting on the topic “Creating a Personal Learning Community in Second Life” along with my fellow DEN in SL leadership council members, Anne Truger (JessieMarie Flanagan), Lori Abrahams (Lor Fredrikkson), Fred Delventhal (Riptide Furse), Nancy Sharoff (Laelia Laval), and Charlene Chaussis (Geekie Kidd). If you’re going, be sure to look us up!

Today, I had the opportunity to present a workshop virtually – in Second Life! The island where the DEN HQ is housed hosted an EduFair today, where educators had the opportunity to attend various educational sessions. The one I was tasked with presenting was “Digital Storytelling”. It was well-attended and, as usual, I learned so much from the attendees (hopefully they learned a little from me, as well). I was very nervous going into it because of the unknown — how would my thoughts and ideas come across in the virtual world? Would educators who are forward thinking enough to be in Second Life find me to be elementary compared to their level?

What I found is that presenting in Second Life is much like presenting in real life. Once I got started, typing my words was almost as easy as saying them would have been in real life. I found my audience to be very participatory – at least until the sim crashed and we all had to log back in!

Still, it was very much worth the effort, and I’ve made some new friends to collaborate with in the world of digital storytelling! What more could I ask for?

So what’s the verdict? What do you all think about the new Discovery website? I think it rocks! I also think that Steve Dembo did an awesome job getting it all set up! It is so much nicer to be able to access all the great Discovery products in one place. Tell me what you think . . .