Summer in Al Ain

Well, here I am enjoying the end of summer in Al Ain.

This is a quick post as I have intermittant internet access at present!

I am waiting for the connection to be set up in my apartment.

Al Ain here I come.

Well, its official, I am off to Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates on the 31st July to work as an ICTin Education Advisor. I spend 4 days initially in Auckland meeting my "team", then we leave on the 4th August. I will post pictures of our apartment, which I am waiting to see now, and hopefully document my big adventure with pictures and video!

It will be interesting to see how the education system operates there, and how we go doing ICT Professional Development with teachers there, as well as adapting to a different culture! Not only that, but it's 45 degrees celsius ther most days, and at night it cools down to about 28 degrees, so just coping with the heat will be interesting.

I'm told that Al Ain being in-land has much lower humidity than the coastal cities, often only about 20% or 30% where as in Dubai and Abu Dhabi the humidity gets up to 95% often. I have learned heaps about this country andthie cities via expat blogs and YouTube - where would we be without it? Hey lay off Viacom!

The real power of sites like YouTube is not in blatantly copying movies, but in allowing people to be creative with remixes, and also just to post their videos to a worldwide audience. The fact that I can make my own movie of my travels, add my own music and commentary and easily post them online to my own channel for all to see is very cool. We really do live in a global village.

Game Based Learning using Virtual Environments

Is this a glimpse into the future use of 3D virtual learning environments?

Westley Field has been developing "Skoolaborate" a project using Second Life and Teen second Life. One interesting aspect of this has been the 17 year old Mike D creating buildings in second life through collaborations with architects, including a "real" project, the design of a multi million dollar Sydney secondary school. Mike D has been collaborating in real time with the architects as he uses the blue prints to build a 3D representation of the design:



According to the information on this YouTube video:
"The Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London has developed a region in Second Life that aims to design game-based learning activities for delivery of virtual patients that can drive experiential, diagnostic, and role-play learning activities supporting patients' diagnoses, investigations and treatment."
I'll work on this and see if I can match some of Gee's Learning principles to a situation like this:


Building 3D walk-around constructions from the architectural drawings is also a fascinating use of Second Life:


Robbie Dingo created this beautiful 3D village from the Vincent Van Gogh painting and the Don McLean music is perfect - this is the movie we saw at the Learning@school conference in Rotorua this year.


I think we have only just begun to tap the potential of 3d Virtual Learning Environments...watch this space!