Finally, Skewl is Kewl

by Alphaville Herald on 23/08/04 at 1:26 pm

teach1.jpg

I took an hour off from war reporting yesterday to drop in on a course being taught by Ancient Earth (AE) member Archaegeo Platini, and while I was AFK and up to my neck in IMs for much of it, I have to say that for the first time ever I had the impression that online instruction actually made sense. In this case Archaegeo was teaching a course on 3D space, introducing the notion of vectors and rotation. Not only did he have streaming video of his notes and graphics to boot, but the basic structure of SL made it ideal for a ?virtual hands on? medium for playing with vector values to see what happens. Students can even rez representations of the XYZ axes themselves and make their objects rotate through them, for example. Really a brilliant idea. I could have done without the new age music being piped in though. Some snaps follow.

teach4.jpg

teach6.jpg

teach7.jpg

teach8.jpg

teach9.jpg

3 Responses to “Finally, Skewl is Kewl”

  1. Awakening Avatars - Merwan Marker

    Aug 23rd, 2004

    Looking forward to this new SL venture!

    Best of luck to Ancient Earth and to Archaegeo.

    Merwan Marker
    Awakening Avatars

  2. blaze

    Aug 24th, 2004

    What I’d like to see as a follow along to this are quizzes which go along with the class and report back to the teacher if people are understanding the material.

    Eg: if 50% of the class can’t answer a particular quiz question than the instructor needs to spend more time on that point .. if only 10% doesn’t get it, then the instructor can follow up later with that person on that point.

  3. Urizenus

    Aug 24th, 2004

    Good idea and easily done, since course materials are distributed on note cards after every class. A quiz could be included to be returned to the teach. For all I know there is a quiz waiting in my course pack now. (Better look)

Leave a Reply