LILAC time

Discussions held on Infolit iSchool: 1 (v. good)

Have finally resumed Infolit iSchool discussion series. Kicked off last Thursday with Pancha, Ishbel and I giving our picks from the LILAC (information literacy) conference. With due modesty none of us talked about our own session. Which - now I come to think of it - haven't actually blogged here, so will mention at the end.

Ishbel talked about Andrew Walsh's session on using mobiles (that is cell phones to American readers and Handys to German ones), Pancha talked about Peter Godwin's, which also focused on mobiles, and I talked about Sally Patalong's account of 2 modules (credit bearing) that she runs. Those are the speakers RL names, of course. Was mix of UK and North Americans at this discussion, and a couple of non-information/library people, and it was actually a good number for a good discussion. The chatlog is posted at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=397

After it was over, was taking down LILAC-y stuff (well, in fact was doing a little celebratory dance in front of poster - see right) when Togashi turned up, and we had a chat. Then I wondered off and bought hair, harpsichord, and tented platform, as discussed in last post.
So, in a previous post I talked about preparing for the session that Pancha, Ishbel, Maggie and Lulu and I did at LILAC. Things went roughly to plan, except that of course we had too much to talk about and so had to abbreviate things a little. The main technical glitch was on sound. Idea had been that Pancha, Ishbel and I (in RL) would use a microphone so that Lulu and Maggie (in SL) could tell what was going on. However we hadn't practiced this bit enough and it soon became obvious that what went in the microphone was feeding out into the speakers in the room, only a few seconds later. Was no way we could turn speakers off, so abandoned microphone.

Do you know it is only as I am typing this now that I realise that all could possibly have been saved by plugging the microphone into MY laptop (which was operating slowly but steadily with my 3G mobile stick), rather than into Pancha's laptop (which was the one plugged into the data projector). Oh well.

Main thing was that SL stuff projected fine to screen, Ishbel showed off the management school at St Andrews' island, I showed the 7 Pillars model, Pancha showed her intellectual property stuff and Maggie types in her contribution.

We didn't use a ppt as PowerPoint, but we did do a handout, which is linked below. We also created a delicious account, namely http://delicious.com/LILACSL

Aspects of information literacy in virtual worlds

View more presentations from sheilawebber.

Conference cavortings

Conferences attended in RL: 1 (good); Conferences attended in SL: 1 (good); No. of feet aching after 90 mins dancing in RL: 2 (bad); No. of feet aching in SL despite dancing in 6 inch heels: none (good)

Hmm. Yet more "doing so much have no time to blog". Spent last weekend doing moderating and other stuff at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, which appears to have been success - must have been 200 avatars in one or other of the conference tracks at many points - in fact probably most of the time. Took zillions of photos (well, possible exaggeration, actually about 100) and so will do some sort of blog entry if mostly consists of pictures.

Am currently at RL conference (LILAC, on information literacy) and tomorrow will be presenting session on SL and information literacy with Ishbel and Pancha in RL and Maggie and Lulu in SL. Well, that's the idea. The pics show us planning for this session.

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Spent good deal of today preparing for tomorrow and a) failing to get pc in conference room to work b) trying to get t-mobile stick to work with my laptop; c) trying to get local wifi to work with SL with anyone's laptop; e) getting Edinburgh Uni VPN to work (hurrah, it did).

In fact in end the situation will be that Pancha will be logging in to SL via Edinburgh (we are in Cardiff) and projecting to the screen, meanwhile we will also log in on the lecture room pc (which turns out to work with passwords other than the ones we've got, but is somewhat sluggish to say the least) and I can login with my 3G stick which is slowish but if I don't move around too much the graphics are OK.

Our hope is that at least one of these 3 will remain operational long enough for virtual Maggie and Lulu to wave, smile and type in their deep thoughts about information literacy and SL.

You can tell Ishbel, Pancha and I are into this type of thing since we look like a laptop convention, Ishbel's is the coolest, i.e. a mac, which is automatically cooler than anything else in the room.