The Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) 2011

WooooWW!! VWBPE is back! Pio is so excited to participate again but this time as a presenter with the good help of two of her best friends in SL.. Ana Begonia and Elaine Khandr ... of course we'll be introducing Artstonia at this very important world conference. Well, I will tell you  more about it when we have a confirmation of our proposal to participate. But, now... what's the VWBPE 2011? smiles... it's a conference .. "the conference"...it will take place – March 17-19, 2011 as you can read in their site:

The Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) is a community-based conference that provides opportunities for participants in all virtual worlds to share current teaching, learning, and research practices in 3D virtual environments. Conference presentations focus on teaching/learning, scholarly work, projects, events, activities and new and innovative tools for virtual education. Presenters will focus on the identification of best practices in education designed for 3D virtual world technology.

Ok, Now the fast facts about the 2011 conf:

1. Theme is You are Here.
2. It's a 53 hours conference.
3. Involves all virtual worlds:  Second Life, OpenSim, World of Warcraft, Eve Online or Club Penguin
4. They want participants to tell their stories of what works well and what can be done better. Where does learning happen for them? Who do they teach? How to they engage learners? Why is learning within the virtual important to them? What is the key learning they want to share with others?
5. Registration is free to all conference attendees thanks to the generous support of their conference sponsors.
6.  Submissions are due no later than 23:59 PST Monday, January 31, 2010.
http://conf.vwbpe.org
7.  The Proposal Streams are.. just in case you want to participate: Theoretical and Research Presentations, Content Based and Informal Presentations, Workshops and Tutorials, Explorations of Virtual Worlds, Panel Presentations and Roundtables, Tools and Products, Games and Simulations, Posters, Machinima, Teen Fair.

We are thinking on participating in proposal stream: Explorations of Virtual World. This stream includes tours, orientations, and  introductions to spaces in Second Life, other social virtual worlds or MMORPGS. Our tour will last  20 minute intro + 90 minute tour including Q&A. 

Since our project is related to the use of medieval roleplaying sims for learning and practicing a new language. We'll demonstrate what roleplaying is about by roleplaying with the participants to the tour. 

Checking back on last March conference Pio found this interesting conversation about Virtual Worlds, Culture, and Change. On that conversation Blogger Dusan Writer interviewed anthropologist and author Tom Boellstorff and they looked at the way a unique culture has evolved within Second Life.




Also had the chance to revisit what she posted at that time and found that she has posted another really interesting presentation By Lindy McKeown (Decka Mah in SL) where she explained How Action Learning works for staff professional development across organizations, how it narrows the 'Knowing - Doing Gap', and how it relates to  Heutagogy, the management of self-managed learners. 

Pio feels embarrased that the author of the presentation has posted a comment to the entrance and she hasn't noticed that until now. Lindy shared two wonderful blogs to read more about her presentation: See this blog post for Pedagogy, Andragogy and Heutagogy compared. and this one on the Roles for Virtual Worlds in Education. Anyway, It's a good thing that this conference post all of the participations and that eventhough you are not in Sl, nevertheless you can benefit from the wealth of material produced in these conferences. 


Well, this is just a little example of the quality of knowlede that'll be happening in March 2011.
Hope to see you all there!

Comments

  1. thanks for the announcement, it sounds like a very worthwhile conference!

    ReplyDelete
  2. umm, is it a brick-and-mortar conference? i went to the site and absolutely can't tell! =p

    ReplyDelete

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