today’s show title is [obviously!] a play on the [most common?] educational use of second life & yes, while we are painting with a broad brush again, let us be honest – have you not been invited to a dance party where folks ran through a power point at the same time? jo and i sure have!
anyways: enjoy an hour of nuance on the subject and feed on the great insight from prisilla “silly” avro, passionate elementary school teacher & virtual model, who embraces technology in education as long as it is not used to “drill & kill”:
now read onward for even more parsing of the issue:
– drax is now obsessed with charlie brooker [and has a playlist of “the black mirror” on youtube]
thank you for coming to my rez day party [thx to berry for taking pics]
– high fidelity raises 11 million us$ for deployable virtual worlds
– a lot works in hifi already done but there are only little alphas in [as of yet!]
– pic above from a 2014 rosedale talk that has a banner of “exponential finance” in the frame [you know you want to watch it!]
– loki is an hifi alpha but he is making a lot of things in sl as well:
– linden lab is looking for educator’s success stories
– our musical guest mummaluv skytower
– our guest silly avro aka melanie ruiz [interview starts around 23:00]
– silly is affiliated with the visionaire institutre in sl
– we apologize for going on about power point [but you know you can’t go of it either!]
– is the “future of learning” to be found at discovery education? discuss!
– vwbpe in sl is coming up soon
– the latest drax files video: nylon pinkney in the house:
the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley] is a weekly production of basicdrax entertainment.
the show is supported by leap motion, sl go [by onlive], stitcher, gizza creations, aeros avatars, maven homes, madpea productions, botgirl’s identity circus, ison, kahruvel design, vika creations, humanoid animations, loki eliot, botanical, death row designs, angel red cotoure, fallen gods incorporated, {what’s next}, abranimations, blue moon enterprises, avacon and landscapes unlimited!
special thanks to justin esparza for the show thumbnail!
music by bd.
contact the show via skype draxfiles, avatar draxfiles or email radio@draxfiles.com.
the drax files radio hour 
SL should have a camera with a timeline to make machinima with. They should set it up so that an avatar sits on ball or something, which is connected to the timeline, and you could drop SL animations into the timeline to control everyone in the scene. Video is so big, LL should consider this when they make the new world.
Hi Fidelity is looking for an animator. Should I apply? lol
The problem with education is that there is no incentive to do better. The system is counter to innovation. Tenure creates a situation where the teachers have no incentive. Yes, there are good teacher out there, that don’t need an incentive at all, but go to any inter city school, and you will find teachers that are only there to get a check, even drinking on the job. Even when I went to school, 20+ years ago, we all knew which teachers drank all day, and there were a number of them. In what other job is this even remotely possible?
The second biggest problem in education, is that everyone at the schools think they all know better than the parents or the kids. The people paying for the service have no say in the service at all. Normally, in a market environment, nobody would pay for crappy service. The bad teachers and school would be gone. In our current educational system, the parents have no say, but the money is taken from them anyways. This is the ONLY reason the crap can continue. It should not be educators telling the kids what they should learn. It should be the kids and parents telling the educators what to teach. Yes, some parents will be dumb, but this can’t be as bad as people with no experience in the real world deciding what should be taught. Even as a kid, I knew exactly the areas that I was going to eventually go into. My school tho, kept me from doing those things. Even my senior year, I had teachers telling me I was wrong to drop my 12th year of english for an art class. How moronic is that? I was a senior, and already accepted into college, yet they thought 1 more english class would help more than an art class. I knew much better where the world was going than any teacher in my high school, yet they were dictating to me how I should spend my time. School was, pretty much, just wasting my time. At least in college, I was paying for it, so I stopped after 2 years and not being able to take even 1 class that I wanted.
I look at my nieces and nephews now, as they are graduating. They feel pretty much exactly the same. They are all artistic, and none of them learned anything at all about creating art in the real world. The kids were told 3D isn’t really art. 3 different schools, but all 3 art teachers were against computers, in the year 2015. And these people are guiding our kids.
Reminds me of my Art School days. I was made to decide which path to take to study, fine art or graphics design. It was hard to choose since the direction i wanted to take was digital art, an area that was brand new and not yet catered for by the established educational system. I wanted to do 3D, comics, painting and what ever else to get ideas out of my head but the art schools just wanted me to rehash the old paradigms.
Sites like deviant art have made old school illustration fresh. Where once i was pushed to be an illustrator because it was a unique and rare skill, now i see millions of great illustrators out there. in the past few years i’ve seen 3D modelling start to appear just as much an art form as illustrations. This i think is in part due to the technology. WebGL has opened a lot of doors for exhibiting 3D work to the mainstream. Thanx to sites like SketchFab, Deviantart now shows 3D modelling along side Illustrations.
I’m not a fan of Art Education, i learnt nothing useful in my days of art school towards what i’m doing now. 🙂
Reblogged this on Jo Yardley's Second Life.
Wanted to add that the above snapshot from Silly dancing [with whom by the way???] features her original Power Point presentation she gave in SL in 2008. GUILTY AS CHARGED SILLY!!!!
LOL Drax! The person I am dancing with is my close friend Gethsemane Idler (credits are on the photo btw, tho Geths did point out the font was a bit ‘fancy.’ Geths also shot the photo of me on my original avi (Faythe Fouroux) and photoshopped her into a classroom for a project I was working on for my online grad class in edtech. That wasn’t the ONLY Power Point I made in SL back then, I was rather good at them and even recently presented a slide show inworld as a part of my Miss Virtual World experience!
I wanted to clear up a part of the interview. You had asked me what the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) was and my response was edited with a bit of what the DEN is as well as what Discovery Education is and I wanted to be clear that they are two different, but related things. The DEN is like a massive PLN (personal learning network) of teachers and administrators from all over the United States. It is free to join. In the DEN educators share ideas with one another and learn from one another on all sorts of topics though it is heavily focused on edtech. Discovery Education is an online subscription based service of videos, images, audio, text used to enhance lessons. They also have content creation tools that can be used in conjunction with their service (and are a part of it at no additional charge) where teachers can create assignments, quizzes, and projects.
You had already provided a link to Discovery Education, so here is one specifically to the DEN: http://bit.ly/1E1Adf9
LOL! Nice commercial for me and my modeling services there at the end Drax! ❤
SL Blog: http://sillyavro.com/
RL Blog: http://mrsruiz.net/
Thank you sooo much for chatting with me Drax! I have been a long time fan of your work and it was a special treat to be able to chat with you! 😀
Reblogged this on Being Silly and commented:
Was so thrilled to be a part! Thanks, Drax!
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I am ROFL and fell off my chair Jerry…..
Wanted to link to Silly’s post = must read http://mrsruiz.net/2015/01/14/instructional-design-principles-and-distance-education/
Okay thanks, Drax….Black Mirror…now you got me hooked….!
oh YEAH – it is magnificent storytelling…[also his series “TV Ruined Your Life” is great!
Will check it out! Ü