Encke 2011 - Encke Virtual University Collaboration

You are invited to participate in a first of a kind event, an in-world mixture of conference, workshop and collaboration, to discuss, design, build, operate and evaluate various virtual teaching and learning spaces for the university environment of the twenty first century!

This unique event will begin with an intensive two day in-world meeting that will consist of a series of plenary talks, small group discussions and report back sessions, workshops, tutorials, demonstrations and tours. Over the following 4 weeks some of the main ideas and concepts for virtual teaching, learning and meeting spaces developed by participants will be constructed on the new virtual university island (with assistance from professional SL builders). Then over the next 3 months participants will be able to book and use these spaces for their own teaching and learning sessions, role plays and meetings. During this time there will be informal follow-up and evaluation meetings. Traditional conferences last a few days and allow for ideas to be presented and for some follow-up discussion to occur.

Standard workshops and tutorials often last a few hours or a day and while they often demonstrate and talk about skills they don't usually allow from much practice, testing or feedback on new ideas. We intend this new style of collaborative event to take the best of these traditional formats and add in the time and the facilities for extended collaboration which will see ideas put into practice and at least some preliminary evaluations undertaken. We plan to repeat the collaboration (ANZVUC2) in March 2012 with the idea refining and extending the ideas and creations of first event.

The plan is to have the virtual university island(s) as an ongoing collaborative and space to allow for construction and testing of applications of virtual world technologies to university teaching and learning. We welcome your ideas and suggestions for this and future events.