The Social English Course on Kamimo Islands

This is a Team Blog for the teachers and participants on a test course within Second Life, run as part of the Kamimo Islands Project. You'll find the main blog for the entire project at http://kamimo-islands.blogspot.com/.

The purpose of this blog is to share with participants and other team members some of the ideas being talked about as we wrestle with the whole idea of creating a useful, worthwhile interactive course within a medium like Second Life.

The team members (at time of writing) are myself, David Richardson, from Högskolan i Kalmar in southern Sweden; Dr Bryan Carter from Central Missouri State University; Dr Mats Deutschmann from Mittuniversitet in Härnösand in northern Sweden; and Judith Molke-Danielsen from Høgskole i Molde in Norway.

I've been working with ICT-based distance courses for more years than I'd care to think of; Bryan has a lot of experience with running courses virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular; Mats has also worked extensively with ICT-based distance courses and did his doctorate in one aspect of the 'real' meaning of politeness in British English (!); and Judith has both worked and written extensively on the whole topic of the development of ICT for educational purposes. Judith is also responsible for evaluating this particular course within the Kamimo Project.

The Social English for Doctoral Students course itself is largely performance-based. This means that participants don't really have to do very much in between course sessions - everything happens on the day. As such it doesn't really need much of a web site or platform on which to run (apart from Second Life, that is).

I have, however, created a sort of 'library' on the web from where you can download documents you might find interesting or useful. You'll find this at:

http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/kamimosoceng/index.htm

I'll try to keep the documents in widely available formats, like .rtf and .pdf.

At present, the Team Members who can post of this forum are the teachers involved. If any of the participants want to be able to post articles here, just get in touch with me (david.richardson@hik.se), and you'll get a mail from Blogger inviting you to become a team member too. Anyone can, of course, comment on the articles posted.

Welcome to the blog - the next article will be about the planning meeting for Session 1, which was held via Marratech on 3rd September.