Winter for eCampus staff is a great time to catch up on our own professional development, and earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend this conference in San Francisco with a variety of participants who are involved using virtual worlds in education. One the best things about this conference was the smaller size compared to other ones I’ve attended. It was interactive too, we use a conference app to communicate and a communal Padlet for reflection on the sessions. Basically, it was like a two day breakout session with passionate and creative educational professionals, and I got to meet and network with old friends and new!
I was delighted to be able to finally meet (in-person) my mentor and the Director of the Community Virtual Library, Dr. Valerie Hill. I also got to meet the CVL’s Co-Director, Alyce Dunavant-Jones who just graduated from SJSU’s MLIS program that is also connected with CVL. (In fact, Alyce also posted about the event at the SJSU School of Information blog.) I met Val and Alyce last year at the OpenSim Community Conference and I’m delighted to be co-presenting with Val for the same conference next week!
In addition to learning from a variety of different sessions, I loved getting to know some of the amazing instructional design team from University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I also got the chance to meet and extensively mingle with the leadership of Rockcliffe University Consortium who sponsor many of the conferences related to virtual worlds and education. As with Valerie and Alyce, some of these people I’ve met in-world at one event or another, and meeting in-person was just like meeting an old friend!
I also met Renne Emiko Brock who teaches multimedia studies at Peninsula College in Washington and we immediately “clicked”. She has worked with Valerie before, and I’ve seen her present in-world on several occasions. I immediately recognized her because she looks the same as her avatar! Before the group dinner together on the second night, Renne, Val, and I began talking about me making a visit to Washington this summer to visit both of them, and for the three of us to co-present on our overlapping projects at one or more conferences in 2019. So here’s to the authenticity of in-world relationships, and some exciting times ahead in virtual worlds and education!