The End of EVO Minecraft MOOC and Electronic Village Online wrap-up for 2021 – Week 5 Focus on Community

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Learning2gether Episode 509

Navigation

Follow EVOMC21 miners as they win the dragon head in the End
EVO wraps up its latest round of 20th anniversary sessions
See more highlights from EVOMC21 Week 5
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

I should begin this post by saying that although Minecraft is not necessarily a game per se, it has an End. According to https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/The_End, the revered creator of Minecraft, Notch, was quoted saying in 2009 that “”While it could be fun to just see how long you can survive in survival mode, I believe there might be a need for some kind of goal,” and in 2011 in the Gallery on The_End page, you can see the first screenshot of an ender dragon ever released, in 2011, and here as well, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Ender_Dragon.

A few years later, on March 19, 2016, EVO Minecraft MOOC miners went on a quest to slay the Ender Dragon, an in-world adventure shared among EVOMC16 miners Linda Gielen, Rose Bard, Mircea Patrascu, Aaron Schwartz, and Vance Stevens, recorded for posterity at
https://learning2gether.net/2016/03/19/evo-minecraft-mooc-in-a-quest-for-the-ender-dragon/ 


This produced three videos. This is the first one, where Rose activated the End portal

That was only my 2nd year playing Minecraft and I participated only with the coaching of my esteemed colleagues who told me what to bring and where to hide. The End is full of endermen, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Enderman. who don’t like water, so we created a shelter two blocks high (they are too tall to get under that) and surrounded it with a moat and stood our ground.


This is how we, or I should say, my more knowledgeable colleagues, secured our base in the End in 2016


I really didn’t have a clue about what the End was or what I was doing there. But being there is how we learn.

Now seven years into our series of annual EVO Minecraft MOOC sessions, I still would not independently know how to get into the End, because it’s not something that has fallen into the natural just-in-time progression of what I’ve felt I needed to know about Minecraft (though I now recall entering through the portal shown in our videos above). Just recently, Aaron screen shared a live-streamed encounter with the ender dragon in our EVOMC21 kickoff event and we caught it on YouTube, queued to the spot just before it appears here https://youtu.be/1FfCGuxnafo?t=4353 (and if that doesn’t work 1:12:30 in the YouTube video). This probably made little impression on much of our audience that night, because you have to have already thrown yourself into a participatory culture before you can comprehend the power and impact your move can have on your practice. For most users, myself included, any hope of experiencing the End is the embodiment of community effort. For those of you teaching language learners, you might extrapolate this out as a community-based project in your own language class.

But one of the remarkable things about learning in a community of practice is that community members are continually scaffolding you. Some of what you thought you didn’t need to know is modeled for you by more advanced players. For example, I’ve skirted for years around the issue of enchantments until Olivetree finally took the time and showed me how (because I asked; when the student is ready the teacher appears, search for the video further down in this post) – and suddenly experience points (XP in Minecraft) make a lot of sense, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Experience (you need XP to catalyze enchantments; incidentally this is one of numerous examples of gamification in Minecraft, in case someone wants to argue with you that Minecraft is not a gamified environment).

I’ve learned this and that about redstone along the way but never saw where I needed to make machines myself, until Finch offered to show us how to create piston-driven traps, https://learning2gether.net/2021/02/09/week-4-in-evo-minecraft-mooc-highlights-networking-with-and-learning-from-students-and-peers/#Finch, and suddenly the penny drops: maybe catch animals or wandering mobs outside your house overnight. There are many more imaginative things you can do with this knowledge, but finally, after 7 years dabbling in Minecraft, I suddenly want to learn more about enchantments and redstone, and more importantly actually exercise what I’ve learned, and maybe soon I’ll be ready for the nether and more of the End.

Learning through a community can sometimes be daunting and seem overwhelming, because there is so much there that just breezes over your head at first. You nod and say, that’s nice, but what I really need to know is ‘how can I create a dirt shelter minutes before nightfall using only my hands and some wood and cobblestone I’ve spent the day gathering.’ And then you realize how far you have to go to become a Minecraft teacher. One approach is to get your students to teach you, as we did with Finch :-), or as I did in gathering together a number of colleagues in 2015 who could teach me enough about Minecraft that eventually I could teach others. But to succeed you need to work your community. The more they know the more you know, and the more you will be able to learn. You’ll soon rise to their level. Soon? Well I’ve been at it for 7 years, but there are people like our participant Mirea this year who have put in the time and persistence and requested help and good company when she felt she could use the support, and now she is teaching us (search for her name in this post below 🙂 )

On Feb 12, 2021 Mirea posted this in our Discord chat:

Mirea Artican at 2:32 PM – For the record, 1 reason I tend to TP more often to you, BB vs. TV is ’cause I’m actually afraid of zombies, skeletons, and other unfriendly creatures too! :see_no_evil: Good thing TV bravely leads us in front often! :slight_smile:
TeacherVance at 2:34 PM – I used to be concerned about them as well, so one reason I’m making these videos is to show they are really nothing to be afraid of, an inconvenience at worst, and working as a team, you can easily overcome them and accomplish your goals, and have FUN too
Mirea Artican at 2:37 PM – It’s always more fun together with good company like you. 😀
TeacherVance at 2:39 PM – yep, community of practice, participatory culture, scaffolding and support networks

2021-02-12mireaDiscord

I didn’t expect that EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021 would come to such a definitive End, but that’s what Dakohah Redstone had in store for us on the night of Feb 13, 2021, as Bobbi Bear and I were about to go to bed. I suppose this was the final official event of EVOMC21 before the EVO 2021 wrap up event 24 hours later.

A question and a more explicit answer to the riddle (and thanks for the question 🙂

2021-02-14hanaaComment

Read on, Macduff!
(From a common misquote of Shakespeare, https://historyhouse.co.uk/articles/macbeth.html)


Sat 13 Feb 1430 UTC Dakotah Redstone guides EVO Minecraft MOOCers from the Endicot signpost to capturing the dragon head in the End

Bobbi and I had hung out online all day on our next to last day of EVOMC21 looking for anyone who wanted to engage in meaningful play, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, EVOMC21 miners generally sleep while Bobbi Bear and I monitor from Malaysia for any activity on the server. We hadn’t planned this one, but the event spawned when we found Dakotah Redstone in Discord #serverchat just as we were sitting down to dinner and he told us that he had put himself down to man the nightwatch our last night in EVOMC21 and his last day there. This was nightwatch for us, but breakfast or lunchtime for many of our miners.

Dak likes to announce his events in Google Calendar. We have to monitor that as well; otherwise they are easy to miss.

We had our dinner quickly and eagerly went back to the server to see what Dakotah had cooked up for us. He was waiting for us in an overhang shelter near a signpost pointing to Endicot because it’s in the End part of Minecraft where the ender dragon resides, though he had nothing in store for us as banal as having yet another go at the ender dragon. We were heading for End City, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/End_City, and Dakotah would be our skilled and venerable guide to accomplish his last mission to End EVO Minecraft MOOC for 2021

We equipped ourselves as instructed beforehand (melee weapons, bows and arrows, iron armor but not diamond because we were told to bring nothing we didn’t want to lose, and tp’d to Dakotah.

Video title
Dakotah Redstone guides EVO Minecraft MOOCers through Endicot to capture the dragon head in the End
https://youtu.be/s02SFtGeHAE

Dak had created 2-block high structures for defense against ender mobs along the shulker-strewn route from the Endicot signpost all the way to our destination which, though we didn’t know it yet, was the End Ship hovering over End City https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/End_City#End_Ship. On arrival we cowered under one of those and surveyed the endless fields of dimly lit lime colored end stone. He instructed us on how to approach shulkers and avoid their missiles, which when they hit you, they make you rise to heights where, when their effect wears off, you fall and die, unless you are under something that will prevent your infinite rise.

See https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Shulker#Behavior for more information and a gif on how shulkers fire their bullets, and here for the levitation effects if you are hit by a shulker bullet, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Levitation

We proceeded, under attack most of the way, to a bridge leading to a strange castle where we had to eliminate shulkers by locating where they were shooting from and take them out with bows and arrows as if we were in combat, climb its towers, always under attack from shulker fire, and then cross over from there to the End Ship floating in the void by constructing a bridge to the ship where at the prow there was a dragon figurehead which Jane Chien, who had joined us by then, and at Dak’s encouragement, removed but dropped — but Dak had anticipated that and created a pool far below into which we all leapt (safely because we landed in water), and recovered it. Jane put it on and we all celebrated Chinese New Years with her while outside our house in real life Penang, fireworks were popping off all around town. These were private celebrations though, as no lion dances were allowed in Penang this year due to lockdown.

At the prow we had found some elytra wings; but it was getting late at night for Bobbi and I so we tp’d back home to our Palace to preserve our gains, but without the contents of Bobbi’s death chest which she had lost by leaping wide of the pool, and we assumed her chest had been lost in the infinite void. But next day Dak let her know he had found it and she was able to recover it.

2021-0214bobbiDeathChest

So our evening and this year’s EVO Minecraft MOOC session for 2021 Ended on this big bang, with Olivetree joining us at the very end.

The video is long, an hour and a half, but unique, and interesting, if you like that sort of thing.

Places where we have posted regarding our completion of and reflections on EVO Minecraft MOOC

On Facebook groups

And at Groups.io

The inevitable tweet

In the End, we Ended up with 9 tweeted reflections from two EVO Minecraft MOOC participants aggregated at this link
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23evomc21&src=typeahead_click&f=live


Sun 14 Feb 1400 UTC EVO 2021 annual wrap up Zoom meeting

All EVO participants were invited to the EVO 2021 annual wrap up Zoom meeting on Feb 14, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

All participants and moderators of TESOL CALL-IS Electronic Village Online sessions were welcome to attend and help close the 20th annual 5-week culmination of this year’s EVO.

Here’s the slide show
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1idxoGOMtKfmDUfLIXEk-m8nSJLs0AzbSwoPe8bQdyQs/edit?usp=sharing

Feedback from Christine Bauer Ramazani

We just concluded the live 20th anniversary of EVO Closing Ceremony, celebrating the successful conclusion of five weeks of intensive teaching and learning in 19 incredible EVO sessions. What an amazing experience it’s been! This is probably THE most meaningful endeavor of my 40+-year teaching career. We have reached over 50,000 ESL/EFL teachers on every continent That is inclusive learning and teaching! My gratitude goes to all past and present EVO coordinators, EVO moderators, and EVO participants. This endeavor would not have been possible without you! Get ready to join us for a special 20th anniversary Webinar hosted by TESOL on May 26, 9:00-10:30 am US EDT on “20 Years of Free Professional Development in Online Teaching/Learning for English Language Teachers Worldwide”; Registration is at https://my.tesol.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=253cf6e7-fc2e-493d-ad11-fd2ff4be3cc9&Home=%2fevents%2ftesol-events

Vance’s screenshot perspectives

A slightly different grouping in each of these 🙂

EVO Minecraft MOOC co-moderator Chien Jane speaks for all of us

Hurray!! Concluded EVO’s 5-week free PD sessions for educators around the globe; this year we had 19 sessions!! We will be celebrating the 20th Anniversary of TESOL’s CALL-IS Electronic Village Online during TESOL 2021 Virtual Conference Best of EVO and on May 26, 9:00-10:30 am US EDT, TESOL is hosting the 20th anniversary Webinar entitled “20 Years of Free Professional Development in Online Teaching/Learning for English Language Teachers Worldwide.” We’re inviting past EVO Lead Coordinators to celebrate this important milestone!!

Thanks, Christine Bauer-Ramazani for taking us on this incredible journey and for organizing this important event! Thanks, Martha Ramirez our Head Lead for this year, Natasa Bozic Grojic, Lead Coordinator, and Nellie Deutsch, incoming Lead Coordinator for this Amazing year!! I’ve learned so much working with you! High five to the rest of us on the EVO Coordinating Team: Vance Stevens, Rose Bard, Larisa Olesova, Sanja Bozinovic, Sheryl A. McCoy, D G Andrea Juliana, Mbarek Akaddar! And as Christine put it, the fun continues!  https://youtu.be/6d5FA0nvjh4

I would also like to thank my colleagues I-Shan Jenny Chen and Michelle Jose for co-moderating Scientific Literacy & CLIL with me and hosting live events every week!

Also, to our Minecraft Mooc lead moderator Vance Stevens and the moderating team Bobbi Stevens, Rose Bard, Aaron Schwartz, Maha Abdelmoneim, Laura Briggs, Kim Harrison, Don Carroll, Mircea Patrascu and Dakotah Redstone for another fun year interacting in-world in Minecraft. Love the adventures we had together! Thanks Rose for giving the talk on Key Aspects of Teacher Development in Minecraft  with me and for selflessly sharing your experience building MineAcademy!!!

 


More highlights from EVOMC21 Week 5

Sun 14 Feb Teacher Vance hiked out from the palace to find Mircea Patrascu and his horse Vifor wandering in the badlands

On the next-to-last day of EVO Minecraft MOOC, the famous explorer MP was interviewed by Mircea Patrascu, who reported it to us on Facebook:


Read the blog post, and many more engaging tales of the adventures of the incorrigible MP, here https://evominecraftmp.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/a-story-about-friendship/

So when I saw Mircea on the server via our dynamic map http://mc.evomc.net:8123/
and saw he was not far from where I was, I didn’t bother to teleport, I just headed out over the badlands and caught up with him by positioning my avatar ever closer to his as I tracked him on the dynamc map. When I caught up with him, I found he wasn’t in Discord voice, so we chatted in Minecraft text, which is programmed to feed into the EVO Minecraft MOOC Discord channel #serverchat. This gives us the option to monitor or engage in-game text chat from either app.

Referring to to blog post above, I told Mircea I’d read “so much” about his horse, Vifor

Vifor seemed happy to hear this

Here, Mircea is letting me have a ride on Vifor before I hand him back.

Actually I didn’t really want to ride Vifor around, I just wanted a selfie 🙂

MP had dropped his lead when he’d handed off the horse and I’d walked over it. We didn’t see it at first, which is why he was looking for it, but when I checked my inventory and found it there, I Q’d it back at him (pressing Q on the keyboard ejects whatever is in your hand and throws it on the ground). Then I pressed S a couple of time to step back so I wouldn’t pick it up again (objects on the ground tend to fly back at nearby players). That’s where Mircea said he had found it, and I said I had found it right after that, meaning I’d found it in my inventory (and thrown it at him).

Last seen, the intrepid MP was heading off into the sunset on his faithful horse, Vifor.

 

Sat 13 Feb Teacher Vance and Bobbi Dare Bear invited company for Meaningful Play Sandbox Adventure at Pirate’s Cove

Sura (a.k.a. Laura Briggs) posted this on our Facebook page while Bobbi Bear and I were sleeping so when we woke up in the morning, it was the first thing we saw.

So we tried to organize an adventure. This was Teacher Vance’s reply:
Bobbi Dare Bear and Teacher Vance will check this out Saturday at around 2:30 am UTC.
Anyone is welcome to join us if you like to do such things in a merrie band and in good company.

Then we saw that Abu Fletcher had responded to Sura’s post by asking about the warp point for Ocean Temple Arena so while waiting for anyone to take us up on our initiation, I created the map below and posted it with this message. 

Hi Don Carroll I made a map here showing the locations and warp points for the attractions Laura aka Sura has created in the double_villages area. No one is around to experience these with us this morning except Sura is online. I’ll see if she wants to show us around; otherwise work on other things while awaiting anyone else who might want to join us.

Just then Sura went offline so we are waiting  now to see if anyone will join us, at 3 am UTC.

No one did, so Bobbi and I spent this day busy with our own projects but keeping our eye on the dynamic map and the spontaneous meetup spreadsheet here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing

Eventually, we went to Pirate’s_Cove ourselves, negotiated the maze of walkways that once you are on them, it’s hard to find your way back, and eventually escaped to climb a few waterfalls. We didn’t find the secret entrance through. We really need a guided tour to narrow down for us which of the three waterfalls we should be focusing on and otherwise help us make it an efficient visit unless we break through blocks to get to where we think we should be. Sura has created this as a set piece though, se we didn’t want to do that.

But Sura’s builds in EVOMC21 have been examples of modeling for teachers what someone with the requisite skills (and perms; permissions on the server) could create that might be useful in crafting environments for student learning. Sura created the spawn area in a matter of days, and opened up access to mines there full of minerals at the sweet spot, level 11 as well as at Pirate’s_Cove, and at two other locations we visited and archived below, /warp awesome and /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves. She was good at creating notices that presented her builds as attractions; I noticed that Mirea spend a lot of time at her /warp double_village, and once Bobbi Bear and I had shown it to her, repeatedly visited Sura’s walled desert city nearby. None other than Mircea, the illustrious MP, trekked overland, sometimes leading his horse Vifor, to make a pilgrimage there to view its colorful squares and tall towers. 

Some days after the end of EVOMC21, Sura posted in Discord that she had created a build on her Bedrock realm to commemorate the NASA Mars Rover Landing February 19, 2021: Celebrating the NASA Mars Rover landing on Mars today, I have added a Mars MC game to my Bedrock (not Java) realm. You are invited to try it out and survive on Mars as you build a base and explore the alien civilizations. Join link: https://realms.gg/temZGkU1hH4 

I reposted it to Facebook with the following commentary:

2021-02-21suraMarsLander

 

Fri 12 Feb 0200 UTC Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear pursue a treasure map found on a shipwreck to a happy ending

We announced this adventure in our spontaneous meetup spreadsheet here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing

Some time ago Olivetree was helping Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance survive the looting of a shipwreck near a place I dubbed /warp shipwreck_city (because the wreck was on a sandbar near a village). More on that here, http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#TeacherVanceandBobbiBearBlazeatrailfromOlivetreesSandboxMeadowtoShipwreckCityandtheSkyboxShelter, but thanks to her, I just barely came away from that with my my original possessions intact, but I managed to filch a treasure map from the submerged chest inside the shipwreck. I’ve been hanging on to it for safekeeping, thinking to pass it on to my children, but then Bobbi Bear and I were looking for something to do today so we decided to pull out the treasure map and dust it off.

So we made the announcement in the screenshot above. Then we went to one of our homes in the hills behind Shipwreck City, a place I call Glasshouse, and what Bobbi calls ‘ducks’ in her list of home destinations, and had a look at the map. There is a little white dot showing where you are on the map, and if that dot is at the edge of the map it means you are off the map itself but your destination lies in the direction of the red X relative to the dot. For example, I saw that, as viewed from Shipwreck City, the dot on the map was in the upper left corner of the map, the far northwest corner, meaning the treasure marked by X on the map was to the south east. But it could be anywhere to the southeast.

One area we’ve been playing around in lately, /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves, lies to the south and east of shipwreck city, so I warped there and had a look at the map. From that I was able to triangulate on the approximate location of the treasure chest marked by the red X on the map.

Armed with the map and that approximate triangulation, we set out on today’s adventure, and the video shows how we got there and what we found.

Video Title:
Teacher Vance & Bobbi Bear follow a treasure map to a happy ending on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server
https://youtu.be/HezRliwHjE4

 

Thu 11 Feb 1400 UTC Meetup with Olivetree for learning about enchantments and potions

Video title:
Olivetree_Gro tutors Teacher Vance & Bobbi Bear from Knowhere Zero to Enchanted – EVO Minecraft MOOC
https://youtu.be/2f383S3HI_U

What is this about?

Olivetree Grove graciously offered to spend time with Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance and show us how to get started with enchanting objects. She took us through all the steps in three ways to acquire enchantments. The last one was to find villagers who would sell you an enchantment which you could then take to an anvil and expend the required experience points to enchant the object you wished lay the enchantment on.

Bobbi and I are both divers-in-lockdown, so our choice was to create enchanted helmets which we could put on to give us extended time underwater. Having succeeded in that, we went with the helmets to the nearby reefs and chased dolphins before I came up on a spot of land, shook myself dry, and ended the video 🙂

How did this event come about?

The genesis of this event is again illustrative of how events in EVOMC21 occur. It started when I woke up in the morning and checked the Discord #serverchat to see what had taken place overnight. Because I am in Malaysia, half a world away from where many of our participants are, the server is often active while Bobbi Bear and I sleep.

This conversation intrigued me. Mirea Artican has found an enchanted book, in this case one that enchants an object with silk touch, see https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Silk_Touch
and https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Enchanting for an overview of enchantments.

mireaartican (Fisherman) » OMG!!! I finally got the SILK TOUCH enchanted book! ❤

OlivetreeToday at 3:34 PM – very useful . The best three enchants that I always look for are Mending which can go on everything, Infinity which goes on a bow and with it you need only one arrow and Efficiency which allows you to mine or dig much faster. Silk touch is also very important up there maybe even better than Efficiency because with it you can pick up Bee hives and other stuff without losing them.

bobbi Today at 3:54 PM – how did you get the enchant? I have two books but have not used them yet

TeacherVance Today at 4:09 PM – There are three days left in evomc21, maybe @Olivetree can show us one or two of them, or possibly after this session we’ll have time to Google them and have a look in those books. Personally I’d like to know how to make an infinity bow and also learn how to breath under water. Right now I’m tied down with rendering videos, working on one of three still in the hopper :slight_smile:

mireaartican (Fisherman) » I got the books from a temple in the desert…

bobbi Today at 4:16 PM I have two enchanted books; I need an anvil to get them to work though right?

mireaartican (Fisherman) » The anvils in the tutorial room will work for both nametags and more enchantments. 😀

bobbi Today at 4:21 PM yay!

Olivetree Today at 4:33 PM – You can get enchanted books in three ways. 1- As treasures from chests in dungeons and temples or from mobs or fishing. 2- creating them on an enchanting table using a book, lapsi lazuli and your XP. 3- Buy them from a Librarian Villager using emeralds, and for this you need to know how to work with librarians to get what you want instead of just any random book which requires time and patience. :slight_smile: and yes @bobbi you need an anvil to add a book to an item.
@TeacherVance I can do a session about books and enchanted books and maybe librarians tomorrow if you want.

bobbi  Today at 4:37 PM – That would be cool!

TeacherVanceToday at 4:44 PM – That would be super. I wonder if you could visit the spreadsheet here,
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing because it gives you time in SFO (pacific times in Discord) times GMT to which you can easily recalculate your time (or I could add a Cairo column for you) and times in Malaysia. If you can find a time that’s convenient for you and for @Mirea Artican and @bobbi  that would be SUPERcool.  I’ve already penciled in a event there but you can bump me if you want, I haven’t announced it anywhere but here. Thanks so much for the offer :slight_smile:

Olivetree Today at 6:00 PM – 1400 UTC today is doable and yes sure you can record  @TeacherVance

TeacherVance Today at 9:11 PM – wow, thanks, cya in discord for further instructions

And that is how Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear got a private tutorial (anyone was invited, but no else came) with the very knowledgeable and enchaning Olivetree_Grove. Fortunately, we recorded it 🙂

This was a busy day. Earlier Sura had posted this

2021-02-12oceanRuins

abufletcher joined the server

TeacherVance Today at 8:23 PM – hey abu

abufletcher (No Job) » Hi, Vance. I had to login to see the stronghold. But I’m not sure which is more exciting, that or the above ground ocean temple.

TeacherVance Today at 8:25 PM – i was planning to visit that tomorrow but I can catch a sneak prview if there’s room for two

abufletcher (No Job) » Curious. As I enter the Ocean Temple Arena all my inventory disappears.
Room for many: /warp OceanRuins&Stronghold. Or just tp to me. No Discord on this computer.

Surajmuhki Today at 8:28 PM – In the Arena, the gamemode is changed to Adventure and you survival inventory will be saved and return when you are out of the Arena region. Don’t forget to click the Kit sign once downstairs in the Ocean Temple- which is also called an Ocean Monument…no guardian fish mobs… :slight_smile:

Today at 8:29 PM – abufletcher (No Job) » OK. Well, here I go!

TeacherVance Today at 8:29 PM – sorry talking to olivetree, go where?

abufletcher (No Job) » Hey there!

TeacherVance was slain by Zombie

bobbibear joined the server

abufletcher was slain by Zombie

abufletcher left the server

abufletcher joined the server

TeacherVance was slain by Zombie

~Vance (No Job) » I’ll have to find out more about that place before revisiting, I got some pictures though

Greeting party on arrival 🙂

I sidestep. Abu Fletcher distracts the attackers

Now they turn their attention on me

This is all happening very fast

I’ve turned to run

Teacher Vance’s last stand

SurajmuhkiToday at 8:33 PM – Did you do all 4 waves of mobs?

TeacherVanceToday at 8:34 PM – couldn’t get through the 1st one

SurajmuhkiToday at 8:38 PM – @TeacherVance If you run away for a second, they will spread out and be easier to get once separated a little, sort of come at them from behind

Today at 8:40 PM – abufletcher (No Job) » So where’s the entrance to the stronghold?

SurajmuhkiToday at 8:40 PM – look in the buildings for a stairway that goes down

Today at 8:41 PM – abufletcher (No Job) » I’ll check again. Haven’t seen any stairways.

SurajmuhkiToday at 8:41 PM – middle tall building, I think it is
you are there Abu, do you see the stairs?

Today at 8:42 PM – abufletcher (No Job) » Thanks. Found it.

SurajmuhkiToday at 8:42 PM – cool!

This is what we had forgot to do. Go here first and then try it.

 

Thu 11 Feb 0230 UTC Meetup with Mirea for Mining in Zombieland

Yesterday Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance met Mirea Artican at a a place on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server that Sura had enhanced in a flower forest biome called /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves. We created a video but then ventured into an unsanitized part of the cave complex. We enjoyed it so much we plan to return tomorrow, but not carry anything we would miss if we couldn’t retrieve it. You are welcome to join us.

Above is a screenshot of the cave exterior. Below is our video from before things got hectic
https://youtu.be/W-cQWITgQik

If there’s time we may visit the nearby /warp awesome mining spot as well. If we go there you might want to bring a chest to leave your valuables at the door and prepare to hold your breath, but once inside it’s awesome mining.

Where does this happen?

  • On the EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_server
  • You can text chat in Minecraft but it’s so much easier if we can speak to one another in our EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_Discord
    • We’ll be in Playground 3

When exactly? Thursday 02:30 UTC Feb 11; but Wed Feb 10 if you’re west of the Atlantic

We had arranged to meet Mireaa through her entry on the spontaneous meetup facilitator spreadsheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing

What happened?
This morning we had two rounds of Meaningful Adventure Sandbox Play on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server

 

Revisiting /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves

Video Title:
Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear, & Mirea Artican revisit mobs in Flower Forest Continuous Caves at EVOMC21
https://youtu.be/Y-BvADnfCFM

In this video Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear & Mirea Artican returned to the place that Sura had found in a naturally occurring Flower Forest biome and designated it /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves. We were there yesterday and left a base with crafting table, furnace and chests at level 11 right off some magma. We had also ventured up and down again to another part of the cave where we were overwhelmed with zombies and skeletons, also at level 11. The zombies were not able to reach us until we hacked our way down to them, and after we were overwhelmed by them and barely escaped with our goodies, we removed the blocks we’d crafted for our way down and thus blocked their way up. For our part, we discovered we didn’t need a crafted way down; we could jump down to where they were at the cost of only a heart or two, easily replenished by noshing on a carrot or a potato cake.

So our destination today was to revisit that place. Our video today is a comedy of errors and strategies we contrived on the fly to work as a team to try and leave at least one member standing so from wherever we respawned, we could /tp back to to recover our death chests — or if we all died, go to a /home somewhere to re-equip and then go all at once back to our death chests. That way, two of us could cover one miner recovering items, and then two cover the next person’s retrieval and so on. We also put torches around to try and minimize the presence of mobs, but in the end, as on the day before, we were happy to extract a few precious minerals from there and return to our base11 chests, all unscathed and richer from the experience, and feeling like accomplished pirates 🙂

 

Exploring /warp Awesome with its 50-block water slide and awesome zombie mining

On our second round of Meaningful Adventure Sandbox Play on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server on the morning of Feb 11, 2021, Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear, and Mirea Artican warped to a spot on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server that Sura has been developing at the site of a previously existing desert village there. The village is across the water from Dak’s pyramid and is in walking distance through the marsh past the witch’s hut to Dak’s skysaucer. Sura created a channel to what was once an inland lake near the town and opened it to the sea and built a pier there with a causeway to the town and placed a sign on the pier that instructs miners to enter the water, sink to the bottom, and follow the light, all while watching their bubbles vanish until, if they’ve done it correctly, they flush out into the thankfully well-lit caves on the other side and into a water slide. If you stay on the water slide you arrive all the way down at level 11, where all the goodies are.

In this video you see Vance, Mirea, and Bobbi orient on the environment, dig passages off the lava beds in hopes of finding diamonds there, and fend off creepers, zombies, skeletons, and even witches while gathering minerals, dying occasionally, respawning, and working as a team to successfully recover our materials and minerals, and in the end, surviving to mine another day. That is after all, the name of the game, the name of this mode of gameplay at any rate.

Video Title:
Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear, & Mirea Artican ride the awesome water slide for zombie mining at EVOMC21
https://youtu.be/YindsQ8xpX8

 

Wed 10 Feb 0200 UTC Meetup with Mirea for Meaningful Play Adventure Sandbox

Mirea indicated that she wanted to meet at 2 am UTC and

  • Practice making signs, creating stuff, and better decorating for parkour, a math mine, and the inside and outside of a home.
  • Progress on building a turtle or scute farm. (e.g. Collect more nautilus shells from shipwrecks &/or treasure chests for an underwater conduit &/or add ‘silk touch’ to a pickaxe.)
  • mireaartican (Fisherman) » have yet to figure out how to use the nametags with anvils…

To this I added, visit flower forest continuous caves

Inside the flower forest continuous caves

Where does this happen?

  • On the EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_server
  • You can text chat in Minecraft but it’s so much easier if we can speak to one another in our EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_Discord
    • We’ll be in Playground 3

When exactly? Tuesday 02:00 UTC Feb 10; but Mon Feb 9 if you’re west of the Atlantic

Arranged though the spontaneous meetup facilitator spreadsheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing

Announced on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/events/2924842307743694

What happened?

We had two adventures this morning.While waiting for Mirea to come online we took the Lodestone compass that Ari had left us for a walkabout, and when Mirea appeared, we went with her to explore what lay beneath the flowers at /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves

 

Teacher Vance & Bobbi Bear follow a lodestone compass to Ari’s Hidden Build in EVO Minecraft MOOC

Video title
Teacher Vance & Bobbi Bear follow a lodestone compass to Ari’s Hidden Build in EVO Minecraft MOOC
https://youtu.be/R2KT6dAoI1I

We had a little too much fun on this one. Mirea was delayed so Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance decided to check out the lodestone compass that was left at our home palace by Ari Bin Lazar in this box.

When held in the hand the compass has a pointer on it that show the direction you should travel to the ‘hidden build’. That direction was pretty much due east from our house, so we followed it out the trimmed paths to the river and crossed into the badlands terracotta-formed biome. We could see from there a spire of light going skyward, not exactly the way to hide a build :-).  It led us to Ari’s train creation, and we could see that Ari was there. I used the map to try to locate Ari but he must have been underground because our icons crossed paths on the vertical plane but obviously not on the horizontal one. After exploring what progress he’d made on this build (we had stumbled on this place before) I noticed the compass was still pointing east so we went that way until nightfall when we could see Ari’s huge balloon looming overhead.

We figured it was a compass pointing us east to whatever we did with it so we returned home for the night, but later Ari told me it pointed to /warp rockridge, a Blazing Saddles set he had created. I had earlier warped there as well, or actually to /warp The_Real_Rock_Ridge. So had we followed it further we might have ended up here:

 

Fun with Mirea exploring what lay beneath the flowers at /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves

Meanwhile when Mirea came online Bobbi Bear and I took ourselves to /warp FlowerForestContinuousCaves, a place that Sura has enhanced with fields of flowers set amid the dark oak forest, and created a lighted cave entrance with water slides leading to the far reaches all the way down to level 11. Mirea tp’d to us there and the video is an adventure getting down to that point, and a study in cooperation in working out how to assemble the tools for continued mining, from getting iron to setting up a crafting table and furnace so we could turn the iron ore into iron pickaxes so we could get at the redstone, to placing chests to store the things we held in excess of what we could carry so we could make room for the additional minerals. And we demonstrated the technique of tunnel mining, 1-block wide by 2 tall every two blocks apart so we could find all the resources in between.  We also cautioned about taking care digging below level 11 (never dig straight down) and how to quickly stem a sudden influx of water.  And then we said goodbye.

Video Title:
Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear & Mirea Artican mine Flower Forest Continuous Caves in EVO Minecraft MOOC
https://youtu.be/W-cQWITgQik

And after that, now off camera, we explored a little further and came to a deep hole where skeletons were shooting up at us. They couldn’t get to where we were though so we were able to practice using our bows on them.  Still they manage to kill Mircea from below and I overextended my reach by hacking a way down to them and getting killed, and then we had to all go down there and help each other recover our death chests. This became a cycle until zombies started coming at us like playing cards spewing from — a spawner maybe? – too many at a time. We finally regrouped at our palace, re-equipped with the bare essentials, and returned all at once to the place where the melee had occurred. We covered each others tails as each of us recovered our death chests and then used /home to get out of there.

But before we left we each made a /sethome there so we could go back, it was so much fun 🙂


Earlier Events

Jan 9 – Week 4 in EVO Minecraft MOOC highlights – Networking with and learning from students and clustered peers

https://learning2gether.net/2021/02/09/week-4-in-evo-minecraft-mooc-highlights-networking-with-and-learning-from-students-and-peers/

 

Wed 10 Feb 0200 EST – TESOL B-MEIS Webinar on Bilingual Education Leaders at the Graduate School Level

Topic

B-MEIS Webinar: Cultivating Bilingual Education Leaders: Tensions, Successes and Lessons Learned at Graduate School Level
hosted by TESOL’s Bilingual-Multilingual Education Interest Section (B-MEIS).

Here is the link to the webinar recording: https://youtu.be/shFEzKJ59d8

Description

This webinar proposal showcases original studies that attempt to recreate the different aspects of a bilingual education program and our participation in it as instructors, mentees, mentors, and direct protagonists of the challenges and tensions we encountered as we worked with novice and seasoned bilingual teachers and engaged in the figured world of bilingual teacher educators (Holland et al., 2001). The authors examine bilingual education preparation programs beyond the induction of future bilingual teachers with a focus on the exploration of its role in the continuous professional development of experienced teachers to become school leaders back to their school districts or to prepare teacher educators and researchers in other higher education institutions in the country. We discuss the tensions we encountered due to contradictory institutional language ideologies and practices, differing stances toward activism, and growth as bilingual teacher educators and researchers.

Registration

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIlde2spjsqEtKS6iyQMdaEwJVbctRHjVO-

Wed 10 Feb 1500 UTC – Free Webinar with Nik Peachey & Russell Stannard

Nik Peachey will be presenting along with Russell Stannard at the LanguagCert conference on the 3rd and 10th of Feb.

Russell will be presenting a range of tools for the remote classroom and Nik will be talking about creativity and sharing some ideas that you can integrate into your teaching in the remote or physical classroom.

For more details go to: https://cm.languagecert.org/en/about-us/events/2020/languagecert-teachers-seminar

Register to attend –

Wednesday 3 February 2021 at 7:30am GMT
Wednesday 10 February 2021 at 3pm GMT

Thu 11 Feb 1416 Oman time – Webinar on Teaching Media Literacy in the EAP Classroom by Dr. Anastasia Khawaja

English Language Centre at University of Technology and Applied Sciences-Ibri, Oman cordially invites to join a webinar on: Deconstructing Media and Decentering Perspectives: Teaching Media Literacy in the EAP Classroom by Dr. Anastasia Khawaja, USA on 11 February 2021 at 2:16 pm Oman Local Time GMT+4)

Sat 13 Feb 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.
Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

 

 

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is February 23, 2021 07:00 UTC

Week 4 in EVO Minecraft MOOC highlights – Networking with and learning from students and clustered peers

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Learning2gether Episode 508

Navigation

Learn about MineAcademy from Rose Bard
Learning redstone basics from Jamie’s young son Finch
See other highlights from EVOMC 2021 Week 4 – Cluster
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

Mon-Sun 1-7 Feb EVO Minecraft MOOC Week 4 – Cluster

EVOMC 2021 Week 4 – Cluster – Mon-Sun, Feb. 1-7, 2021

2021-02-08_21.37.34Bobbi Bear attracted a cluster of arrows on this visit to a dark alcove.

EVO Minecraft MOOC has ended as of this writing (see current date at bottom of this page as opposed to publication date above). This post provides an encapsulation of and a reflection on Week 4 of the 5 week EVO workshop session.

EVO is Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com. EVO is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC) is in its 7th year. I started EVO Minecraft MOOC (EVOMC15) so that I could learn about Minecraft and how I could possibly use it with students. My first forays with Minecraft were rather clumsy but we had gathered together a group of other noobs like myself as well as a smattering of colleague gamers who served as our gurus, plus some equally knowledgeable children. In that first and subsequent years the community has scaffolded us noobs into becoming less clumsy, little by little, year by year. Along the way we in EVOMC have become a true and vibrant community of practice inculcated into the participatory culture inherent in the game Minecraft and its surrounding larger community of Minecraft players and teachers everywhere.

I decided to dedicate each week to one of Dave Cormier’s five stages of success in MOOCs. These stages describe a natural progression of people becoming involved in MOOCs: Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster, and Focus.

2021-02-07_18.52.08One day the itinerant trader brought his llamas to cluster in our house for a while. No telling how they got in 🙂

Week 4 is the week that people in EVOMC21 might logically cluster according to the interests of certain members of the group. In our case, I think we formed two distinct clusters according to our timeszones.  Where I am in Malaysia, I was 12 hours distant from participants in the USA. There were many in between, but the most active participants in the USA, UK, and Egypt gravitated to the AZcraft server (Arizona?) where there was a very lively community of highly creative young miners. Thus our group tended to cluster on just diurnal rhythms.

2021-02-06_22.40.17

Dakotah Redstone confronts a hoglin one eventful evening in the nether. He encourages me to plunder the chests we find; says he’s in it for the bacon 🙂

Others of us found compatible players to accompany us in game. Bobbi Bear and I (Teacher Vance) clustered naturally with Mirea, a night owl teacher in San Francisco who seemed to enjoy our style of tutelage at first and quickly became proficient enough to teach us a few ropes. We also had a significant didactic encounter with Finch, the young son of one of our other participants. Finch took Bobbi Bear and I through the basics of redstone and showed us how to trigger mechanisms with it. We recorded that and posted it on YouTube, and archived it here as the second article in this blog post.

2021-02-06_22.35.08

Mirea Artican joins Dakotah and I and completes the cluster in the nether. Survival is possible under Dak’s expert guidance. Bobbi Bear passes messages from the overworld.

We also carried on with our networking with other co-communities. One of our longest running of these associations has been with VSTE, Virginia Society for Technology in Education. Kim Harrison, aka K4sons, hosts a Minecraft Monday event on the first Monday of every month. She is also a co-moderator of EVOMC21, and so our first event in Week 4 (last article in this post) featured K4son’s hosting of Dark Knight’s redstone workshop, part 2.

This post leads with an introduction to Bard Rose’s MineAcademy English Club, which she has set up as a space to allow her students to grow into English language learning though the meaningful play that we teachers are enjoying in order to learn what we want to know –> how Rose and other teachers in our community are using Minecraft to achieve desired outcomes with students. As this will be her focus for some time to come, and as she has invited us to join her in her MineAcademy journey, her presentation segues us nearly into week 5 of our MOOC, the focus stage.


Sun 07 Feb 1400 UTC – MineAcademy English Club – Bard Rose hosting

📣Rose Bard is PLANNING SUNDAY (02/07) LIVE SESSION!
🙃Topics of the session and pre-session reading task:
✅MineAcademy project: what I’ve done so far and what is next
✅Pedagogical approach: language learning and project-based frameworks I’ve designed in 2020
✅Discussion on Managing learners community in-game

📑Before discussing in-game management for educational purposes, I’ll discuss techniques of how game designers build community in and out of game.
💭“A ‘community’ can be thought of as a group of people who share informal relationships that are intimate, enduring, intense, and emotional. Communities form around a shared interest, need or expertise”

Online Community Building Techniques Used by Video Game Developers
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download…

This event was announced

Session description:

If students can learn English in a physical classroom with limited concrete resources, why wouldn’t they develop their communicative skills if class could happen inside in immersive ludic environment? Minecraft provides concrete experiences and meaningful opportunities to learn and practice the language. In MineAcademy English Club the official language is English; projects are negotiated and agency is promoted.

I’d love to share with EVOMC community how MineAcademy started, give an overview of the pedagogical frameworks I’ve created for language learning and managing project-based learning, and discuss managing students in-game.

And here’s the recording, https://youtu.be/wOsxn1lQDaw

Rose has blogged her own reflection on her presentation, here
https://rosebardeltdiary.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/mineacademy-in-game-management-qas/

There are many insights here but a pleasantly graphical one was how she characterized answers to one of the questions she had the audience answer in Mentimeter. The question was: “What challenges would you think we could face while running a class with children and teens in Minecraft (participants)?” and here is how she categorized the responses:


Credit: Categorizing participants’ answers as either cognitive or affective challenges (Rosemere Bard, 2021)


Learning redstone basics from Jamie’s young son Finch

Tue 09 Feb 0300 UTC Learning about Redstone with Finch and Jamie

This image is one of Teacher Vance’s screenshots from Dark Knight’s Tue 3 Nov VSTE Minecraft Monday workshop on Redstone basics

Teacher Vance knows a little about redstone in theory but has never built anything with it. Jamie’s son Finch is eager to show us what he knows about creating traps with redstone. Hopefully that means traps not meant for other players, using skills that can be applied to triggering mechanisms in general.

Finch agreed to meet Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear online at 3 am UTC on Tue Feb 9 and show us what he knows

I thought we would have these problems, assuming we would be playing in survival mode, as we usually do.

  1. We’ll have to find some redstone
  2. We’ll have to find a safe and appropriate place for our sandbox activities
  3. Finch will have to show us the basics
  4. We’ll go from there, avoiding inconvenience to other players

But we solved these problems by playing in CREATIVE MODE at /warp creativespawn on our EVOMC21 server.

The informal tutorial was recorded and is available here, https://youtu.be/DBuBmgzyw3E

This event is a good example of many of the basic tenants of Minecraft pedagogy. Kids like to be clever and creative and apply critical thinking to projects that engage them. They like to communicate about their projects though spoken discourse and even create records of them such as written or multimedia descriptions in order to teach their teachers, if one is available, but more so to communicate with their peers who may in turn be sharing what they know with them. The situation is ripe for presenting opportunities for community-based authentic communication in a first or target or tandem language language environment.

Minecraft-driven learning is just-in-time learning where students use google to research solutions to immediate conundrums (e.g. how do I make a hoe / start a farm in Minecraft). It is student-driven but can be teacher mediated if the teacher is familiar enough with the environment to mediate it. Thus it can be serendipitous and unpredictable, but with a teacher skilled in massaging the Minecraft environment, those features can be used along with the many inherently gamified elements in Minecraft to keep students playing as linguistic (or other) concepts are acquired.

Heartwarming feedback, speaks for itself (I’m in it for the participants, be they kids or peers):

Thanks Vance – Finch had a great time and talked about it all day the next day – thanks so much for the opportunity. He has been brainstorming since then about he and I could start a Minecraft English school together… so, while I’m not sure about THAT, I do love the collaborative opportunities it could bring! 🙂

***** (6 hours later, and I still haven’t emailed this)*****

As soon as finch got home from school today he started creating a ’school’ in Minecraft and talking more and more about his plan to start a school. I’m trying to lean him toward creating a list of topics that he’d like to teach about… and then we’ll go from there! 🙂 If I can figure out how to get our accounts unlinked from each other, I could be his pupil and we could do a Minecraft for Moms series…

Anyway, thank you for the fun event and I love this group and the way you have it set up. I’m sorry I struggle to be more involved during the 5 week sessions – but I do hope to keep up with you all in EVO from time to time moving forward.

Where did this happen?

  • On the EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_server
  • We were able to speak to one another in our EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021_Discord

Announcements of this event were made

Tweeted accordingly:

We now have 8 tweeted reflections from 2 EVO MInecraft MOOC participants at this link
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23evomc21&src=typeahead_click&f=live


Other highlights from EVOMC 2021 Week 4 – Cluster

Sat-Sun 6-7 Feb Spontaneous meetups on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server

In an attempt to increase the likelihood of connecting with tutors / tutees I started a spreadsheet with I maintained hour by hour while I was monitoring the server (pretty much in COVID lockdown here in Malaysia; not wise to be out much).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit?usp=sharing

Mirea noted on the spreadsheet when she would be around

2021-02-06helpingMirea

I noticed from the dynamic map that she was spending time at this /warp double_village and made a screenshot to show here that there were interesting builds in her neighborhood. I didn’t want to intrude but just let her know that Bobbi Bear and I were available.

She didn’t respond right away so Bobbi and I found our way to the desert village that Sura had created, reaching there by water from the double_village warp.

Mirea joined us there. We showed her how to get back on the river, but she wanted to spend more time at the village.

Later she sent us some information on what she had learned about cactus, besides that it cost you hearts if you ran up against it in the desert.

Thu 04 Feb 0200 UTC – EVOMC21 explores together what’s beyond the door that says Enter if you Dare

Bobbi Bear and I decided to recruit volunteers to accompany us in an exploration of what lies behind the sign teasingly placed on a door somewhere on our EVO Minecraft MOOC server.

In this spreadsheet, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kSDVi8jhLN7LGyYpoBj61IFaJa0kFG3fe1QOaOisuM/edit#gid=0

Mirea Artican posted that she would like to explore together what’s beyond the door that says, “Enter if you dare!”

Moderator team Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance entered our names in the moderator column to volunteer to accompany her

Here is the door in question;

and its position in our world relative to Spawn

Teacher Vance went down to reconnoiter and found a set of caverns, fairly well lit, with waterfalls that help with orientation.

Though precipitous drops I could see magma below. I only went down to about level 40 or so. Later we discovered that you could step down and land in pools of water at the bottom and not be injured, or ride waterfall elevators for much of the way down to level 11, where the goodies are, but it’s just above the magma.

When I revisited I will carried only things easily replaced,

  • a bed,
  • a stone sword
  • both stone and iron pickaxes
  • torches and spare sticks and coal,
  • some carrots or any sufficient food
  • a chest, in case I want to leave anything I find in a safe place before exploring further
  • a stack each of dirt and cobblestone, handy for marking the way back, making bridges and repairs, and easily removed afterwards

Where did this happen?

We made announcements made on

Video Title:
EVO Minecraft MOOC miners cluster behind the door that says Enter if you DARE! on the EVOMC21 server
https://youtu.be/MW5jBdQLU9g

What happened?

In this Meaningful Play Sandbox Tutorial Adventure on the EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021 server, Bobbi Bear and I opened the door that says Enter if you DARE!  Behind it we explored towering caverns flowing with waterfalls and magma, all the way down to level 11. While we were still above level 20 Mirea joined us, after resolving problems with her computer or connection.

We soon realized that this cave area fell within the EVOMC21 protected spawn area, so there were no monsters here. Bobbi Bear and I also realized when we came upon the house that we had created here just off the river flowing through the deep trench, that we had been here before, though it seemed that the ways out had been altered. The boats were still on the river, but there were no mobs sitting in them, no archers on the ledges above, and looking at the map, we saw that the trench itself had been re-terraformed. It was not the gash in the land that it once was and just a small part of it remained exposed to the open sky.

However, ample rewards awaited our pursuit of the way down to level 11. That area had been meticulously strip mined, with multiple 1-block wide by two-blocks tall passages made to expose mineral deposits in the walls. We found redstone and diamonds and even a bed of obsidian, which Mirea used to make bridges in the lava so we could reach further diamonds.

By now Jane had joined us along with Mattie, who went swimming in the lava and emerged as if from water. Bobbi’s and Mirea’s cats both tried that but with the expected sadly different results. Zzidkha and Sura noticed five people on the server and came down to see what’s up, so we had achieved a cluster for Week 4.

After almost an hour Zzidkha and Mattie and Jane warped over to the wool race course on the old server, which I have a feeling we are going to hear more about before the end of Week 5. The rest of us joined them but Bobbi Bear and I stopped the video and returned to real life, where we had been delaying our breakfast.

Tue 02 Feb 0100 UTC VSTE Minecraft Monday in conjunction with EVOMC21; K4sons hosting

VSTE Minecraft Monday in conjunction with EVOMC21; K4sons hosting, took place at 8 pm EST on Feb 1, which is 1 am UTC; hence the disparity in days

It was recorded by Jane Chien on behalf of EVO Minecraft MOOC
https://youtu.be/2j9y1meDRzE

Dark Knight did part two of his redstone tutorial. Part one was on Monday, 2 November, 2020. Teacher Vance attended on that day, but did not record it without permission; plus I saw that the Minecraft app was being streamed into Discord.

86baa55ec3bbbfdb083e425e99276f1c.png

That’s when I learned that Discord doesn’t do recordings. I made it a point to record this one. The last one was great.

On Nov 2, I only made these screenshots. It was hands-on and took place in the workshop space shown here in Minecraft. We moved from challenge to challenge, and the last challenges were left to this second session. I hope Dark Knight will recap the first ones.

Minecraft Mondays occur on the first Monday of any month at 8 PM Eastern time on the VSTE Place server
minecraft.vste.org:11002. (GMT -5)

Basic directions to join VSTE Place, VSTE’s Minecraft world

You must have a computer Minecraft account from https://minecraft.net/en/ to join. There is a one time fee of $26.95.

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. Make sure you have installed and are running version 1.16.5
  3. Choose multiplayer and add a server: Name VSTE Place IP: minecraft.vste.org:11002.
  4. Our server is protected. You will need to be whitelisted to enter.
    Email Kim Harrison at K4sons@gmail.com from an educational email address with your real name and Minecraft account name.
    K4sons told me that for this event the whitelist will be switched OFF so no need to worry about that on this day.
    But if you want to return, you’ll need to get whitelisted.

We’ll be using VSTE’s Discord server

Discord is a voice and screen sharing application that will run on your computer or mobile device.

  1. Download and install it for free.
  2. Create an account. Many of us use the same name for our Discord account as our Minecraft account to keep things simple.
  3. Our channel is https://discord.gg/cp9tsWz

It helps us to be able to play Minecraft in one screen and listen via Discord with earbuds or headphones.

K4sons will post an invitation link in our EVOMC21 Discord server the day before the event. The invitation is good for one day.

We will distribute the invitation link as best we can for anyone wishing to join us in this well established and highly creative and knowledgeable community of educators and students.


Earlier Events

Sun 31 Jan, 2021 – Various EVO Minecraft MOOC moderators and participants engage during Week 3 in EVO Minecraft MOOC highlights – Trading string for emeralds and networking on the AZcraft server

https://learning2gether.net/2021/01/31/week-3-in-evo-minecraft-mooc-highlights-trading-string-for-emeralds-and-networking-on-the-azcraft-server/

Fri-Sat 5-6 Feb 2021 NileTESOL free Virtual Conference

The 25th NileTESOL Conference will take place online on February 5 and 6, 2021. The theme of the conference is “Digitize Globalize”. This year, we are celebrating the conference Silver Jubilee and it is the hope of the Organizing Committee to offer you a great and memorable professional development experience with our selected Egyptian and international plenary, featured, and conference presenters.

Please find information on our conference plenary speakers on this link.

The conference is offered this year for free to support EFL professionals in Egypt and internationally. There is no pre-registration required. All you need to have is the Webinar ID and Passcode in the program book to enter the Zoom room and enjoy a diverse program of sessions for two days. Please note that the Zoom room capacity is limited, so please login on time to secure a place.

Find the 2021 NileTESOL Virtual Conference Conference Program, with Zoom IDs and passcodes on this link.

Direct link to program, https://drive.google.com/file/d/11ifTKuK_w1Jve_GM0c5iEBGa_BjtSJgW/view

Fri-Sun Feb 5-7 – The 17th Annual CamTESOL Conference, held virtually

The 17th Annual CamTESOL Conference will be held virtually on 5-7 February 2021, under the theme ‘Actions and Innovations in Teaching and Learning.’

The CamTESOL virtual conference continues to ensure that presenters and delegates’ journey at the conference is convenient and friendly. At the upcoming 17th CamTESOL virtual conference:

  • The ‘CamTESOL App’ and ‘Zoom’ platform will be used for presenters to deliver their 45-minutes interactive sessions
  • There will be a chair and a coordinator in each session to ensure a smooth flow, including Q&A
  • Special training and tips on ‘How to present virtually’ will be provided to all presenters if their abstracts are accepted

Conference Registration (it wasn’t free)

Early rate

(Paid by 17 January 2021)

 Standard rate

(Paid after 17 January 2021)
Citizen of ASEAN countries US$ 20 US$ 40
Non-Citizen of ASEAN countries  US$ 25 US$ 50

Sat 6 Feb 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is February 19, 2021 13:00 UTC

Week 3 in EVO Minecraft MOOC highlights – Trading string for emeralds and networking on the AZcraft server

Uncategorized 1 Comment

Learning2gether Episode 507

Navigation

How we used string to buy emeralds and arrows at the Tower Mall
Flights of fancy on the AZcraft server
Other highlights from EVO Minecraft MOOC Weeks 2 and 3
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

evomc16_logo

We have just passed week 3 of EVOMC21 the five-week EVO Minecraft MOOC session, http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/. EVOMC21 is in its 7th year now in the annual round of professional development offerings from the Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com. 

EVOMC21 is not technically a MOOC, although I have expropriated the acronym to fit what I think it is: a miniscule open online course. However, participants in the session each year generally follow the progression laid out in Cormier’s five steps in coping with connectivist MOOCs: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus; explained here https://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0.  It’s been around for a while, but I really like this video:

As the EVO sessions run for 5 weeks, the numbers line up, so we anchor each week’s activities in what participants in any MOOC would be doing at about the same time in a similarly-paced open online course

I also need to reiterate that I am talking here about cMOOCs. There are also xMOOCs, somewhat different kettles of fish. A succinct but substantive explanation can be found here: http://blogs.onlineeducation.touro.edu/distinguishing-between-cmoocs-and-xmoocs/

The first week in a cMOOC is for orientation. cMOOCs are known to be disorienting. Since they emerge from free platforms, some of their bells and whistles might not at first appear to be in synch. But they are, as participants eventually discover, if they stay around long enough (many fall by the wayside in MOOCs). Once they understand the routine inherent to the MOOC they are in, they might be moved to declare, over time, who they are, what they are doing in that particular cMOOC, and what they might want to get out of it. Once participants start to find out more about one another, they start to network among themselves, but as each individual is likely to be a node in some wider network as in a set of venn diagrams overlapping with EVOMC21 in the center, they start to learn about each other’s networks as well.

This post takes a snapshot of this process at it stood after Week 3 in the EVO Minecraft MOOC, ostensibly the week devoted to networking. The cluster and focus weeks are yet to come; these are the weeks where some participants find what they have in common and cluster together around topics and projects that interest them in the MOOC. The final week, focus, is where participants start to think beyond the MOOC, where some of the participants in clusters might formulate projects deriving from the MOOC and carry on with them. One of the chief take-aways of MOOCs is always the extension to one’s network, the people you meet there and bond with professionally and personally, because cMOOCs are very personalized.

Now when I say the highlights of Week 3, I mean those as perceived through my eyes and those of others who might have engaged with me and my wife Bobbi Bear (i.e. people in my cluster, such as it has emerged from this particular MOOC). As we are a 24/7 MOOC with participants from all over the world, many of us are active while others sleep.  So my highlights reflect what I have seen and recorded and was able to convey in media, from my own perspective, while other equally or more outstanding activities were no doubt taking place outside my waking hours on other parts of the EVO Minecraft MOOC and other servers, but participants in these need to write their own blog posts. I hope they do and tweet about them using the tag #evomc21. That’s how these different clusters might learn more about what each has been up to.

At the moment there are only three hits on the tag #evomc21 on Twitter
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23evomc21&src=typeahead_click&f=live
My tweet about this post will be the fourth.

Announcements were made after the fact at these Facebook groups

And at Groups.io

I have tried to record all of the events I have found out about and that left some kind of record here: http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events.

Here then is a blogged encapsulation of my highlights from the 3rd week of EVOMC21.

 


How we used string to buy emeralds and arrows at the Tower Mall

Sun-Mon 25-31 Jan EVO Minecraft MOOC Week 3 – Network

EVOMC 2021 Week 3 – Network – Mon-Sun, Jan. 25-31, 2021

Sun Jan 31 Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear, and Mirea Artican gather string to trade for emeralds with savanna villagers and then buy arrows with the emeralds

We had learned about the stringfarm from Sura, who suggested we go there for string, so so we did. The stringfarm is in a dangerous place deep underground because it contains spawners, rendered more or less safe by Sura. For example, Sura had put a lot of torches all over, including on top of the nearby spawner, in effect neutralizing it, and she had left the spider spawner to allow spiders to spew forth, but built a glass wall to contain the spiders, who eyes glow red and menacing in the dark, as in the image below. You can get to this place on the evomc21 server at  /warp stringfarm.

She put lots of torches around to suppress the mobs’ ability to spawn here.

She build an opening in the glass were participants can slay the spiders safely, with a chest beneath to collect  their accumulated string.

But you have to understand there are no guarantees in such volatile dark spaces, as Mirea discovers, below.

Why do we need string? Read on ==>

The main limitation to becoming a proficient archer in Minecraft is the amount of flint you can accumulate for the arrowheads. You can kill skeletons and get their bows and a few arrows, and you can kill spiders for string, and chickens for feathers, but for flint you need to break about 100 gravel blocks to get enough flint for just ten arrows.  Bows are much simpler; you need only string and sticks, but of course to shoot a bow, with any effect, you need a lot of arrows.

The pictures above are from this page:
https://www.dummies.com/programming/programming-games/minecraft/how-to-craft-a-bow-and-arrows-in-minecraft/

I found a better way for those of us on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server in 2021 to get arrows in quantity for our bows. It involves getting string from the spider stringfarm and then finding fisherman villagers who will trade string for emeralds, and with the emeralds buy arrows from fletchers, villagers whose calling it is to craft arrows.

Another way to collect arrows is shown in the Facebook post below, but these are absorbed by the body and can’t be recycled.

2021-01-31stringfarmhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/evomc/permalink/2095943820540499/

On Facebook, Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance offered to show any participant in EVOMC21 how you can make a bow and then use two /warps on our server to get a quiver full of arrows in maybe half an hour, most of that trekking from the nearest warp to the right villages. Obviously users on our server could eliminate the trek by setting a home point to what I call the Tower Mall (reason obvious from the video), but until some admin sets a warp to it, the only way to get there the first time is to trek there from the nearest warp (at this writing, that’s /warp bank), so I wanted to show my viewers how to get there by orienting on our dynamic map at http://mc.evomc.net:8123/.

In a matter of minutes Mirea took us up on our invitation, and the video below was the result. Maybe if others in our community follow the technique in this video, we can form a merry band of EVOMC21 archers 🙂

 


Flights of fancy on the AZcraft server

Thu Jan 28 1700 UTC – Play and Learn and Network with Olivetree Grove on the AZcraft Minecraft Server and Discord

https://www.facebook.com/events/2109848619314712

Event created by Olivetree Lighthouse and EVO Minecraft MOOC
An EVO Minecraft MOOC event on the AZcraft Minecraft server and EVOMC21 Discord Server
Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 5 PM – 7 PM UTC

This was one of our announced networking events for this week. Olivetree told us we would “be visiting a family friendly public server where we can go on a boat trip, a scary ride, dive and swim through a coral reef, play with dolphins and turtles, ride horses, go shopping at some creative shops, and more. The server is called AZcraft – The address to add it is azcraftbc.mcraft.pro .”

Video title
Teacher Vance & Bobbi Bear Play, Learn & Network with Olivetree_Gro on the AZcraft Minecraft Server
https://youtu.be/hyY0mD7uIHo

The video above includes 20 minutes of metered flying time around some phantasmagorical builds created by young people working strictly in survival mode on a private, open, but well structured server, and includes a phenomenal roller coaster ride and a swim with sea creatures on a coral reef after quaffing special potions bestowing 8 min. of underwater breathing.

 


Other highlights from EVO Minecraft MOOC Weeks 2 and 3

 

Thu 28 Jan 0300 – Bobbi Bear shares the art of cat taming with Teacher Vance and Mirea Artican and others interested at EVOMC21

It was still Wed in San Francisco when Mirea Artican joined us online after her supper to catch Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance just finishing breakfast Thu morning in Penang, Malaysia. But it was be just the right time in Minecraft for Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance to demonstrate collecting string at the local /warp stringfarm and then put a pair of strings together with three sticks to make fishing poles, and with the newly crafted polls go off to catch some fish. Next step was to go where there were likely to be some cats (a village somewhere) and attract them with raw salmon and cod. That’s the tricky part, but Bobbi has perfected the technique and she had promised to try to pass it on to participants present. Once you have a cat, your life will be purrrfect; it will follow you, even when you teleport, and you will wake up to find useful bits and bobs the cats have collected such as feathers and rabbit hides and feet (must bring good luck, yeah?). 

Announcements

http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#Thunbsp28Jan0300BobbiBearsharestheartofcattamingwithTeacherVanceandMireaArticanandothersinterestedatEVOMC21

This event came about after this one a few days before:

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear Blaze a trail from Olivetree’s Sandbox Meadow to Shipwreck City and the Skybox Shelter

On Jan 23 we had promised to be available on helpdesk but as there was no one around, Bobbi and I blazed a trail from Olivetree’s sandbox meadow over to the home we had built near Shipwreck City, and we video’d the result: https://youtu.be/Fh3Ci4blZLk

In this EVO Minecraft MOOC Meaningful Play Adventure Safari Hangout, Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear show you the path we blazed from Olivetree’s Sandbox Meadow (which she is using to introduce newcomers to the game) to Shipwreck City, and we show you around the Skyhouse we built nearby.

We built the Skyhouse after venturing from Olivetree’s Sandbox Meadow and finding the nearby village. We decided to build a home in the mountains back of there since it’s near the village on the ocean, cats hang out around villages, and Bobbi thought she could catch fish in the sea there and use the fish to try and tame some of the cats.

We spent many pleasant Minecraft hours in blazing the trail through the spruce and mushroom-filled oak forests. Then we went back over it again and again and put in street lights and made road improvements. Here you can vicariously retrace the results of our endeavors.

And that’s how Bobbi got her first cat!

Bobbi is so proud of herself. She says she did it the hard way. She wasn’t able to tame any cats at the shipwreck village, but she killed spiders to get string, cut wood to make a pole, and then went fishing around the spawn area. She caught cod and salmon there and tried it out on cats lurking around the spawn area. She finally found one that would love her after purrrfecting her technique, after wasting many fish on 3 other cats. Now she’s happy, and so is the cat.

What happened on this meaningful play adventure we were talking about earlier, where Bobbi Bear shares the art of cat taming with Teacher Vance and Mirea Artican?

Video Title: 
Bobbi Bear shares the art of cat taming with Teacher Vance and Mirea Artican in EVO Minecraft MOOC
https://youtu.be/zy2mxj74uuY

We start at the spawn point, and Teacher Vance begins by briefing the plan, which is to /warp to the stringfarm, the gloomy place in the pictures above at level 26 under ground. That’s about 38 blocks deep from the surface and it’s where Sura found a couple of spawners: fire baskets that spawn mobs (e.g. skeletons, spiders, and zombies). These baskets will churn them out unless they are surrounded with torches including one placed on top of the spawner to staunch the flow of mobs, at which point visitors can move around them without being incessantly attacked.

Sura has set the stringfarm up so that the spider spawner is left operational but behind glass, so visitors can approach the glass and kill spiders with their swords through a slat the spiders can’t get through. Their string and eyeballs (objects that spiders always ‘drop’ when slain) go into a box which is constantly filling, so if you take away some string and put it in your pockets, more will appear. You can take string in bunches of 64 at a time. With just 30 strings you can buy emeralds from Liam the librarian back at spawn, so you could get yourself an endless supply of emeralds by tp’ing back and forth and feeding Liam, who would just keep giving you emeralds. Not sure what you’d do with those, maybe deposit them with Zzidkha at the /warp bank on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server.

(Later, I discovered that you could trade the emeralds for arrows, something that IS quite useful, and you can get a better deal on string for arrows from the fisherman in the kiosk next to the fletcher at the Tower Mall, as described in the lead article in this blog post)

It’s easy to /warp into the stringfarm but I had not been able to find a sporting way out, and I wanted to be able to get out of there in a manner that just anyone on our server could replicate, and go from there over well worn paths that Bobbi and I have set to a nearby village, where we’d seen cats. I found the warp marker on our dynamic map and noticed that it was right under one of our trails between the ark and our castle. I also found a small cave just off the path there and saw that if I dug north at an angle down I would come out right on the spawner, which I did until I hit a spot where the bottom fell out, and I soon worked out that I was right over the mineshaft where the spawner is. But I couldn’t jump down and be sure of getting back up, so I had to corkscrew around lower and lower until I’d worked my way low enough to step down into the abandoned mineshaft which contained the spawner chamber. By creating a stairway down I had thus created one back up.

So the day before this adventure Bobbi and I came here and made sure we could find those steps quickly, going back up from the bottom. Mineshafts can be confusing but we put sufficient torches down to both find our way accurately and protect us from skeletons and zombies, which had already caused us to have to make trips back here to collect our death chests, and I installed a salt and pepper diorite staircase over the cobblestone block one I’d made coming down, much easier to find and follow upwards. At the top I had installed a door to keep monsters from getting in from the cave or out from the spawner area, and outside the door I’d installed in the cave, I had left a chest and a crafting table as well as a bed.

So on the day of our meeting, we warped from Sura’s build at the Spawn point to the stringfarm where the spawners are, got some string, and took it up top and out the door, where in the video I illustrate how to craft fishing rods on the crafting table there. Someone slept in the bed, and in the morning we exited the cave and followed the path down the hill to the river, where we fished for cod and salmon. Then we headed for the village, following paths that took us through our castle house, and ended at the village where there are lots of cats. Bobbi showed us how to sneak up on them and feed them enough to get their trust and next thing you know, best friends for life! I had won over a cat.

We tp’d back to our home base and the cat I had tamed followed. Bobbi showed us another couple of things about cats, but it was time to end the video. Bobbi said that no one ever gets bored with cats, but in that case they can find their own. If you find us in Minecraft we’ll show you how.

On this adventure, Mirea got her first cat! 🙂 <jump> <jump>

2021-01-28_mirea1stCat

The eternal question remains: What is the right number of cats?

One or two is ok

Four or five is a bit much

Over a dozen, a cat circus, you can’t open half your boxes.

Don’t be like Bobbi Bear!

 

These highlights are from Week 2 in  EVO Minecraft MOOC – Declare

EVOMC21 Week 2 – Declare – Mon-Sun, Jan. 18-24, 2021

 

Sat 24 Jan and Sun 23rd 1230-1430 UTC Join Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance in Meaningful Play – Adventure Safari Hangouts

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear keep trying to find an evomc21 event title that will characterize what we are trying to do when engaging participants on our Minecraft server. We’ve settled on Meaningful Play – Adventure Safari Hangouts. 

First we have to find a time when participants are likely to be available. We set events to draw them to our server and monitor our Discord #serverchat channel to see when they are there on their own. If we find a participant online we send them a message in world and ask if we can assist. If they want help we go there.

We don’t set plans in advance for teaching people about Minecraft since our participants range from newbie to knowbie, and we have other moderators who are mounting more systematic approaches. If you need to be shown what to do we can help you with whatever you need to learn. If you know a bit about Minecraft and want to be shown around some interesting places on our server, we know of a few.

Either way, clueless or clued-in, you need to come online so we can show you. The ultimate goal is for you to become familiar enough with the medium so you can work out in your mind, Aha! THIS is how I might use this with MY students! We are all in pursuit of such aha moments; hopefully there will be more than one.

What do we mean by Meaningful Play – Adventure Safari Hangouts?

Meaningful play is a term Jeff Kuhn threw into an article we wrote together. You can find the original reference for it here:

Kuhn, J. and Stevens, V. (2017). Participatory culture as professional development: Preparing teachers to use Minecraft in the classroom. TESOL Journal 8, 4:753–767. 
https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.359 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tesj.359/full

Pre-publication proof available: 
https://vancestevens.com/papers/tesol/r1_TESJ_359_review2017oct25_1_archivecopy.pdf

Adventure Safari is where we agree on a destination and go there and talk through where we are headed and what we are doing using Discord. I feel that this is where we all learn best how to function in any multiplayer communicative/collaborative game environment, whether it be Minecraft or learning a target language by moving around a city where they speak that language and interacting with the natives there. You call on resources you already have and develop new ones as the need arises. It’s like meeting your friend on a street corner and starting with “Whatdya feel like doing today?” (“I dunno, I hear Olivetree found a skele spawner near her farm area, wanna go look?” – or wherever, and off we go).

Imagine doing that in a target language. You would learn and use the language you needed for the situation you were in, just as you would if making friends in a foreign country.

If you aren’t up to moving about quite yet, then we can hang out with you and help get you up to speed.

Announcements

What happened over these two days?

One thing was that Bobbi Bear and Teacher Vance built the Skyhouse and Bobbi tamed her first cat.

and the other was …

Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear meet Dakotah Redstone on his realm, and [itsasecret]

The next day, same time same station, we found Dakotah Redstone streaming his Minecraft screen into Discord from his Haliwell Realm and I made these screen shots from my Discord view of his stream. First I watched Dak as he flew above his realm and captured images from his streamed arial view of the confluence of biomes there.

Below is a manor house that he is using as one of the buildings in his Haliwell campus.

The juxtaposition of biomes makes intriguing panoramas.

Then Dak invited me to join him there and talked me through entering his realm. When you start the Minecraft launcher, where you can choose to play single player or multiplayer, the third option is to play on a realm. Under that option I had to first find Dak’s invitation to join his realm, and when found that, I was able to join him there. These screenshots show my desktop with my Minecraft realm play view at the upper left, concurrent with Dak’s view of what he saw as seen in his Discord stream, on the right.

 

Here we are looking at each other. Dak is wearing cactus armor, I believe.

 

Then we went over to the EVO Minecraft MOOC server and went to Dak’s recent build at /warp itsasecret. Anyone can go there but not many will find the many secrets lurking underground and behind the bushes.  Many of these latter are revealed in the video, filmed with Dak’s wholehearted permission.

Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/WVKu_DJ8lAU

Wait, there’s more

You can see whatever traces have been made of all the EVO Minecraft MOOC events that have taken place so far, from Week 1 forward to however far we’ve got to now, here:
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#2021LiveEventsARCHIVE

 

 


Earlier Events

 

Mon 11 Jan 1400 UTC – Teacher Vance, Jane Chien, and Bobbi Bear host EVO Minecraft MOOC kickoff event in Zoom and Minecraft

https://learning2gether.net/2021/01/11/176472421/ 

Followed, six days later, by Jane Chien and Rose Bard’s presentation:

2021-01017keyaspects

http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#Sun17Jan1400UTCRoseBardandJaneChienKeyAspectsforTeacherDevelopmentinMinecraft

 

Fri 15 Jan 1000 ET – Bilingual-Multilingual Interest Section (B-MEIS) webinar on Multilingualism, Social Justice and Intercultural Competence in the Remote World of Virtual Exchange

Through a dialogue format that will include both students and teachers in the virtual exchange program between the U.S. and Spain, we will engage in a critical discussion of language and culture, their power and the challenges in supporting cross-cultural collaborations.

PRESENTERS

devin_thornburg.jpg

Devin Thornburg is an educator, psychologist and committed advocate for social justice and human rights in his teaching, his scholarship and his life. He is a tenured Full Professor at Adelphi University and just published a book on trust within learning.

 

oscar_ceballos.jpg

Óscar Ceballos is Academic Director and professor at CIEE Seville, where he has developed multiple programs for undergraduate students and faculty from the U.S.. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Seville in 1989 where he also holds an MA of art and philosophy.

 

clara_bauler_jpeg.jpg

Dr. Clara Vaz Bauler is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Adelphi University. Her research focuses on how digital media technology can be used to support multilingual learners’ academic writing skills while valuing their voices, linguistic assets and composition strategies, ways to better prepare pre-service an in-service teachers to effectively work with linguistically diverse learners in face-to-face and remote learning environments, and integration of disciplinary content, academic discourses, and translanguaging practices to support and empower emergent bilinguals.

 

Sat 16 & 23 & 30 Jan 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

 Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/ 

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58 
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.  

 

Sat 23 Jan starting 0900 UTC – Prof. David Crystal at the English Department of Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering virtual ELT conference 

The English Department of Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai, India – as an extension of its virtual ELT conference – is hosting plenary webinar talks by Prof. David Crystal on 23 January 2021.

Session 1: 2:30 to 3:30 pm presumably in Chennai – The future of Englishes

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Session+1%3A+2%3A30+to+3%3A30+pm+-+The+future+of+Englishes&iso=20210123T1430&p1=553&ah=1

Session 2: 4:40 to 5:30 – English Accents – Past, present, future

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Session+2%3A+4%3A40+to+5%3A30+-+English+Accents+-+Past%2C+present%2C+future&iso=20210123T1630&p1=553&ah=1 

The event flyer with all the details can be accessed here.

You can check the local time of this event by clicking here.
In case you are interested please register here so as to receive the webinar joining instructions by email.

They have not announced a recording to my knowledge.

 

Sat 23 Jan 1400 UTC TESOL CALL-IS webinar – Open Educational Resources 101

TESOL CALL-IS cordially invited visitors to the webinar: 
Open Educational Resources 101: Finding and Using Free Resources in Your Classroom 

Presenters: Dr. Christine Sabieh, Dr. Nellie Deutsch, Charity Davenport, Sharon Tjaden-Glass

Registration link: http://tinyurl.com/CALLIS-OERwebinar 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is February 6, 2021 10:00 UTC

 

 

 

 

Rose Bard and Jane Chien discuss Key Aspects for Teacher Development in Minecraft

Uncategorized Leave a comment

Learning2gether Episode 506

Navigation

Skip down to the Zoom Chat Logs
See our promotion and feedback for this event
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

EVOMC21 moderators Rose Bard and Jane Chien helped us bring Week 1 of EVO Minecraft MOOC to an end with a live session to help participants reflect on the key aspects for teacher development when it comes to implementing Minecraft in Education.

As they put it:

In order to get started in education with Minecraft, teachers will need to delve into the world of the game and develop a new set of skills. In this live event, we would like to introduce you to the key aspects for teacher development to enable teachers to implement Minecraft in their context and also help you define your learning goal(s) for EVOMC21 MOOC.

Bring your thoughts to our live event and be prepared to actively share and discuss!

Some screenshots from the event
showing who was there and content displayed

The presenters introduced the TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_pedagogical_content_knowledge

There were polls using http://www.menti.com

 

This statement was made on one of the slides and participants were asked to go on to Mentimeter and agree or disagree, and say why not. More responses can be seen in the video.

The concepts of language acquired in, through, and for gaming is covered in Jane’s article in TESL-EJ

Chien, Y. (2019). The language of massively multiplayer online gamers: A study of vocabulary in Minecraft gameplay. TESL-EJ, 23(3), 1-16. http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej91/int.pdf. Also available: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej91/ej91int/

Group selfie:


Zoom Chat Logs

I need to ask if Zoom chat logs can be made available, in full or excerpted form.

I never found out if a chat log was available, or parts of it that might be of interest, but meanwhile, Rose has blogged a reflection on a later presentation for EVO Minecraft MOOC, here
https://rosebardeltdiary.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/mineacademy-in-game-management-qas/

I left a comment at that blog mistakenly pointing here. I tried to correct my mistake by leaving an additional comment on Rose’s blog post.

But in case you have arrived here via my original comment on her post, please carry on to the correct link here:
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#Sun07Feb1400UTCMineAcademyEnglishClubBardRosehosting.

My mistake should be clear if you follow the links. Abashedly, Vance


Promotion and Feedback

The event was announced as taking place in Zoom, courtesy of Jane Chien
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#Sun17Jan1400UTCRoseBardandJaneChienKeyAspectsforTeacherDevelopmentinMinecraft

There was an event announcement made on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/events/417999672798405

Rose Bard’s post on Declaring Goals Now and Then in EVO Minecraft MOOC
Here, Rose contextualizes how she discovered Minecraft, came to grips with it, and expanded on her knowledge to use it with students, leading up to this presentation on Key Aspects, in her blog post here:
https://rosebardeltdiary.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/declaring-goals-now-and-then/


Earlier Events

There had been several EVO Minecraft MOOC events since the previous Learning2gether episode 505 posted here:

Mon 11 Jan 1400 UTC – Teacher Vance, Jane Chien, and Bobbi Bear host EVO Minecraft MOOC kickoff event in Zoom and Minecraft

https://learning2gether.net/2021/01/11/176472421/

Wed 13 Jan 2300 UTC – Sura hosts Weekly Warping Wednesday

Where mc.evomc.net server and Discord

Description

Join us each Wednesday as we explore fun locations in our Minecraft world!
Get set up in Discord and grab some items from our Spawn Base before we go.

Make a sword too, as we will need it where we are going! Hope you can join us!

Facebook event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/691323604818858/

Wed 13 Jan 1000-1100 UTC – Olivetree Lighthouse hosts Play and Learn in Discord and on the EVOMC21 Minecraft server

For newbies we are going to go through the basics, of the Discord set up, where to find things and how to communicate. In Minecraft we will practice moving, teleporting, warping, getting our first resources in the wild including dying and finding our way back 🙂 We’ll have fun playing and later reflect on the language that we used and how the environment can be used for learning.

If you are not new, come get acquainted with the server and the different builds that we have, and find a place for yourself.

You’ll need to set yourself up in Discord beforehand; see 2021_Discord

If you need back-channel asynchronous help, join https://groups.io/g/minecraftmooc/ and ask your questions there.

Thu 14 Jan 1300-1400 UTC Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear facilitate meaningful play in Discord and on the EVOMC21 Minecraft server

Facebook event created: https://www.facebook.com/events/424587512083164

Teacher Vance and Bobbi bear will hang out on the server and greet anyone who wants to come online and get any kind of help with learning and playing with us in Minecraft.

It will help if you set yourself up in Discord beforehand; see 2021_Discord

If you need back-channel asynchronous help, join https://groups.io/g/minecraftmooc/ and ask your questions there.

If you want to arrange to meet us at different times, you can send us a message through Groups.io, or in any of our other online spaces (but Groups.io will reach Teacher Vance most directly).

We recorded a part of what we did here
https://youtu.be/k9BT-sAA3FM

We met at the spawn point but went exploring Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear’s tracks with special guest Walton Burns who had dropped in for the Meaningful Play experience. As Bobbi and I had been about to create part 21 of our trek through various biomes we’d visited the past couple of months, we invited Walton to join us as we journeyed through icebergs from Savanna Beach to Greenland and continue by boat to an eroded badlands biome, ending in a shelter on a lonely mesa as part of a Meaningful Play experience in EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021

After that we went with Walton, at his request, back to the spawn point and then over to Ari’s builds where Walton climbed the tricky scaffold that leads up to the balloon. We visited Ari’s colored wool factory, and found where he keeps bees, then tp’d to spawn and started on a trek to Dak’s pyramid, when Walton needed to go because his son needed more bandwidth for his school project. So Bobbi and I kept on up the trail with the blue glass markers, past a panda lying on its back across the trail, and found the bed at the entrance to Dak’s where we went from dusk to dawn. Then we took our boats northeast to where Ari has made his hole in the ocean. We continued to the island just beyond but got caught in a spillway there where the boat rode it down and got lodged in a crevice. Fortunately it was easy to just walk back to the top. There we found an ender chest, one of only a few objects on the flat postage-stamp sized island, but we’d spent a couple of hours already, and tp’d back to our own beds.

 

Sun 17 Jan – Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear at Meaningful Play – At Home Office Hours on the EVOMC21 Minecraft Server

Between the hours of 1 pm in Malaysia to 8 pm Teacher Vance and Bobbi Bear will keep an eye on the EVOMC21 dynamic map: http://mc.evomc.net:8123/ and Discord #server chat in case anyone wants to drop by our server and needs help.

If you need a hand with anything or want to take a tour, hope to see you there

To connect

Sun Jan 17 1600-2100 UTC Dakota hosts Great Expectations, Herding Cats

Found under the door in the Google Calendar, a note … who could have left it … and what time ??? where ?

Wait, scroll down, there’s more …

For “2-legged avatars” we are going to go through the basics of education in Minecraft
we will focus on discussing “What could happen?”,

oh my goodness, you mean “Things could happen?!?!?”  [yep, and dollars will get you donuts… they will.]

investigating what 2 and 4-legged avatars are up to in the wild, including how to prepare for and hopefully to cope with when we (inevitably) fail… and Why Failing Is A GOOD Thing. 🙂

We’ll have fun playing and later reflect on the language and the environment that can be used for learningctrl-H ctrl-H ctrl-H ctrl-H ctrl-H ctrl-H ctrl-H telling stories.
(and chasing, err I meant to say herding cats.)  😉

[hey… wait a minute… haven’t you said that education/learning is the exact same thing as telling stories???…   Shush!!!!!!]

< /teaser off >

Organizer: EVO Minecraft
Created by: Dakotah Redstone

Here are two other events that Learning2gether had listed this past week

Fri 15 Jan – Bilingual-Multilingual Interest Section (B-MEIS) webinar on Multilingualism, Social Justice and Intercultural Competence in the Remote World of Virtual Exchange

When:  Jan 15, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 10:00 AM (ET)

Multilingualism, Social Justice and Intercultural Competence in the Remote World of Virtual Exchange

Through a dialogue format that will include both students and teachers in the virtual exchange program between the U.S. and Spain, we will engage in a critical discussion of language and culture, their power and the challenges in supporting cross-cultural collaborations.

PRESENTERS

devin_thornburg.jpgDevin Thornburg is an educator, psychologist and committed advocate for social justice and human rights in his teaching, his scholarship and his life. He is a tenured Full Professor at Adelphi University and just published a book on trust within learning.

oscar_ceballos.jpgÓscar Ceballos is Academic Director and professor at CIEE Seville, where he has developed multiple programs for undergraduate students and faculty from the U.S.. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Seville in 1989 where he also holds an MA of art and philosophy.

clara_bauler_jpeg.jpgDr. Clara Vaz Bauler is an associate professor of TESOL/Bilingual Education at Adelphi University. Her research focuses on how digital media technology can be used to support multilingual learners’ academic writing skills while valuing their voices, linguistic assets and composition strategies, ways to better prepare pre-service an in-service teachers to effectively work with linguistically diverse learners in face-to-face and remote learning environments, and integration of disciplinary content, academic discourses, and translanguaging practices to support and empower emergent bilinguals.

The webinar was held in Zoom

Sat 16 Jan 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

 Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is February 15, 2021 08:00 UTC

EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021 kickoff event in Zoom and in Minecraft – How the EVOMC21 ecosystem works

Uncategorized 2 Comments


Download this audio:
https://learning2getherdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/2021-01-11evomc21kickoff_audio_only.m4a?

Learning2gether Episode 505

Navigation

Skip down to the Zoom and Facebook Chat Logs
See our promotion and feedback for this event
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

On Monday, January 11, Teacher Vance, Jane Chien, and Bobbi Bear organized and hosted this 7th annual EVO Minecraft MOOC kickoff event in Zoom and Minecraft.

We met in Zoom and many of our colleagues and participants who were whitelisted on the #evomc21 server joined us from there as well. Jane, Vance, and our server administrator sysop Aaron Schwartz shared their screens from Minecraft and explained how this EVO session is being organized in Discord, Facebook, and optionally in Groups.io. Inexplicably, but serendipitously, some of our colleagues managed to tune in from Discord, and voice-broadcast through Zoom. Others participated in the text chat associated with the Facebook stream from Zoom. J

We started where most visitors will begin, at the spawn point, where, although we are in survival, mobs (monsters) have been suppressed for their safety (safety of both the mobs and our participants). And we ended at, of all places, with the ultimate experience in Minecraft, a rare visit to the Enderdragon engineered by our Minecraft server guru Zzidkha, aka Aaron Schwartz.

This event was intended to be an informative visit, the main purpose being to make a recording of how participants could join us in-world, and how we would welcome them there and tend to their needs as they immerse themselves into the challenging world of our Minecraft server, and it ended with an out-of-this world visit under the hood, covering the gamut of ways people might interact with us in EVO Minecraft MOOC this 2021 EVO season.

EVO is Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.org.
For more information about EVO Minecraft MOOC see http://minecraftmooc.org

This and all #evomc21 events are being posted at http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events
and their YouTube videos, when available, are being archived there as well.

The picture shows our resident turtle at the EVO MInecraft MOOC spawn point


Zoom and Facebook Chat Logs

Zoom

22:18:57 From Marijana : hi everyone,
22:19:08 From Jane Chien : hello
22:20:22 From Claire Siskin : Hi Sedat!!
22:20:28 From Sedat Akayoğlu : hi Claire
22:20:41 From Marijana : I am on my tablet, because
22:20:45 From Sedat Akayoğlu : hi Vance
22:21:06 From Marijana : my laptop is having some problems. Filip is trying to fix it for me. 🙂
22:21:10 From BARBARA STEVENS : Hi everyone
22:21:20 From Sedat Akayoğlu : hi all
22:21:25 From BARBARA STEVENS : Oh good luck with your laptop
22:21:54 From Marijana : @Vance, you always have fun!
22:22:07 From Marijana : Thanks Barbara! 😗
22:22:09 From BARBARA STEVENS : We try 😉
22:22:42 From Serdar Sen : Hi Sedat hocam
22:22:55 From Sedat Akayoğlu : hi Serdar…
22:24:31 From Marijana : hashtags will help us all more to find the important information
22:29:04 From Caterina Skiniotou : What is each playground about?

To answer this question, we make available a number of channels in Discord (which we call playgrounds) so we can have multiple separate conversations. For example when Olivetree was conducting an orientation recently, we saw that Serdar was more advanced than the other players, so Bobbi Bear and I went into another channel and talked to him there as we went elsewhere on the server

22:30:20 From Marijana : I am on tablet so, it’s a bit hard to follow
22:30:38 From Marijana : Playground is for you to speak while playing in Minecraft
22:31:02 From Marijana : I suppose you can join certain playground with certain players
22:31:12 From Marijana : Aaron has microphonia
22:32:10 From Caterina Skiniotou : @Marijana, thanks!
22:36:55 From Marijana : No problem Catarina. Let’s say newbies use Playground 1 with few of us mods, and more expert Minecraft players can talk in Playground 2. but you always need to connect to voice to be able to use mic and speak in channel. while you should disconnect others
22:38:16 From Marijana : Playing Minecraft and using Discord is a process, but you will be able to see how our students and kids do this at the same time. I have witnessed that with both of my sons 😁
22:39:23 From Marijana : @Aaron, is this an octopus?
22:43:03 From Jamie Harrison : Does the night end for everyone if one person sleeps or just for that one person?
22:43:06 From Caterina Skiniotou : So, when is nighttime exactly?
22:46:08 From Jane Chien : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ILqfvWUAMvwYIfIir10w0Qj-J2jmUXChr-OB_YarrYA/edit?usp=sharing
22:46:25 From Caterina Skiniotou : Is the list of plug-ins recorded somewhere so we can explore?
22:50:32 From Vance Stevens : nighttime is every 20 minutes
22:51:22 From Claire Siskin : every 20 minutes?????
22:51:36 From Jane Chien : Super cool!!!
22:51:41 From Vance Stevens : day night cycles, you have to get your business done in 10 min and then get to a bed or get to a shelter. If you sleep it gets light immediately. If not you have to wait another 10 min
22:52:35 From Vance Stevens : https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Daylight_cycle#:~:text=Sunset%20is%20the%20period%20between,lasts%205%E2%81%846%20minutes.&text=During%20sunset%2C%20the%20Sun%20descends,rises%20on%20the%20eastern%20horizon.
22:53:11 From Marijana : Night is more scary in survival mode , but you can cheat, hahaha, my sons love survival mode as well
22:54:00 From Vance Stevens : checking that, I think the day and night together are 20 min
22:54:53 From ROSEMERE BARD : Survival mode creates some interesting interactions between players
22:55:22 From Tilly Harrison : I thought it was shorter than 20!
22:56:13 From Caterina Skiniotou : I am still in the dark as to the objective(s) of the game: is it to build and/or destroy? Do we as a group of players set the game objectives?

To answer this question, the objectives are very much open ended. It’s up to the teacher to find ways to channel the inherent interest kids have in Minecraft toward educational objectives. There have been books written about this subject; a good one is Teachercraft, listed on this page in our wiki, giving articles, presentations, and blog posts about EVO Minecraft MOOC: 
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142599177/Pedagogy_of_Minecraft
But the best way to learn is through a community and that is what we are here for. Join us and learn through doing and by example; through modeling best practices in Minecraft for one another.

22:56:41 From Caterina Skiniotou : We focus a lot on technical stuff but I am so far unable to connect the dots.
22:56:45 From Marijana : You will get to test both modes
22:57:12 From Tilly Harrison : Hi Caterina – I was the same as you when I started. But when I tried Survival it started to make sense – that is where the game gets fun because you really have to work hard to not get killed.
22:57:14 From Marijana : My suggestion is to read the week 1 orientation and just get yourself familiar with Minecraft
22:57:40 From Jane Chien : XD yes work on not to get killed
22:57:43 From Vance Stevens : hear hear
22:57:43 From Marijana : Creative is to huild, Survival is to stay alive and kill zombies.. 😉
22:58:03 From Marijana : sorry, guys, I am on tablet so I make spelling mistakes
22:58:06 From Dani Hersey : I’ve gotta run and teach a class. Thank you for this introduction!
22:58:14 From Marijana : bye Dani!
22:58:16 From Claire Siskin : If you kill all the zombies, are you safe?

To answer this question, on our server you are pretty much safe in the daytime as long as you are out of doors and it’s not raining. Clouds and dark places in caves is where mobs (zombies, etc. ) hang out during the day. You are also safe if you’ve protected yourself inside a shelter. We have shelters spaced throughout our server. You can see examples of what Bobbi Bear and I do to protect ourselves in our videos, here
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142108218/Video_Tutorials
You can see how we move around freely during the daytime and take care to get indoors at night. Join us on the server and we’ll show you.
But I didn’t answer the question. Mobs spawn algorithmically in Minecraft. Sometimes you can kill one and there are no more, but sometimes they seem to swarm you if you are in a dark cave without light or out at night. As you might have gathered, light intensity is a factor in their propagation. Best to carry torches and a good sword.

22:58:16 From Jane Chien : Thanks Dani!
22:58:19 From Jane Chien : Bye!
22:58:28 From Tilly Harrison : When you realise how hard it is to stay alive, you REALLY appreciate advice from experienced players – but it’s better for it not to be too easy.
22:58:55 From ROSEMERE BARD : Minecraft is pretty much like a sandbox. You can do a lot of different things there. As Marijana says, once you start experimenting and also participating in the ‘play and learn’ sessions, you will understand more and more how the game Works and what the possibilities there.
22:59:04 From Caterina Skiniotou : The story line sounds pretty limited so far.
22:59:41 From Tilly Harrison : It’s like ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ – just surviving!
22:59:48 From Jane Chien : Bobbi says: Claire, you asked about Zombies. If you kill one others you are safe from that one but others might appear.
23:00:01 From Claire Siskin : Thanks, Bobbi!
23:00:07 From Don Carroll : I don’t think there is any “story line” in MC.
23:00:38 From Claire Siskin : The “story line” seems to be like life!
23:01:19 From Claire Siskin : I mean, we live life but we are not always aware of what the story line is,
23:01:33 From Don Carroll : You can really do whatever you want.
23:01:44 From Don Carroll : If you want to build things you can do that.
23:01:56 From Don Carroll : If you don’t want to build, that’s fine tool
23:02:16 From Don Carroll : I really just run around, find stuff, and take photos.
23:02:30 From ROSEMERE BARD : You create your own stories
23:02:41 From Jane Chien : Yes, we like your photos! And your adventures!
23:02:50 From Marijana : I personally loved riding the rollercoasters one of our experts builds. so much fun.
23:04:19 From Marijana : I am very bad at bulidng, both Filip and Domagoj always laugh at me, I used to build and destroy at the same time, by just a wrong mouse click 🙄
23:05:21 From Marijana : oh no Jane! 😄
23:05:22 From Claire Siskin : What is AFK?
23:05:33 From Nazlı Ceren Işıklıgil : away from keyboard
23:05:38 From Claire Siskin : Thanks!
23:05:47 From Marijana : there will be many abbrv. in Minecraft
23:05:49 From Anne Hendler (complete noob) : What other abbreviations do we need to know?
23:06:27 From Marijana : Those are similar for all social media, for example BRB
23:06:32 From Marijana : be right back
23:06:34 From Sedat Akayoğlu : I think we will learn in time as you suggested
23:06:40 From Caterina Skiniotou : Thanks, everyone. I will be exploring things on single-player mode and come up with more questions to post on groups.io.
23:06:48 From Caterina Skiniotou : Buy for now!
23:06:49 From Don Carroll : The abbreviations used in MC text messages are pretty much the same as regular text messaging.
23:07:04 From Jamie Harrison : Thank you for this intro. I’m glad to be part of this EVO group. I’ll do my best to be part of things and learn a lot! I have to go now – but I’ll be back! 🙂
23:07:20 From Don Carroll : If you join via Discord you won’t really need to use the text messaging within MC.
23:07:27 From Marijana : Sure Caterina, 😉
23:07:46 From Marijana : Yes, as you speak, so no need to use chat in Minecraft
23:09:41 From ROSEMERE BARD : Emanuel took me and my husband to the End yesterday and took him almost an hour to get crystals and kill the dragon. Guess where hubby and I were at that time? hiding in a shelter ahahah I can survive there, but I won’t dare to fight the dragon yet. ahahah
23:09:47 From Don Carroll : I’ve got to go. I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to participate this year.
23:10:03 From ROSEMERE BARD : you can survive if you are wearing a good armour
23:10:06 From Don Carroll : This year happens to be really busy.
23:10:08 From Anne Hendler (complete noob) : I guess I’ll have to go in and figure out what my questions are.
23:10:09 From Claire Siskin : Must go too. Thanks for a most informative session!
23:10:17 From Marijana : Great Rose, bye Don, take care, sure no worries
23:10:35 From Marijana : I also need to go, I have meeting in 30 mins in Adobe. 🙂
23:10:45 From Marijana : bye guys, see you soon
23:10:50 From Vance Stevens : thanks for coming
23:10:53 From Sedat Akayoğlu : thank you so much for this intro… I will join MC today..
23:11:08 From Sedat Akayoğlu : I will have more questions when I start using it
23:11:15 From BARBARA STEVENS : Bye Thanks for joining us everyone.
23:11:22 From Nazlı Ceren Işıklıgil : Other than live events like this, are we going to have specific times to play together? I normally play with Olivetree since I know her from last year and learning from her but that would be great to play with others as well

To answer this question, we moderators set up times to be online where we tend to find others active. For example, Bobbi and I usually go for our evenings around 14:00 UTC (GMT). This is early morning for people in South America and two hours before midnight in Asia where Jane and I are. But we are up from about 1 or 2 am UTC, in case anyone wanted to make an arrangement to meet. During lockdown we stay home usually, so if you want to meet suggest a time. Or go to our server map at http://mc.evomc.net:8123/. If we are you can join us. You can page us in world right on the chat bar at the bottom of the map.

23:11:37 From Jane Chien : Thanks for joining everyone!
23:12:08 From Jane Chien : I’m doing research on language learning in Minecraft, if anyone is interested 😉
23:12:42 From Nazlı Ceren Işıklıgil : Yeah that would be great!
23:12:42 From Jane Chien : Also, we’re building Minecraft language learning lessons 🙂
23:12:47 From Marijana : Great Jane. Have you checked our old article, written in 2014, bye Vance, Filip and me
23:12:53 From Nazlı Ceren Işıklıgil : If we know who are up for playing at what time generally

We are from all parts of the world, so we are up at different times. If you are in Turkey you are near those of us from Egypt, Croatia, Romania, and Asia (in Asia we are 24 hours away from USA)

23:13:03 From Jane Chien : Yes, I cited your article when I wrote mine 🙂
23:13:39 From Marijana : great
23:13:53 From Marijana : ok, need to go now. see you later, bye all
23:14:12 From Vance Stevens : Smolcec, Smolcec , and Stevens (2014) is listed here: http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142599177/Pedagogy_of_Minecraft
23:14:56 From Anne Hendler (complete noob) : Thank you for all the information! It’s after midnight here, so I have to turn in. See everyone in game.
23:15:12 From Aaron Schwartz : thanks everyone for coming
23:15:13 From Nazlı Ceren Işıklıgil : Thank you!!! See you in Minecraft 🙂
23:15:13 From Serdar Sen : thanks for the instruction, see you later in the game 🍃stay safe ✨
23:15:26 From BARBARA STEVENS : Bye all
23:15:36 From Sedat Akayoğlu : bye all
23:15:42 From Sedat Akayoğlu : thank you all
23:15:46 From Sedat Akayoğlu : for this great intro
23:16:00 From BARBARA STEVENS : see you all in the game!

2021-01-11evomc_gallery

Facebook live stream

Krisztina Tisza · 53:49 Just joined on Zoom! It’s awesome! Thank you!
Walton Burns · 44:04 Does warp creative mean you go into creative mode?
Virgínia Oliveira · 38:13 I`m watching on facebook but the audio is very low!
(Teacher Vance – Huge Hint, the passcode is in the email confirmation)
Aaron Schwartz · 28:26 i’m also being asked for a passcode
Virgínia Oliveira · 25:44 what`s the password?
Jane Chien · 0:00 I don’t have the password?
Jane Chien · 15:41 https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZctf-6trzMsG9P-x&#8230;
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Mon 11 Jan 1400 UTC etc
Jane Chien · 11:19 Let me get you info
Don Carroll · 10:49 The server is popping on and off.
Don Carroll · 10:25 How do I join the Zoom?
Jane Chien · 0:00 Hi! You’re early! I’ll be back soon! Give me five minutes!
Don Carroll · 5:11 Hi Vance and Bobbi.
Mike Kenteris · 0:52 In the backdrop … not available to attend at this time!


Promotion and Feedback

Announcements were made
on Facebook groups

And at Groups.io

Live stream
And the event was live-streamed on https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomc
but the recording ended up at my facebook page under videos: https://www.facebook.com/vance.stevens.3/videos/ and to that add the code 10158846255149719
to complete the URL (if I write that out in full here, it converts into what you see below)

We started the stream about 15 min before we started the Zoom recording,

I’ve faced this problem in the past, when I stream to a private group, I can’t post the video in such a way that anyone can see it. I’ll have to make a Camtasia recording, maybe of just the first 15 minutes until we started the Zoom recording (they should be the same). And in FUTURE stream to a public group, such as Learning2gether. Later for this.


Earlier Events

Electronic Village Online Opening Kickoff and EVO Minecraft MOOC pre-session server party

https://learning2gether.net/2021/01/10/electronic-village-online-opening-kickoff-and-evo-minecraft-mooc-pre-session-server-party/

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is January 14, 2021 10:00 UTC

Electronic Village Online Opening Kickoff and EVO Minecraft MOOC pre-session server party

Uncategorized 1 Comment

Learning2gether Episode 504

Navigation

The Electronic Village Online Opening Kickoff
The EVO Minecraft MOOC pre-session server party
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

January 10, 2021 was a big day in the compatible but overlapping worlds of EVO, Electronic Village Online, and EVO Minecraft MOOC. The former held its annual kickoff event on this date, starting at the internationally sweet spot time of 1400 UTC, tentatively expected to last an hour, and the latter was holding a server party event at the same time (through no fault of my own; CoP cats are known to be difficult to herd) but set to go on for two hours. I attended and presented in the EVO annual kickoff until 1500 UTC (it went on for another half hour after that) and popped over to the Minecraft server to catch the last half of the party there.

Here’s the story of these two amazing events.


Electronic Village Online Opening Kickoff for 2021

EVO2021 officially began with an opening ceremony in Zoom on Sunday Jan 10 1400 UTC

Slides 
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rbwr2Bal1t4zSGeEE_4wuFHtQUdkWDVbqnBXnzMM-K0/edit?usp=sharing

More information: http://evosessions.org 

All interested #EVO2021 moderators and participants were welcome

Announcements were made in these

Facebook groups 

And at Groups.io 

At the EVO Minecraft MOOC spaces above, we also noted that:

For #EVOMC21 participants there is a BBQ at Dak’s place on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server coinciding with the start of this event at 1400 UTC but extending for an hour after the EVO session ends (or we slip out early, see you there 🙂.)

Meanwhile, back at the EVO 2021 kickoff

2021-01-10evoKickoff_martha
A job well moderated by EVO Lead Coordinator for 2021, Martha Ramirez

EVO announced its sessions Jan. 11 – Feb. 14, 2021, with Registration: Jan. 3 – 10, 2021

Celebrate EVO’s 20th Anniversary with us!

It is a pleasure to announce the Call for Participation for the Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2021. As a project of TESOL’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS), EVO has been offering free, open online professional development sessions and workshops to teachers of English around the globe for 20 years.

For five weeks in January and February, TESOL experts and participants from around the world engage in collaborative online discussions or hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. These sessions bring together participants for a longer period of time than is permitted by land-based professional development conventions and allow a fuller development of ideas than is otherwise possible.

Sessions are free and open to anyone around the globe. It is not necessary to be a TESOL or IATEFL member nor to attend the TESOL Convention in order to participate. All you need is access to the Internet. The sessions carry no academic credit, and participants may choose the level of involvement that works for them.

This year, we are pleased to offer a record 19 five-week sessions, with the EVO21 Kick-off event on January 10, 2021 at 2 PM UTC (9:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada). Register in advance for this meeting at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItfu6gqzMoG9xWVH-w1JTo9FsvscdihdOz. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting

Please inform your colleagues about this unparalleled professional development opportunity! For descriptions and abstracts of all sessions, visit the Call for Participation at evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/10708567/…. 

Here are links to all of the sessions

  1. CEFR VS Assessment: How can new revisions help?
  2. Classroom-based research for Professional Development
  3. Digital Imagery and Designs
  4. Effective Presentation Skills
  5. EVO Minecraft MOOC 2021
  6. Flipped_Learning_in_language_teaching 
  7. Grammar for TESOL 
  8. Immersive Storytelling in Virtual Worlds
  9. Intercultural Competence 2021 
  10. M4TEVO21
  11. Scientific Literacy and CLIL
  12. Self-Care for Educators with Mindfulness 
  13. Shaping New Ways of Teaching English for Tourism in Uzbekistan
  14. Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach
  15. TECHNO CLIL 2021
  16. TEFL2YL EVO21
  17. Tools for Student Collaboration
  18. Technology for Spoken English
  19. Wellness: A Happy and Healthy You

Please share this invitation with your colleagues and e-lists. Thank you for helping us spread the word!

For additional information about EVO, visit http://evosessions.org

 


EVO Minecraft MOOC pre-session server party

Here is the recording of the Sun 10 Jan EVOMC21 pre-session Kickoff & BBQ. Having left another online Zoom meeting and come directly to this one, Teacher Vance started it quickly and did not take time to make a test recording first. Everything usually works fine, but maybe because I had taken my USB mic to another computer for the Zoom session, Camtasia switched my mic off for this recording once I put it back in. I was devastated to discover that at first, but then it dawned on me that no one needs to hear me natter on all the time, so here is the result

YouTube URL https://youtu.be/c6O9emiidWQ 

In this video we meet at the spawn point developed by Sura so meticulously over the past week or so. I exit the gate to look for MrMikeGR whom I find standing near the chest full of shears, provided so that newcomers won’t simply slaughter the sheep in order to get wool to make beds. However the sign says “Please use shears to get wool. Do no kill the sheep”, but it looks like a sign posted in a park somewhere. The newcomer doesn’t know that it’s posted on a chest, let alone how to to right-click to open it, and then how does he use what he finds inside on sheep? Being in Discord would help us to explain. However MrMikeGR is a brave newcomer here in this survival world for the very first time, though the area around the spawn point has been rendered ‘peaceful’ – no monster mobs. I am even unable to place a boat in the water here except in the designated safe swimming area directly off the pier.

We travel across the water to Dak’s and climb some vines to reach the terrace where the BBQ is in progress. We meet Dak’s cured zombie, Captain Francis, who guards a freezer full of fish and dairy supplies. He is standing near a chest where we can get fishing poles and take them down to the water to catch our own fish. Back on the terrace Dak has prepared special mesquite charcoal for us to cook our catch, which is delivered unfathomably into a separate delivery system. Go figgah!? Meanwhile Olivetree Grove is busy digging her own firepit that emits puffs of smoke that would pollute any real world, but here the smoke has zero effect on the environment. 

Mattie comes along and brightens up the night with an incessant display of fireworks, though when his mom Jane is handed an ‘Old Betsy’ fireworks launcher she turns out to be equally hedonistic amongst this group of staid and serious educators. Just kidding (about the educators)! We all pose for photos on the landing, we can probably find them posted in Discord, although the video renditions are not that bad either. They just won’t hold still.

Eventually MrMikeGR finds his way to where we are and we pass him snacks and I pass him my finest stone sword. It is not an easy process explaining to someone who is not in Discord the seemingly simple series of keypresses required to eat something, so that takes some time.

Finally it approaches midnight in the uber-overworld where Teacher Vance, Bobbi Bear, Jane Chien, and Mattie Tsai go about their real lives (Mattie is still up? we thought he has gone to bed already). Teacher Vance and Bobbi /home home off to their castle elsewhere and though you can’t hear it on the video, we are all saying goodbye to one another in Discord.

Feedback

Mr Mike’s take
https://mreltmike.wordpress.com/2021/01/10/evomc2021-day-1-the-beginning/

My reply
Hi Mr Mike, it was great to see you in world with us. Thanks for the family portrait. I’ve produced a lot more videos starting from the spawn point where the shear sign is (that’s a chest, btw, you can right click on it to open it and help yourself to shears inside. Then with a shear in your hand, you right click on a sheep, and it ‘drops’ wool. You walk over the wool to pick it up.

The updated videos are here, http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142108218/Video_Tutorials. The first one here, https://youtu.be/iLxoWmbbJpw is a better one for showing you how to survive in the wilderness. The rest of the videos guide you down paths that others have made, where there are shelters along the way.

My advice is to go on the server and meet people there. Contact us through discord to see when we’ll be online, or write us at https://groups.io/g/minecraftmooc/. I follow all messages posted there. Also, you can visit our dynamic map at http://mc.evomc.net:8123/ and see who is online now and use the dialog box at the bottom to chat with people on the server whether you are in game or not.

There’s much to learn, but many on hand to help you, especially if you want to learn by doing. When you get into discord and can speak to us this will speed up the process because then we can explain to you quickly, directly, and hands free what you should be doing. Look forward to seeing you in #evomc21

Announcements

in the Google Calendar in the screenshot above,
and on the EVOMC21 live events page
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142133859/2021_Live_Events#Sun10Jan14001600UTCEVOMC21presessionKickoffampBBQ

In Facebook groups
EVO MInecraft MOOC – https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomc 

At Groups.io
EVO Minecraft MOOC – https://groups.io/g/minecraftmooc/message/198 

 


Earlier Events

Sat 19 Dec 1500-2000 UTC – Free CETE/TESOL (Virtual) Annual  Online International Conference, with Deborah Healey plenary

https://learning2gether.net/2020/12/19/learning2gether-at-the-cete-tesol-virtual-annual-online-international-conference-deborah-healey-plenary/

Mon 21 Dec – TEIS Webinar Recording: Lessons from Africa: Teacher Development through Language Teacher Associations

Webinar URL: youtu.be/NXos-eysyXs

Aymen Elsheikh, (President of Africa ELTA (formerly known as Africa TESOL) & Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University at Qatar) and Chadia Mansour (Athabasca University), discussed unique circumstances, opportunities and challenges language teacher associations in the region face in language teacher development. Amongst the many points raised included the uniqueness of Africa ELTA’s focus on diversity, its community-based orientation, and its emphasis on cultivating leaders as well as the fronting of expertise from within its membership. Amongst Africa ELTA’s challenges included garnering resources to support its members and navigating turf lines amongst sponsors. The discussion began with Elsheikh & Effiong’s 2018 research on the subject. With the participation of audience members, the discussion concluded with a recognition of the monumental efforts it took to establish the association, with minimal funding sources, and based heavily on the work and unwavering belief of volunteers and advocates.

Sat 26 Dec and Jan 2 & 9 noon UTC – Free Graphic Design from EVO Moderator Omal Peter

Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.

Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/tZMsdOygpz8tHNc_WLlu_kPfIuQ_zb0fF75W/ics?icsToken=98tyKuGvrzgvEt2Rtx-ERpwEBYjCZ_zxmClago1eoyjJDzVsaTPwH_dzDah9QN72

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87135894763?pwd=eXRsQXpMSTVuL2VVUThwV2U5dHU4QT09

Meeting ID: 871 3589 4763

Passcode: 6Bgf8n

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRULA65zf2gVN5J_V4q4Yg4Vk1eRGd3RFqgtqdFrcMmhIesw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Sat 26 Dec and Jan 2 & 9 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/ 

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58 
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.  

 

 

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is January 14, 2021 06:00 UTC

Learning2gether at the CETE/TESOL (Virtual) Annual Online International Conference – Deborah Healey keynote

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Learning2gether Episode 503

Navigation

See promotion and feedback for this event
Skip down to Earlier Events that happened since the previous Learning2gther post

I have occasionally in the past made Learning2gether episodes out of events I did not myself organize. My involvement in this one was almost accidental. I received a message from a colleague that the Center for English Teaching Excellence affiliate of TESOL, CETE / Georgia was looking for speakers for their upcoming virtual conference and suggested I put myself forward. On making enquiries I discovered two important things: (1) the conference was to be held from 7 pm to midnight Tbilisi time, odd timing for Georgians, but most probably to accommodate their plenary speaker Zooming in from west coast USA; and (2) the plenary speaker was Dr. Deborah Healey, a long time colleague in CALL-IS in TESOL, and past-president of, and current roving / virtual ambassador to, TESOL.org. When a TESOL affiliate needs a speaker, Deborah is often called on and often accepts (and always makes a great presentation).

healey_ceteGeorgia

The conference started at 11 pm my time in Penang, Malaysia. I had scheduled a meeting of moderators of my EVO 2021 group, EVO Minecraft MOOC, for 10 pm my time, and as long as I’d be online anyway, I decided to stay up for Deborah’s presentation.

I don’t see where there is a video recording yet, but if one becomes available I can embed it here. Meanwhile, we’ll have to make do with my screenshots and the materials Deborah posted at http://tinyurl.com/healeycete

Deborah’s Tiny URL points to a Google Drive folder where there are three files. One is to a getting-to-know-you Google form. One is to a breakout activity she may have been planning for her presentation (or perhaps meant it as a model for one). And the third file is to her slide presentation, direct link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w-B1yYBBc7aJo6bHkpREasphu9GtPCNa/view?usp=sharing

The presentation was timely, entitled
Building community in difficult times: Pandemic and online teaching

She set the presentation in the context of the sudden shift in demands on teaching, followed by suggestions for effective teaching and community building online, couching the discussion in the framework TESOL’s 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners. She closed with a discussion of resources that teachers could access worldwide for free, and from TESOL often for free or at nominal cost. She made clear when one of her suggestions might cost something; e.g. in the neighborhood of $35, what a year’s global membership subscription to TESOL would cost people overseas in Georgia, for example.

My other meeting had run a little overtime, and I arrived at about the point when she started talking about the 6 principles:healey06ps

You can see in the slides where for Principle 1 she talked about ice breakers in Zoom; using surveys and playing games such as scavenger hunts to get to know participants and their opinions.

2020-12-19

On Principle 2 she gave her insights into conditions for interactivity in virtual classrooms. One of these was to have students switch cameras on, which I interpreted as a signal to turn mine on immediately. No one likes to talk to a wall of static icons. Also her breakout activities would have fit in here, all explained in the slides.

Also on the same Principle 2, on Slide 11 (page 11 in the pdf version) Deborah introduced the Flipped Learning approach, https://flippedlearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/FLIP_handout_FNL_Web.pdf. She mentioned its tenets and then suggested her listeners go to the Electronic Village Online page which has on it a Call for Participation in the sessions taking place this January and February, 2021, http://evosessions.pbworks.com/

She suggested that teachers find in the list on that page the link to the session on Flipped Learning in Language Teaching, whose direct link for those interested is http://evo2021proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/141324927/Flipped%20Learning%20in%20Language%20Teaching.

She did not mention that there is also a session given by one of the chief proponents of Flipped Learning, Laine Marshall, on her trademark SOFLA, or Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach, http://evo2021proposals.pbworks.com/w/page/141322005/Synchronous%20Online%20Flipped%20Learning%20Approach.

So participants in EVO this year could take one or both of those. EVO sessions are free and available to all.

The part of her presentation that I warmed up to most was about Principle 3, designing high quality language lessons, because she gave practical examples of tools that might be used to implement the three online presences in Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (2000); per Slide 12:

healey_principle3

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2, 87-105.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6; also available http://cde.athabascau.ca/coi_site/documents/Garrison_Anderson_Archer_Critical_Inquiry_model.pdf

As can be seen at the CoI portal page (https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/) there are three presences represented in the Venn diagram reproduced in Deborah’s slide. For Social Presence, Deborah suggests the following tools, plus Webquests, which she added just before she changed slides, and before I could refresh my screenshot.

healey01

For Cognitive and Teaching Presences, she suggested these tools as an appropriate fit to the revised Bloom’s taxonomy for constructing meaning in a digital age (shown on her slide 14):

But the part of the presentation where she made this a Learning2gether episode was when she reached her discussion of Principle 6, Engage and collaborate within a community of practice:

healey06

On slide 20 she made mention of Learning2gether as a salient example of teachers helping one another in times of need; most recently in reference to ERT (emergency remote teaching) and whatever the new normal is in this era of pandemic

healey_slide20

This was followed by a full list of resources, many of which are not hyperlinked in the PDF version of the slide show, but there are usually umbrella links at the bottom of the slides, and failing that, there’s always Google. One such set of resources was the https://my.tesol.org/ COVID-19 Resources Group.

covid19tesol
https://my.tesol.org/communities/community-home?CommunityKey=80115161-470c-46be-bd23-849d1e8302a4

This group has informed a substantial portion of materials I have been sharing since last March 2020 in my Crowdsourced Google Doc on COVID-19 Teaching. This document was created at the outset of the ERT phase as a part of the TALIN webinar series whose 38 webinars took place from from March to August 2020. TALIN at the time stood for Teaching and Learning in IsosatioN, but it has since morphed into TALIN2, which, whenever possible, I represent with a superscripted 2 so that it reads “TALIN squared” – standing for Teaching and Learning in the New Normal.

talin2020fb
From the TALIN Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/talin2020

So, this was a very stimulating presentation, overlapping nicely with principles and mindset of the ongoing Learning2gether project.

2020-12-19certificate

If more links for this presentation become available in the near future I’ll add them here.


Promotion and Feedback

This event was promoted at the CETE / TESOL Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1406931896220617

And in email from the organizers, which had this welcome announcement:
Thank you for registering for the 12th (Virtual) Annual Online International Conference “Pandemic and Online Teaching” which will be held on the 19th of December from 19:00 to 24:00 Georgian time

Plus the email had a Zoom link, and an attached schedule (to my knowledge, not online)

From Nino Chachanidze’s follow-up post to the
CETE/ TESOL Conference 2020 Dec 19

ninoFBdec20


Earlier Events

Tue 8 Dec 0100 UTC Learning2gether Episode 502 – VSTE Minecraft Monday regular monthly webinar for December 2020: Fun with skins and resource packs

https://learning2gether.net/2020/12/08/vste-minecraft-monday-regular-monthly-webinar-for-december-2020-fun-with-skins-and-resource-packs/

Tue 8 Dec 1500 and 1800 UTC – CALL-IS and American English Live Tech Tips webinars

ELT educators around the globe have faced new and often unexpected challenges during the recent shift to online and hybrid learning. To address some commonly reported virtual instruction concerns, the U.S. Department of State’s American English Live webinar team and TESOL International Association’s Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS) are jointly presenting two special Tech Tips webinars on December 8, 2020.

Please join us on the @AmericanEnglishforEducators Facebook page (facebook.com/AmericanEnglishforEducators) for one or both of these free 45-minute sessions; times below are listed in US Eastern Time (Washington, D.C.), and you can confirm your local broadcast time here: bit.ly/ChecktheTime.

Registration is not required. Recordings of both professional development webinars will be available on the CALL-IS YouTube channel at tinyurl.com/call-is-youtube

——————————
posted by Heather Benucci
TESOL Computer-Assisted Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS) Chair, 2020-2021

10am EST – “Flipped Instruction in the Virtual English Language Classroom” 

Martha Ramirez will explain the concept of flipped learning and examine how to apply it during courses that include live virtual sessions. We will also discover how flipping has become an effective practice for differentiating learning during online instruction.

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanEnglishforEducators/videos/2453641318274868

Martha shows us (in a compelling and insightful way) how learning can be messy

Recordings:

“Flipped Instruction in the Virtual English Language Classroom” with Martha Ramirez

1pm EST – “New Frontiers in Classroom Management: Effective Practices for Live Online Instruction“

Justin Shewell will share a selection of practical strategies and accessible tools that can help teachers manage their e-classrooms during live online sessions.

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanEnglishforEducators/videos/2802058820037517

Recordings:

“New Frontiers in Classroom Management: Effective Practices for Live Online Instruction” with Justin Shewell

Wed 9 Dec 1300 EST B-MEIS Webinar: Hip-Hop and Translanguaging: Negotiated Community Participation

Here is the link to the webinar recording: https://youtu.be/WjMj3LAd7E8

Description

 This panel brings together a group of critical scholars who look at the intersection of hip-hop and translanguaging scholarship. Drawing upon their own experience as a hip-hop artist and/or scholar-activist and work with people from language-minoritized groups in different regions of the world – Hong Kong, U.S., South Korea, and Serbia, panelists (Chang, Im, and Schreiber) will discuss how individuals adopt and adapt hop-hop and translanguaging practices to participate in local and global communities with the purposes of amplifying their voices, expressing their multicultural and multilingual identities, and resisting the dominant ideologies and discourses. Panelists will also offer implications on how hip-hop and translanguaging can be used as pedagogy in classrooms to promote bi/multilingualism and advance a social justice agenda. Our discussant, Angel Lin, will synthesize ideas and guide overall discussion to help develop further theoretical understanding, practical applications, and future pathways toward engaging in hip-hop and translanguaging as a form of negotiated community participation.

Presenters

Benji Chang is Assistant Professor of Equity Education in the School of Education, and International & Global Studies, at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is also Adjunct Faculty at the Education University of Hong Kong. Dr. Chang’s work focuses on teacher education, community engagement, and language, literacy and culture, with publications in venues like Linguistics & Education and Curriculum Inquiry. He currently serves on the Teachers College Record board and is Co-Editor of Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. Prior to UNCG, he was a hip-hop artist, inner-city classroom teacher, and Fellow of NCTE and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Jae-hyun Im is a PhD candidate in the department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University Bloomington. He is interested in translingualism, teacher identity, hip-hop-based education, and discursive psychology. His recent publications can be found in Applied Linguistics Review and Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

Brooke R. Schreiber is an Assistant Professor of English Department at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches courses in writing and linguistics. Her research focuses on second language writing, pedagogy, and teacher training, as well as global Englishes and translingualism. Her work has appeared in TESOL Quarterly, ELT Journal, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Composition Studies, and Language Learning and Technology. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection with Multilingual Matters on linguistic justice and multilingual writers.

Angel M. Y. Lin received her doctoral degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto in 1996. Her research and teaching have focused on critical discourse analysis, critical literacies, bilingual and multilingual education. She has published six research books and over 100 research articles and book chapters, and serves on the editorial boards of leading international research journals. She was a full professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong before moving in 2018 to Simon Fraser University to take up the position of Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Plurilingual and Intercultural Education.

Where?
Register for the Zoom meeting: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrc-2qpz0pG9H6QXIwpAfx9A6s3CogvtQK

Fri 11 Dec 1500 UTC – AQUEDUTO

https://bit.ly/32kRmmH/

Fri 11 December 11 1500 EST – Christine B., Liz England, Sara Stevick, and Ashley Jennings

Sharon Tjaden-Glass: I’m happy to share the recording of our most recent #networking session between TESOL/education professionals and instructional designers. Thanks so much to our speakers, Jennifer Davis, Laine Istvan, MSID, Jennette Skaggs, and Elisabeth Huber for sharing their stories of moving from the field of teaching to #instructionaldesign.

Our next networking session will be held on Friday, December 11th from 3-4 p.m. EST, and our speakers include Christine B., Liz England, Sara Stevick, and Ashley Jennings, MA. To register for our next session, please visit this link: https://lnkd.in/dZi2hD6

Recording of most recent networking session: http://bit.ly/ArtsCreativity
(The bit.ly link opens onto the Zoom recording)

Sat 12 Dec noon UTC – Free Graphic Design from EVO Moderator Omal Peter

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87135894763?pwd=eXRsQXpMSTVuL2VVUThwV2U5dHU4QT09

Meeting ID: 871 3589 4763
Passcode: 6Bgf8n

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRULA65zf2gVN5J_V4q4Yg4Vk1eRGd3RFqgtqdFrcMmhIesw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Remaining sessions, all at 07:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

  • Dec 19, 2020 07:00 AM
  • Dec 26, 2020 07:00 AM
  • Jan 2, 2021 07:00 AM
  • Jan 9, 2021 07:00 AM

Sat 12 Dec 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Time where you are Dec 12, 9-11 am EDT, 1400-1600 UTC
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Sat+Dec+12%2C+9-11+EDT+-+VSTE+Second+Life+Saturdays&iso=20201212T09&p1=212&ah=2

 Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

Thu 17 Dec Diversity in L2 Writing: Creating Inclusive Pedagogical and Administrative Approaches

What: Diversity in L2 Writing: Creating Inclusive Pedagogical and Administrative Approaches

L2 writers in English-speaking colleges and universities come from across the globe and bring myriad academic and life experiences with them. Panelists discuss research and practical applications for creating equitable spaces for English learners with disabilities, refugee students, and international students in writing classes and institutions. Teachers and researchers of L2 writing as well as administrators of writing programs will learn important information about how to make their programs more equitable for all learners.

Presenters

  • Betsy Gilliland is past chair of the Second Language Writing Interest Section and an associate professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i Manoa.
  • Caroline Torres is an associate professor in the second language teaching program at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawai’i.
  • Shawna Shapiro is Associate Professor of Writing and Linguistics and Director of the Writing & Rhetoric Program at Middlebury College in Vermont.
  • Megan Siczek is an assistant professor and director of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at George Washington University, Washington, DC.
  • Aylin Relyea the current chair of the Second Language Writing Interest section and faculty at Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College in California.

When: Dec 17, 2020 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM (ET)
Register here: my.tesol.org/events/…

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is February 23, 2021 07:00 UTC
Added certificate of participation forwarded from Georgia organizers

VSTE Minecraft Monday regular monthly webinar for December 2020: Fun with skins and resource packs

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Learning2gether Episode 502

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In the USA where my VSTE friends were convening in Discord and talking each other through their preparations for the day’s event, it was Monday evening, December 7. But for me on the other side of the world it was almost 9 in the morning of Tuesday December 8. Still, in deference to my friends, I go along with how they like to call their monthly event: “VSTE Minecraft Monday”.

This Minecraft Monday was streamed in Discord by K4sons and recorded in Camtasia by the mysterious alter ego Streamer Vance, who made it available for replay at https://youtu.be/y3RExV7vcMw

My VSTE friends, two of whom were also moderators in EVO Minecraft MOOC (and some other VSTE folk who are occasional EVOMC participants), were in Discord getting set up for their regular monthly event. I had offered to record it. There are various ways of doing this, but the easiest way for me is to use Camtasia since I bought a copy years ago and Techsmith still honors my license after all these years and not only that, lets me download and install the software onto multiple devices at any given time using the same purchase key. Camtasia is the quickest way to get a screencast up and running unless you plan to stream out to the Internet as well, in which case OBS (Open Broadcast Software) is usually my choice; it’s free but trickier to configure, therefore takes more time to pick and choose what you want to record and test beforehand. Camtasia costs a couple hundred dollars, but I’d already bit that bullet, and it is pretty good at recording whatever part of the screen you want to include and whatever sound is coming out of the computer, and getting your mic sound if you tick it in, and and your web cam if you choose to include that. I just have to test it once, and it’s usually good to go.

I had arrived in Discord early to find out if K4sons (a.k.a. EVOMC21 co-moderator Kim Harrison) was going to stream the session in Discord (‘stream’ here means stream someone’s screen in Discord, but visible only to others with permission to view that group’s doings in Discord; and the stream can’t be recorded in Discord). I had offered to record that if that was what they were going to do, in which case I would need to bring along Streamer Vance, one of my alter egos, to assist. Teacher Vance, my Minecraft character, can be in Minecraft and record that in Camtasia on one computer, but Teacher Vance would become quite disconcerted if he were having to track both his view of Minecraft and a stream from someone else’s perspective taking place on one patch of laptop computer screen real estate (and Camtasia itself records a region of the screen which would consume a large part of that real estate). So I invented an imaginary sidekick Streamer Vance whose job it is to go onto another of my computers, insinuate himself into Discord there, and record the stream. However, in order for me to record a stream in Discord, Streamer Vance would need to become a member of the VSTE Discord group

This meant that K2sons had to add the new member to the group while trying to get set up for the event, but she’s pretty good at that, so well before start time Streamer Vance was happily in place and testing the setup, and giving us the thumbs up that all was good to go.

We waited for Show Time! K4sons had sent an email just four hours before the two Vance’s had got out of bed in the morning which said:

Take a break from your shopping and decorating to reconnect with your VSTE Minecraft friends. Tonight we will play with changing skins and resource (texture) packs. Let’s dress up Minecraft for the holidays!

And what a great session, as I noted on Facebook …

2020-12-08vste

Among the items presented were:

Toward the end of the session (we were playing in survival mode) we were attacked by phantoms, flying mobs in Minecraft that appear at night, seemingly out of nowhere. Here’s what they look like when they are dangerously bearing down on you. It’s rare (for me) to get a screenshot of them:

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Here are the same phantoms once Jaz had kindly gone to sleep, and switched the lights back on for all of us:

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Burn in peace, duckies!

Meanwhile, those of us on the EVO Minecraft MOOC server noticed that we were prompted in November to accept a resource pack that turned our world into fall colors. After Thanksgiving, another resource pack was offered that has thrown us into Christmas, with wreaths on the doors and snow on the ground (fortunately the paths we’ve painstakingly made are still visible 🙂

Here’s the view from the top of my house these days:

It seems that the Resource Packs that our EVOMC21 server admin Zzidkha has prompted us to install are running on the back end, but if you want to install your own resource packs, in your Minecraft Settings window you click on the button that says “Resource Packs”  and this is what I see in mine:

1.16.4resourcePacks

It looks like we can revert to the default look or load in the classic view, both built in (I tried it though; didn’t work, still got the resource pack imposed on us from the server). If you want other options you have to install them on your computer. But after this session, we can now see now how to install service packs more to our taste and just run them at will when we launch Minecraft.


Promotion and Feedback

Here are K4sons’s instructions on how to join Minecraft Mondays each month

Minecraft Mondays occur on the first Monday of any month at 8 PM Eastern time on the VSTE Place server
minecraft.vste.org:11002. (GMT -5)

Basic directions to join VSTE Place, VSTE’s Minecraft world

You must have a computer Minecraft account from https://minecraft.net/en/ to join. There is a one time fee of $26.95.

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. Make sure you have installed and are running version 1.16.4.
  3. Choose multiplayer and add a server: Name VSTE Place IP: minecraft.vste.org:11002.
  4. Our server is protected. You will need to be whitelisted to enter.
    Email Kim Harrison at K4sons@gmail.com from an educational email address with your real name and Minecraft account name.

Discord

Discord is a voice and screen sharing application that will run on your computer or mobile device.

  1. Download and install it for free.
  2. Create an account. Many of us use the same name for our Discord account as our Minecraft account to keep things simple.
  3. Our channel is https://discord.gg/cp9tsWz

It helps us to be able to play Minecraft in one screen and listen via Discord with earbuds or headphones.

Promotion on Facebook

This post was made to the EVO Minecraft MOOC group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomc/


Earlier Events

Sun 6 Dec 0800 UTC Minhaaj Rehman interviews Vance Stevens to discuss their life and career trajectories so far this century

https://learning2gether.net/2020/12/06/minhaaj-rehman-ceo-of-psyda-co-interviews-vance-stevens-to-discuss-their-life-and-career-trajectories-so-far-this-century/

Sat-Sun 5-6 Dec two-day OpenSimulator Community Conference

From 5-6 December 2020 starting at about 3pm GMT (Sat) the OpenSimulator Community Conference takes place on the AVACON grid. Come join us for 2 days of learning all about OpenSim.

To HyperGrid jump to the OSCC conference grid:

  • Click the Map button at the bottom of your screen
  • In the Search text field on the right side of the map, paste this link: http://cc.opensimulator.org:8002/   (note the trailing slash)
  • Click the Teleport button at the bottom of the screen to teleport to a Landing Zone on the conference grid where there will be maps & info signs.

New to the conference and interested in creating an avatar?
If you registered and requested a new local account be created for the OSCC Conference Grid, you should have received an email with the login details. View this step by step video and visit the Login Info page for instructions on how to download an OpenSimulator viewer and more information about how to connect to the grid. If you have a Local Account from a previous OSCC event and have forgotten your password, use the Forgot Your Password link to reset it.

Sun 6 Dec 1630 UTC Heike Philp presents on EVO storytelling in virtual worlds at the OpenSim Community Conference

On Sunday 6 Dec 2020 Heike Philp will present a short 20min session about her EVO session coming up (9 Jan – 14 Feb 2021 EVO Storytelling in Virtual Worlds), showcase EduNation in OS purposely built for EVO, but perhaps there to last, and she will mention her latest EU funded project proposal EXCALIBUR.

When:
6 Dec 2020 at 4:30pm GMT (UK time) or 8:30am SL time; World times
Heike Philp: ‘Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and Anvil, is rightwise king born….’

EXPO Zone 4
Also Heike created an expo area/ booth on Expo zone 4 where you will find more information about EduNation in OS, the upcoming EVO session and EXCALIBUR. Here is the link to the expo:
hop://cc.opensimulator.org:8002/OSCC%20Expo%20Zone%204/112/179/26

Looking forward to seeing you there!
Rgds Heike

Here is my screenshot of the crowd at the last session in the conference

Here I am testing my ability to embed a video I can’t get the plugin to accept at this page
http://missions4evomc.pbworks.com/w/page/142108218/Video_Tutorials#EVOMC21Tutorial12SafarifromTrenchshelter1toMountainbase2toMineshelter3

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is December 10, 2020 09:00 UTC

Minhaaj Rehman, CEO of Psyda, interviews Vance Stevens to discuss their life and career trajectories and convergences this century

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Learning2gether Episode 501

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Minhaaj’s video recording is here, https://youtu.be/gKbLRnjfRaU

Some early participants in Webheads in Action might remember Minhaaj Rehman, who has since become CEO of Psyda https://psyda.co/, which is a company into different kinds of academic research; e.g. AI and data analytics.

2020-12-06psyda

Among many other initiatives, Psyda mounts a podcast series,
https://psyda.co/podcast#6ceff2ac-33d6-4dac-8358-eec731068780 

with topics such as this one, an interview with Dr. Premkumar Elangovan, developer of a writing software package called Ref n Write, https://youtu.be/RsVMDr2MNEg

Many of the topics of these podcasts appear somewhat even more esoteric than the one above.

One of Minhaaj’s lesser esoteric of these podcasts occurred on December 6, 2021, when Minhaaj interviewed Vance Stevens on a wide ranging variety of topics, stemming from Vance’s background in computer-assisted language learning going back to the late 1970s, and into when Webheads in Action was founded 20 years later. At around that time Minhaaj, one of the early Webheads, met up with Vance and Bobbi frequently online and later over several meals in Abu Dhabi.

2020-12-06psyda-abuDhabi2
Bobbi, Vance, and Minhaaj in Abu Dhabi, circa 2006

In our interview we caught up with what we’ve been up to since then, and how our respective interests and career trajectories intersect.

Where?

Minhaaj invited us to meet him in StreamYard on Sunday, Dec 6, at 0800 UTC,
Streamyard is very similar to Zoom. You can find detailed instructions here:
https://streamyard.com/resources/docs/guest-instructions

Minhaaj produced this attractive poster for the interview

2020-12-06poster

Minhaaj wrote this about the event on Facebook:

Tools like Grammarly, Ref n Write and Scholarcy are all outcome of Natural Language Processing and helps in writing academic papers that are of high quality. On December 6th, i’ll be talking to an expert in computer assisted language teaching Vance Stevens. Vance has trained pilots in UAE and has spent 40 years working around the world teaching English using cutting edge technologies such as SecondLife. We will be discussing issues like academic writing and modern day tools for intelligent research like MAXQDA and NVivo. You can read more about his work at https://vancestevens.com/papers/CurriculumVitaeVance.pdf 

Note from Vance: a better link is to stop further back at the URL above, where all my publications are listed and many are linked in full text, here: https://vancestevens.com/papers/

On teaching writing to (low-level) EFL students

In preparations for this interview, Minhaaj mentioned Ref n Write, a microsoft word addin for better academic writing. I mentioned that in my last years teaching EFL in UAE I was focusing my most novel work on writing.

I told Minhaaj that I had described and demonstrated a technique for giving feedback on student writing to teachers at SQU in Oman, online, and posted this archive of it.
https://learning2gether.net/2019/03/07/vance-stevens-presents-on-supporting-student-writing-with-the-help-of-voice-to-text/

I note there that I gave an improved version of the presentation online in preparation for a face-to-face presentation I would be giving at GLoCALL in Danang a few days later. These links are:

These links reference articles I have published on and around the topic

I said I could address the topic above if  Minhaaj wanted to bring it up in the interview. He replied that “that’s a very good topic and method to teach students. You can elaborate that in detail.”

But the topic never came up. I include it here because it seems to be something Minhaaj wanted me to mention, and anyone can follow the links for more information.


Promotion and Feedback

Vance’s announcements beforehand

This event was announced at these Facebook groups

And shared with …

The event was also posted at this Groups.io –  https://groups.io/g/webheadsinaction/message/32753

Minhaaj promoted the event on Facebook and on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/events/computerassistedlearningandnlp-6740878708908797952/

2020-12-06psyda-LI1

2020-12-06psyda-LI0

2020-12-06psyda-goingLIve

2020-12-06psyda-LI2

2020-12-06minhaajFB

This is the video as it appears on Facebook, for as long as it stays there 🙂

Long-time Webhead-in-Action Maru Del Campo sent us this much-appreciated feedback

2020-12-06psyda-maru


Earlier Events

Sun 29 Nov 1400 UTC Webheads in Action 30th revived Open Mic FUNinar and 500th Learning2gether Webcast Party

An archived work in progress can be found at https://learning2gether.net/2020/11/29/webheads-in-action-30th-revived-open-mic-funinar-and-500th-learning2gether-webcast-party/

Tue 1 Dec 1500 UTC CALL-IS and State Dept Office of English Language Programs webinars – Tech Tips for Teaching Today

Heather Benucci, CALL-IS Chair, 2020-2021, informs us of a collaborative “Tech Tips for Teaching Today” OER webinar partnership between TESOL’s CALL-IS and the U.S. Department of State’s Office of English Language Programs designed to meet the needs of teachers around the world facing an unexpected shift into online learning environments due to the current global pandemic.

Tentatively planned for Tuesday, November 17th at 10am Eastern Time and Tuesday, December 1st at 10am Eastern Time

Sat 5 Dec noon UTC – Free Graphic Design from EVO Moderator Omal Peter

Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.

Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/tZMsdOygpz8tHNc_WLlu_kPfIuQ_zb0fF75W/ics?icsToken=98tyKuGvrzgvEt2Rtx-ERpwEBYjCZ_zxmClago1eoyjJDzVsaTPwH_dzDah9QN72

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87135894763?pwd=eXRsQXpMSTVuL2VVUThwV2U5dHU4QT09

Meeting ID: 871 3589 4763

Passcode: 6Bgf8n

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRULA65zf2gVN5J_V4q4Yg4Vk1eRGd3RFqgtqdFrcMmhIesw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Remaining sessions, all at 07:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Every week on Sat, until Jan 9, 2021

Sat 5 Dec 1400-1600 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Time where you are Dec 5, 9-11 am EDT, 1400-1600 UTC

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Sat+Dec+5%2C+9-11+EDT+-+VSTE+Second+Life+Saturdays&iso=20201205T09&p1=212&ah=2

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

Sat 5 Dec 1430 UTC KSALT Teacher Talks

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is December 9, 2020 08:00 UTC

Webheads in Action 30th revived open mic FUNinar and 500th Learning2gether Webcast Party

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You are welcome to download this audio:
https://learning2getherdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/2020-11-29-21.45.29wia30th_l2g500th_audio_only.m4a?

Learning2gether Episode 500!
30th Webheads Revival Weekly Sandbox Open Mic-inar

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The mp4 video file generated by Zoom uploaded to YouTube

All were welcome to join us in the one-and-only, never-to-be repeated, 500th episode of Learning2gether, which coincided with the 30th Webheads in Action Open Mic FUNinar to take place since we started regrouping during lockdown last March.

2020-11-29party500poster

Since it was a spontaneous FUN (frivolous unanticipated nonsense) and open mic event, there was no plan per se, except that we could get together and talk about our intersections in this movement, which began ten years ago (meaning Learning2gether; Webheads began 20 years ago!). You can find an index of all 500 Learning2gether events over the past decade here: http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/34456755/archiveindex

We could also talk about where we see Learning2gether and Webheads in Action heading in the future., connect it with your own projects and directions in life and career aspirations.

2020-11-29partyDorisFB_rock

And of course, not to lose sight of the essential, we can party. Party hats and masks are encouraged, though as with everything in Webheads, not required, and not ruled by any one person’s agenda.

The Learning2gether 500th episode party was attended mainly by Webheads revelers. Attendees appeared in Zoom and in Facebook, and are listed here in alphabetical order:

Aiden Yeh in Taiwan
Claire Bradin Siskin in Pittsburg
Cris Fry in Barcelona
Doris Molero in Argentina
Elizabeth Hanson-Smith in Maine
Evelyn Izquierdo in Venezuela
Graham Stanley · in Mexico at the moment
Grazzia María Mendoza in Facebook
Hanaa Khamis from Alexandria, Egypt
Heike Philp in Germany
Helena Galani in Greece
Jane Chien in Taiwan
Jeff Lebow, in Korea
Jorge Kormpas, a.k.a. Georgios Kormpas from Greece
Kirsty Wood joined us in Zoom and Facebook
Laine Marshall in Long Island
Michael Coghlan, on guitar and in spirit
Mike Byrne, once lived in Alexandria
Minnie Wang in China
Mbarek Akaddar in Morocco
Nahed Farouk, Hanaa’s friend in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Nina Liakos, checking in from Indivisible Montgomery, Maryland
Rita Abdelnour from Lebanon
Rita Zeinstejer in Argentina
Vance and Bobbi Stevens in Malaysia

Links shared by Vance during the webinar

Michael Birch had earlier suggested: “It might be quite fun to look back at extracts from episode 1, 100, 200 etc. Tools still used. Opinions/predictions that have changed.” This was requested as well by other participants in the day’s webinar.

I wasn’t able to monitor the chat and also the participants’ list (with its waiting room) at the same time, so I wasn’t able to post the links I was showing in the Zoom chat as I shared them. But here they are (timings given are from the 1:21:39 YouTube version of the Zoom recording):

Getting back to Jeff Lebow’s question where he had asked me about the first ever Learning2gether episode, at about 17:15 in the recording, I scroll all the way to the end, to where these entries appear (we had called our first Learning2gether sessions “speedgeeking”):

One week before our first Learning2gether event we had one on June 7, 2009 which we called Speedlifing: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/06/speedlifing.html

  • There’s a picture in the above blog post from the June 7 event (that’s me on the horse)

2020-11-99_sl090607_crop

  • You can see below me the becaped Zorro character who emerged from the Mayan ruins and mingled with us in the speedlife event.  When he motioned with his arms it caused cyclone winds where everything was blowing about chaotically.  I have always suspected that this was the only known detractor of EVO, who used to turn up in his normal avatar at some of our Second Life events at this time, though to be honest I have no proof of that, but I mentioned where I had reported on his antics in my blog post about him 20:23 in the Zoom YouTube recording:
    https://evomlit.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/the-only-known-detractor-of-evo/

Learning2gether Episode 1 – Speedgeek June 14, 2009

At 21:10 I pulled up the post from the first Learning2gether event, Teresa Almeida d’Eca’s presentation on Tag Galaxy (hence the ‘speedgeek’ concept

The presentation was 15 minutes long (hence the ‘speedgeek’ concept); see http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/w/page/5316667/SpeedGeeking

I hadn’t noticed it when I visited it at our live session, but at the top of the post there was an audio player which preserved our very first Learning2gether event on June 14, 2009. The audio still works:

Audio recording of Teresa Almeida d’Eca’s official Learning2gether Episode #1

There is also an Elluminate link here (a link to the playback file of an Elluminate, later called Blackboard Collaborate, recorded session; the audio was extracted from that recording). I clicked on it and found that the file downloaded to my computer, good news because it meant the file was still online. The trick would be to open it. To do that you have to install the Bb Collaborate app or launcher on your computer and then associate the file with that app. I was using a newly acquired computer so I didn’t have that software downloaded, and even if you have the software, you might have to do this manually.

I had mistakenly thought that Rita Zeinstejer had done the first SpeedGeek, but she was indeed one of our early presenters. At 23:26 I searched on her name in the recordings archive and pulled up a webinar on WritingMatrix our team had given at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference. That was listed among the precursors to Learning2gether at the bottom of the archive page.

The video presentation on Wrtingmatrix included in the asynchronous K-12 Online conference in 2007

I scrolled up to find in addition this entry, Episode 18, on  Sunday, December 5:

Before I could examine these files, at 23:45 in the recording, Jeff asked me what had prompted me to start Learning2gether. I explained that L2g derived from our Webheads in Action Online Convergences, the world-reknowned WIAOC events of 2005, 2007, and 2009. To reach our archive of those events, I went to my index of all things Webhead, the Webheads in Action portal page at http://webheads.info

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I went on to explain that I had started Learning2gether in order to have to avoid having to mount a 4th 72-straight-hour WiAOC event in 2011. I estimated that we could produce more presentations working at the moderate pace of one per week than we could by doing them all at one go in 72 hours every other year. More importantly, I had detected no interest in our CoP from anyone else wanting to take charge of the event instead of me; hence I moved to the Learning2gether weekly format.

I wrote about the transition from WiAOC to Learning2gether in Stevens (2014, p.162)

2014stevens

At 42:40 Jeff asked yet another incisive question. In early 2020, when educators were forced to go into Emergency Remote Teaching mode, how has that panned out for those of us who have been dabbling in this since the turn of the century?  I thought Jeff might be able to best answer his own question if I pulled up Learning2gether Episode 441, where Jeff describes how he created his DIYLMS (do it yourself learning management systems; see Stevens, 2012) for porting his class materials over to online environments, and helps his teaching cohort do the same:

2020-11-29partyDorisFB_lebow

https://learning2gether.net/2020/03/01/jeff-lebow-drops-by-blended-learning-classrooms-to-discuss-how-he-creates-his-diylms-told-as-a-digital-story/

by 46:48 in the recording, the conversation had turned toward the “Webheads spirit” and as an example, I referred to Minnie’s collaboration with Doris in her transmedia storytelling project, where Doris provided Minnie with an avatar and invited her to play her guzheng (Chinese zither) in a specially constructed theater in Second Life. I referred to the archive of their collaboration here; https://learning2gether.net/2020/08/16/doris-molero-and-minnie-wang-edutain-us-at-the-21st-weekly-webheads-sandbox-open-mic-funinar/

At 1:00:31, I mentioned that TALIN had started thanks to Michael Coghlan, one of the Webheads founders, who had suggested that we revive Webheads to serve as a community to which we could retreat weekly, as in the past, from our respective lockdowns during COVID-19
https://learning2gether.net/2020/03/30/20-years-after-michael-coghlan-and-vance-stevens-convene-a-webheads-in-action-reunion-and-launch-talin/

2020-11-29partyDorisFB_themeSong

In the screenshot above, we are listening to Michael Coghlan playing the Webheads Theme Song
Sing along: the Lyrics

An interesting back story behind the party screenshots and recordings

Zoom provides several options for recording sessions. Many people use the option to record online, hosted at Zoom. For this option to work, the host needs to have adequate space in his/her account for the recording. The first time I had a recording abort because I had run out of space in the middle of it, I stopped using this option (though this happened before the option to generate a backup stream was available; I should probably go back to this method). However, if you trust it or manage it well you can get an immediate link where people can go to view the recording, and the view is the richest available. You get the most faithful reproduction of what the host has broadcast to the screen in that view, and you can see the chat unfold as the recording plays. You also have the option of downloading your files and mounting them elsewhere, so this is probably the best option.

You can also record on your computer, or stream to Facebook, or you can stream onto YouTube, and you can also invoke more than one of these options simultaneously. I usually record onto my computer (for reliability) and onto Facebook for convenience and for the interaction possible in a social media space. Streaming to YouTube requires you to configure your streaming server in advance. You can do the same in Facebook but there is a quick option to just put in a title and description, and Go Live! I normally invoke this one, so I end up with (1)  a Facebook stream which I can embed in my blog posts (in WordPress just by pasting its link in the post) and (2) an mp4 recording on my computer which I can upload to YouTube and also easily embed in blog posts.

The recordings to computer and to Facebook produce slightly different results. I like to switch often between speaker and gallery view while I’m recording, but during screen shares, in speaker view, you see just the speaker in a thumbnail in the corner, or if in gallery view, you see just a few thumbnails from the audience to the right of the shared screen (the speaker and a few others). The mp4 and Facebook renditions of these vary slightly.

Another option is to make a screen capture of the session as it plays on your computer. This will give you the best view since you can include the text chat if you wish, and it’s WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get; in other words, this produces the most faithful recording of what you as host mean for the audience to see. The participants themselves have the ability to generate their own speaker or gallery views on their own devices, so no one person’s view of the event will be quite the same – but if you screen cast what’s on your screen, you have perfect control over the recording.

Two things happened during our party, both after we had been in session for about an hour. The first happened at about 1:04:36, when Doris showed us a special Webheads / Learning2gether 500th Celebration room she had created for us in Second Life:

2020-11-29partyDorisSL

An unfortunate choice of background music

Doris likes to dance almost as much as she like to be in Second Life, which means that when she is in Second Life, especially at a party in SL, her instinct is to dance, which her avatar proceeded to do. The music she had chosen for this occasion was Jerusalema, apparently a popular disco beat in Argentina, as suggested in one video on YouTube entitled “Dance Video Official© | JERUSALEMA | Master Kg feat Nomcebo – Baila con VITO e STEFANIA”, which you can see here, https://youtu.be/QJgwF_9cl1M

Note the “Video Official©” in the title of the video above. Doris’s version, as it played out in our webinar, was not official. This caused YouTube to flag it for a potential copyright violation. According to the explanation from YouTube posted below, you should still be able to see the video unless you are in the short list of countries where it is forbidden.

Facebook placed a more inconvenient restriction, which prevented me from embedding the video here in this blog post, and including in its notice, where the embed should have been, a link to where you can see the video at my personal profile in Facebook. I’m not sure how many of you can see it there.

Therefore, I decided to make a Camtasia recording of the Facebook stream, while I myself could still see it. This created my own mp4 which I uploaded directly to WordPress, no need to go through Facebook or YouTube and be subject to their filters. If the makers of Jerusalema have any objection they can contact me personally, but their work is available in various versions all over YouTube and ours is a completely non-commercial rendition made only coincidentally and only for the benefit of a community of practice of educators who are celebrating 20 years together, so one would hope there should be no objection. I realize that lawyers and corporate interest might have contrary opinions, but hopefully this blog will be off their radar. Lawrence Lessig (responsible for the Creative Commons movement) is also a lawyer and I feel certain that he would support us in our petty larceny.

Webheads all over the world

The second thing that happened requiring some effort on my part came at the end of the event, and followed the participants’ request, at around 1:09:52, that I play for them Michael Coghlan’s Webheads Theme song, “Webheads all over the world”. To do this I needed to visit http://webheads.info and scroll toward the bottom, play the mp3, and share the screen, having first invoked the option to play computer sound while doing that. Laine explained how each of us viewing the webinar could alter our individual views so that we could see the gallery, by moving aside my screen share on their individual devices, which by default consumes participants’ screens in the manner described above.

When the music played, Webheads being Webheads, and Webheads in Action to boot, they went into action. They started hand-dancing and swaying to the beat. Having myself brought up a full gallery view in accordance with Laine’s instructions, I instinctively made screenshots. When I want to do this spontaneously, I just press Print Screen on my PC.  This produces a notice that my screenshot has been automatically saved in my OneDrive. I made half a dozen screenshots of these precious moments where Webheads were coming together 20 years after our emergence on the web and dancing to the song that Michael had been moved to write for us way back then.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I viewed both the Zoom and Facebook recordings and saw that the screen share views were recorded in each but not the gallery views as I had enjoyed them. Fortunately I found the screenshots, duly saved to my OneDrive web account. And here they are:

2020-11-29 (7)

2020-11-29 (6)

2020-11-29 (5)

2020-11-29 (4)

2020-11-29 (3)

References

Stevens, V. (2012). DIYLMS: Learner-centered Do-it-yourself Learning Management System. In Dowling, S., Gunn, C., Raven, J., Gitsaki, C. (Eds.). Opening up Learning: HCT Educational Technology Series. HCT Press: Abu Dhabi; ISBN 978-9948-16-864-5), pp.103-112. PDF available, pp.0-11  http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2012DIYLMS.pdf

Stevens, V. (2014). Connectivist Learning: Reaching Students through Teacher Professional Development. In J.B. Son (Ed.). Computer-assisted language learning: Learners, teachers and tools. APACALL Book Series Volume 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available:
http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/archive/2014connectivist_learning.pdf


Zoom and Facebook Chat Logs

Zoom chat logs

21:45:29 From Bobbi : hi
22:03:11 From Bobbi : Hi Claire
22:03:19 From Vance Stevens, to the Waiting Room : Please change your name to someone we recognize
22:06:26 From Jane Chien : hello
22:06:41 From Jane Chien : just want to come in and say congrats!!!
22:07:03 From Bobbi : Thanks! Glad you are here!
22:08:36 From Bobbi : Hi Chris
22:17:30 From Bobbi : hi Mike!
22:18:32 From Mike B : Hi Hanaa, I lived in Alexandria too.
22:18:47 From Hanaa Khamis : Hi Mike
22:18:51 From Claire Siskin : me too! for a short time
22:18:55 From Bobbi : That’s interesting!
22:24:19 From Hanaa Khamis : i didn’t know u could wear glasses on top v a mask @Vance
22:24:39 From Bobbi : He is so funny 🙂
22:24:55 From Hanaa Khamis : 😄
22:37:28 From Hanaa Khamis : Hi Nina 🥰
22:38:20 From Hanaa Khamis : Webhead jargon
22:39:17 From Hanaa Khamis : Impressive mask Heike!
22:41:59 From Bobbi : Hi Laine!
22:44:17 From Nina Liakos : Bolas throwing video: https://youtu.be/TVTWCYULqmM
22:48:52 From Hanaa Khamis : Way to go dear Minnie😄
22:49:04 From Hanaa Khamis : Any warm bodies Minnie!
22:49:09 From Hanaa Khamis : 😄
22:50:39 From Mike B : trying to dream up improvised fancy dress, but I’m just in a rented place not at home…
22:51:21 From Bobbi : Ah no problem. Welcome just as you are.
23:08:58 From Heike Philp : Jerusalema
23:12:21 From Laine : https://lyricstranslate.com/en/jerusalema-jerusalem.html-0
23:18:31 From Kirsty Wood : Hi. Arrived late and I’m eating, so give me a few mins to put my cam on.
23:19:02 From Hanaa Khamis : Thats fun😄
23:22:09 From Hanaa Khamis : Amazing show to end with 🙂
23:22:19 From Heike Philp : YES
23:22:36 From Vance Stevens : http://webheads.info

Facebook chat transcripts

more or less in reverse chronological order
(or however Facebook orders them when you select ‘most recent’)

Aiden Yeh · 44:34 Happy Anniversary Webheads!
Bobbi Stevens · 0:00 Aiden Yeh Thank you!
Nahed Farouk · 0:29 So lovely 💗
Jane Chien · 1:20:39 Beautiful Webheads song!
Jane Chien · 1:19:35 Love the song!!!
Mbarek Akaddar · 1:12:10 Happy 500th anniversary❤️❤️❤️❤️
Grazzia María Mendoza · 1:06:19 Love it!
Evelyn Izquierdo …
Grazzia María Mendoza · 50:49 That sounds great Heike!
Jane Chien · 46:31 Happy 500th anniversary!!!
Aiden Yeh · 45:46 Love the hat, Vance
Jorge Kormpas · 42:13 Nice!!!
Graham Stanley · 40:21 Happy anniversary, Webheads!
Grazzia María Mendoza · 39:47 A hug to Nina, Vance, Claire, Heike!
Grazzia María Mendoza · 37:46 So good to see everyone!
Helena Galani · 0:00 Happy 500th anniversary, and many more to come


Promotion and Feedback

I live-streamed on the Learning2gether Facebook page, but, as you see …
— try clicking on WATCH ON FACEBOOK —

Facebook would not allow me to embed the streamed video as it usually does.

At first I didn’t know the reason, but we had two musical interludes during our program, and that is often the problem. Eventually, this appeared in email from YouTube

A copyright owner using Content ID has claimed some material in your video. As a result, your video has been blocked in some countries. This means that your video is still up on YouTube, but people in some countries may not be able to watch it.

This is not a copyright strike. This claim does not affect your account status.

Video title: Webheads in Action 30th revived Open Mic FUNinar and 500th Learning2gether Webcast Party
Copyrighted content: Jerusalema (feat. Nomcebo Zikode) (Edit)
Claimed by: WMG
Blocked countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria

Why this can happen

Your video might contain copyrighted content.
Copyright owners can choose to block YouTube videos that contain their content.
If this copyright claim is valid

You don’t need to take any action or delete your video.

So, it was Jerusalema!  In revanche,  I recorded my view of the stream in Camtasia and uploaded it here

This event was announced beforehand at these Facebook groups

And shared with …

A calendar event was also created at https://groups.io/g/webheadsinaction/message/32748

I noted in my announcements that the Facebook live stream
would occur NOT in the Webheads in Action group
but in the Learning2gether one, since it’s Learning2gether’s 500th:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/learning2gether

2020-11-29party500
Bobbi and Vance in party guise 🙂


Earlier Events

Fri 27 Nov 1400 UTC 1st Online CLIL-Ren Cafè – Focus on learning technologies for CLIL

https://learning2gether.net/2020/11/27/1st-online-clil-ren-cafe-focus-on-learning-technologies-for-clil-panel-with-greg-kessler-nicky-hockly-and-vance-stevens/

Sat 28 Nov noon UTC – Free Graphic Design from EVO Moderator Omal Peter

Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.

Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/tZMsdOygpz8tHNc_WLlu_kPfIuQ_zb0fF75W/ics?icsToken=98tyKuGvrzgvEt2Rtx-ERpwEBYjCZ_zxmClago1eoyjJDzVsaTPwH_dzDah9QN72

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87135894763?pwd=eXRsQXpMSTVuL2VVUThwV2U5dHU4QT09

Meeting ID: 871 3589 4763

Passcode: 6Bgf8n

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdRULA65zf2gVN5J_V4q4Yg4Vk1eRGd3RFqgtqdFrcMmhIesw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Remaining sessions, all at 07:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Every week on Sat, until Jan 9, 2021

Sat 28 Nov 1300-1500 UTC – VSTE Second Life Saturdays – repeats each Saturday

About this intitiative, https://vste.org/upcoming-events-virtual-environments-pln/

Nov 28, 9-11 am EDT, 1300 UTC

Jaz and Thunder are at VSTE Space in Second Life every Saturday morning from 5 am to 7 am Pacific time.

Feel free to come learn more about the VSTE VE PLN there. Follow VSTE on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VSTEVEPLN/

Below are directions for joining the VSTE VE PLN in Second Life and Minecraft

Basic directions to join VSTE Spaces

If you don’t have a Second Life account get one, it’s free. We recommend setting one up at the Rockcliffe University Consortium’s Gateway here: https://urockcliffe.com/reg/second-life/

  1. Download and install the software.
  2. While your Second Life viewer (software) is open click this link http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Soulgiver/155/144/58
  3. and voila! Look for an avatar on VSTE Island and say, “Hey, I’m new!” We will take care of the rest.

Mon-Sun 23-29 Nov Cambridge Assessment English free MOOC on Teaching English Online – Week 4 of 4

The Cambridge Assessment English MOOC on Teaching English Online aims for participants to learn how to transfer their teaching skills to an online context and start teaching English online.
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/online-tutoring/7

Started Nov 2, 2020, lasted for 4 weeks

This was a freemium course. You could take the course for free for its 4 weeks and have access to it for two more weeks for free.

It appears to be an xMOOC with a prescribed course to be completed in each of 4 weeks. Here is the beginning of Week 3’s syllabus

 There was more, as you would have seen when you registered for the course.

___________________________________________________________
This blog is written and maintained by Vance Stevens
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The date of this update is December 4, 2020 01:00 UTC