Learning2gether Episode 509

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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

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 🙂

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.

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

• EVO Minecraft MOOC – https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomc
• Learning2gether –  https://www.facebook.com/groups/learning2gether
• Learning with Computers – https://www.facebook.com/groups/6577061586
• Multiliteracies –  https://www.facebook.com/groups/evomlit
• Teaching and Learning in IsolatioN –  https://www.facebook.com/groups/talin2020
• Webheads in Action – https://www.facebook.com/groups/webheadsinaction/

And at Groups.io

• MinecraftMOOC – https://groups.io/g/minecraftmooc/message/230
• WebheadsinAction – https://groups.io/g/webheadsinaction/message/32760

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:

 

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

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)

• Kindly, click here to join the meeting: http://tinyurl.com/2srn7uxp
• To check the time difference, kindly click here: https://tinyurl.com/1j5ravj8
• The registration is free through link: https://tinyurl.com/h28rt7jd

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