Thread:Past meetings (1)

First meeting, 2nd March 2008

Midwives have established a group for sharing and collaboration within the virtual world of Second Life.

We have had our first meeting you can read about this in Carolyn's Blogor in Sarah's blog on in Merrolee's blog (Merrolee is an Otago Polytechnic colleague from the School of Occupational therapy and came along to help and support us at this meeting.)

We are very grateful to Kiwi Educators for letting us meet in their meeting place on the Island of Koru. This is land in second life owned by the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology so thanks also to them for allowing us to use this place. Thanks also to Clare Atkins (Arwenna Stardust in second life) and Isa Goodman (SL name) for helping and supporting us as we find our way in this strange environment.

Meetings are to continue and the second meeting is scheduled for the 9th march 2008

Minutes for the first meeting of midwives in second life

Transcript from midwives meeting in second life 2nd March 2008

Second meeting, 9th March 2008

We had our second meeting of midwives in second life today. I was great to meet up with three midwives from the North American continent and one from Australia. Thank you to you all for coming and also once again to Arwenna for helping us all out and to Sarah for also coming along and supporting. We struggled at the start of the meeting to get audio working and gave up in the end just communicating through text. This is quite a challenge with a group and I am doubly glad audio worked for us last week. We also had problems for some with getting connected at all and Sarah crashed out of second life once while I crashed and had to resume four times. Others did not seem to crash. The sexual health area looked very interesting but there were lots of scripts being offered to us all the time. if we had been communicating in voice it may have been OK but trying to communicate in text when lots of other text was appearing all the time was too much really. Arwenna's garden and cave are quite magical places and a real pleasure to see.

On reflection for a group such as ours I think second life does hold tremendous possibilities for collaboration and networking. I think these possibilities are yet to be realised. I would not feel happy at this stage to use second life to meet with students as i do not feel it is reliable enough and would cause some anxiety for students. At this stage I would prefer to use software such as elluminate to have meetings with students. Given the pace of development in second life I believe that the time when it is more suitable for meeting with students is probably not far away. I therefore am happy to continue developing my skills in this environment.

It was disappointing that none of the others from last week made it. Understandable though given our busy lives. I have not organised a further meeting at this stage and will wait and see if there is support for this. I will go online on Sunday Mornings around 0900hrs NZ time 1200hrs Saturday Second life time as often as I can at Koru Island Kiwi educators sandbox, (Koru 161, 212, 34 PG - Koru Sandbox). I can then practice building while I am waiting. If anyone turns up I will be happy to see them. I will wait for a little while before logging off. I am not around every weekend however as I often have midwifery locum work in the weekends.

You can see a slide show of the meeting and photos here

You can see a transcript of the text of the meeting here