Shawn A. Shepard
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technical

Use software and other tools appropriate to the task.

Second Life CheckerboardEDTEC 670: Exploratory Learning Through Simulation and Games

Build a Checkers Set in Second Life Simulation (11MB SWF)

I've used a lot of software for class assignments during the Educational Technology program. For instance, I used Flash for Eating Penguin (EDTEC 561), a short movie about my Antarctic experiences; I used PowerPoint for Locate the Restaurant (EDTEC 572), an English lesson for Korean-Americans; and I used Captivate for How to Build a Checkers Set in Second Life (EDTEC 670), a tutorial and simulation on how to use Second Life’s building tools. In every case, I started with a vision of what I wanted to do, but the limitations of the tools and my lack of knowledge about the tools chipped away at that vision.

For me, Flash was the most flexible and the most difficult to use. Eating Penguins was intended to be much like a Ken Burn’s movie and it was relatively successful. But, there were a few scenes, such as a helicopter landing, where I had to settle for a less animated sequence than I wanted because I just didn’t know the program well enough. I knew I should be able to do it, and I tried to discover how to do it, but I ran out of time and decided that maybe the scene didn’t need to be animated after all. Coincidentally, we were transitioning from Flash to Captivate in the Education Department at work because Flash was so much more difficult to learn.

Locate a Restaurant was my primary contribution to a team project, an English for Korean-Americans LMS on MindFlash. We settled on PowerPoint as our primary tool because we all knew the program, it would be easier to collaborate, and it would be easier to upload our work to the LMS. The slide show worked reasonably well, but transitions were clunky, awkward, and slow. The final product left me feeling as if I had just spent a lot of money at a really swanky restaurant for a less than a mediocre meal. I wish I had used Captivate.

I did use Captivate for How to Build a Checkers Set in Second Life, another team project. By this time I had been using Captivate for other projects and was feeling comfortable with it. Even though our instructor tried to dissuade us from using Captivate with Second Life because of some issues capturing right-click menus, it seemed a good compromise between the complexity of Flash and the limitations of PowerPoint (I had already run into and resolved the right-click issues).  But we did run into some issues. I didn’t know Second Life well enough to build the checkers set, and my partner didn’t know Captivate well enough to capture the Second Life scenes.  Fortunately, he taught me what I needed to know about Second Life and I taught him what he needed to know about Captivate.