Monday, March 26, 2007

Second Life at the ACS and Quizzes

Yesterday, I gave my first talk at the March07 ACS meeting on Teaching Organic Chemistry with Blogs and Wikis. The screencast is now available.

It was part of a symposium on Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry organized by Harry Pence and Andrea Gay. Joanna Scott gave a most interesting talk about Nature's experimentation with Second Life and the great possibilities for communicating research work. Harry is also involved with Second Life. Indeed I met him in world by accident a few days ago!

Largely because of Beth Ritter-Guth's tireless dedication to implementing educational opportunities in Second Life, I am finally coming around and seeing the potential for teaching and research. With the help of Eloise Pasteur (SL name), Beth has created an adaptation of the EduFrag quizzes for second life.

The rules are the same but the interface is very different from Unreal Tournament. Click on the obelisk to get the quiz started. Four images will appear and only one will be correct. Click on the correct one to go to the next set. Clicking on an incorrect image will make you start over. If you make it past the 20th room you will be a rewarded with a picture of my cat yawning.

The material in the current quiz is on introductory organic chemistry (Lewis structures, Newman projections, nomenclature, etc.) and I will make good use of it in the class I am teaching next week.

Give it a try and let me know how it works. The quiz is located in the Open Notebook Science building on Eduisland (slurl). We'll be adding more material related to UsefulChem there shortly (thus the use of the Blue Obelisk).

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2 Comments:

At 6:12 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello Jean-Claude,

Dr. Ken Hartman forwarded me your email following the Drexel eLearning conference. I immediately came by to read this posting. Awesome! Seems as though you are having great results and more importantly you are encouraged to continue. These experiences are helping educators everywhere see the value of SL.

I'd like to tell you about a neat Google Group called Gaming and Learning in SL:

http://tinyurl.com/24wafp

That would be right up your alley. I know the organizers, they are an amazing group, and the membership represents some of the brightest minds in SL & education today, worldwide!

Please consider joining and participating. I've already posted a link to your blog entry!

Best,

KJ Hax
Walden University

 
At 4:14 PM, Blogger Jean-Claude Bradley said...

Thanks for the tip about the Google Group - I signed up.

 

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