Second Life from the tablets

We've now pretty well completed loading the Second Life viewer onto all the tablets, and we're really pleased with how well they cope with it. The quality of the picture is generally good, although it doesn't have the richness of the picture on machines with more poweful graphics cards (e.g. no sparkly water!). But, we're still really impressed with how well they do handle it, and we'll be using them in class in semester 2 so that students can access a learning simulation area we're building on our SL island. For more info on this, go to our Research Observatory/SL blog at http://researchobs2.edublogs.org/ . The picture on the left shows the hub area of the island, with the offices on the right and the exhibition hall on the left.

New uses for the tablets

We're beginning to look at ways in which the tablet computers can be used to support other elements of the MScs in IT and Statistics, so that students can become more familiar with them when we begin the research methods curriculum work again in semester 2 (Feb 2009), and also to try them out for different aspects of the wider curriculum. For example, students can work together on creating work in the IT lessons, and then upload this to Sharepoint and continue collaboration both inside and outside the classroom. They will be using the tablets this semester for both IT and statistics curriculum work, so we'll keep this blog posted with comments, discussions and descriptions of the work.