It’s an accomplishment to get 498 people give or take a few (ok, I don’t know how many are just lurking but it’s cool to lurk) to achieve this level of comfort in an online community so fast…especially since most are teachers.  Everyone is pretty much playing like kids.  I have to credit the facilitators, who are playing very hard every day and sharing like mad, making us feel like we can share our little products instead of waiting for some kind of grand production.  I am learning so much about apps!  I think I downloaded 30 apps this week.  But more than that, I’m learning about this kind of online community of creators.  The meeting place is the showcase and the workshop, more or less, all in the same space (Google+).

For those of you who follow or are a part of my ePortfolio community at Stony Brook, I’m getting a sense of how I would like our ePortfolio community to be (a little more like).  Our community is already doing great work.  However, there are still so many ePortfolios that just lie there, rather like a guppy out of the bowl, after the “class” in which they were made is over.  Some of those beautiful ePortfolios get so lonely and unattended!  Sometimes I don’t update mine for weeks at a time, and I’m one of the diehard returnees (of faculty, anyway).  It is still more of a showcase than a learning space, for me.  I like showcases.  But I really love the dynamic quality of this G+ community.  The Faculty Center has been brilliant about promoting our ePortfolio communities, but I think more of us need to be involved in this.

We have Google Apps for Education, but our school has NOT enabled G+.  I am unable to use my school email address for this project.  It got under my skin, and I wrote to the CIO, and he answered me quite promptly (he is a good guy) and said that once security issues have been addressed, it is likely that they will enable it.  (New York and FERPA concerns, always. Our students are 99% legal adults, so I am certain something can be worked out.)

This week, I made a lot of new wonderful contacts, including two Second Lifers (Zoe Foodiboo and Valibrarian Gregg, or Monika Talaroc and Valerie Hill in real life, both information scientists) who met with me at Zoe’s archival workspace/playspace on 1920’s Virtual Berlin.  I invited them to our Second Life Seawolves group and hope that we can get some events or projects going on the SLN (SUNY Learning Network) island this summer.  (Everyone needs to see Virtual Berlin, but be forwarned, the avatars are very tiny!  Not tinies per se, just made to scale, unlike most of us.)  I broke open my Adobe Production Suite and learned how to animate text, then mashed it up with Terry Elliott’s and Shari Edwards’ adorable kitty Vine videos, and even made an animated GIF of one.  Probably because I don’t have kids around the house and teach young adults rather than children, I was a little baffled by the #toyhack exercise, but in a sleep-deprived state I got the urge to fill my Osho Tarot deck box with raw lima beans and made a kind of shrine out of it.  That was my only #toyhack that wasn’t digital.  But I want to keep the Tarot idea on the table for later projects, maybe.  I might try to mark a Tarot card profile????  Oh, yes, there was Mozilla Webmaker and  the profile exercise that Chad Sansing set up for us by making an easy-to-use template so we could modify the code and learn a bit about coding without tears and hair-tearing.  And I was a little late to Kevin Hodgson’s foray into augmented reality and Aurasma and I made a couple of short augmented reality videos too, but I’m finding the app a little glitchy to share work and still figuring that out (whether it’s the app or just me).  So, we have been producing all sort of wonderful little projects and finding friends to teach us and offer support along the way.