Rock the Academy Symposium Opening Reception

The twelfth in the series of NMC Virtual Symposia, Rock the Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning, opened last night at NMC Conference Center with a nicely attended reception.

This fourth of these online conference held completely in Second Life, Rock The Academy is intended to explore the ideas and activities that are changing/revolutionizing the shape of education today. With some meeting and greeting, NMC staff welcomed attendees from as far away as Hong Kong, Australia, and Austin ;-) and one NMC staff member stationed in Iceland.

At the reception, participants took on the challenge of our Treasure Hunt; you can try it yourself by looking for the instructions in the treasure chest placed out in the Grace Hopper Expo Center. This activity had people looking all over the Conference Center sim for the magic lamps that handed out clues to a puzzle. Top prizes (L$2500) went to Marcia Kjeller and Chimera Cosmos for getting in their answers first-- and Marcia was gracious enough to turn over her prize to the avatar that was newest to Second Life- Shaffer Parx who had made his avatar at just 1:00PM yesterday.

We then went down to the Cooper Coliseum for some fabulous live music from the very talented Jean Munro:

There is just something that is so exciting and what makes Second life special to be virtually together with a live performance.

The Symposium opens today with a welcome at 10:00am PDT by NMC CEO Larry Pixel (aka Larry Johnson) and we have a great opener in Desideria Stockton (aka Beth Ritter-Guth) on "Teaching Naked: An A-Z Guide to Open Access Teaching". Other sessions today touch on using Wikipedia and YouTube in Academic Research; Virtual Cinematography, History of Ideas via the BBC's In Our Time. and Infrastructures and Sandboxes in Second Life.

Today we are really rocking!
http://www.nmc.org/2008-fall-virtual-symposium