Getting to know each other and familiarising ourselves with the tools

It’s been only ten days into the MUVEnation course but a community is forming and Moodle and Pbwiki are buzzing with activity. More than double the intended number of participants have been accepted but the coordinators expect a lot of lurkers, participants who enrolled but do not want or cannot participate fully but will rather observe from the sidelines and maybe participate in the forums, now and then.

The course is about virtual worlds but we will be using many different Web 2.0 tools for collaboration (Moodle, wiki, Second Life), communication (Moodle, wiki, Twitter, Second Life group notices/IM) and aggregation (Netvibes, Flickr, Twitter, muvenation blog). I am very happy that I have used all of these tools at some point and use many of them regularly. If not, I would feel completely overwhelmed by having to learn how to use Second Life plus all these tools. I believe this is the case for many participants and I can just imagine how they must be feeling at the moment. But, I know from my own experience when I started learning about web 2.0 tools during the EVO 2008 session “Becoming a Webhead” that things will fall into their place slowly. 

As this is about peer-to-pear teaching, volunteers are needed to help with the various tasks. By volunteering to help feed all the participants’ blogs to the MUVEnation Twitter account, I had the change to use Twitterfeed for the first time and learned how to use it. So, already in pre-week 1, I learned how to use a new tool and I got to know many of the participants through the introductions and interactions in the Moodle forum.