Published by Carina on 12 Apr 2010 at 12:23 pm
Prairie Loon: The Educators’ Muse
Whenever I meet with an Educators Coop member, I ask to interview them in a place that is special to them. I want to see what they built or what inspires them as participants in the Educators Coop. To my delight, when Prairie Loon teleported me, it was to my favorite place of all the sims of the Educators Coop. While writing articles for the Educators Coop, I always lay down on this white bench beneath a beautiful tree bursting with blossoms. The idyllic setting and the soothing susurrus of water emanating from the nearby bubbling fountain just inspires contemplation. This skill of providing inspiring atmospheres and the thought-provoking ideas to populate them, is Prairie Loon’s talent.
Prairie Loon first came to Second Life in June of 2007. While she is unclear as to how exactly she heard about Second Life, she became involved through sheer curiosity and an interest in how it can be applied to adult education, experiential education, transformational learning, and/or leadership development. Prairie is passionate about learning experiences that cause a person to examine assumptions and possibly change their worldview, or their underlying paradigm about something.
Prairie was first intrigued by this kind of learning when she was involved in a leadership development program called Visions for Change, which was part of a national initiative funded by the WK Kellogg Foundation, that sought to connect land grant colleges of agriculture more to the original land grant mission of teaching, research, and outreach connected to/with community. As a part of the program, Visions for Change (or VFC) gave out mini-grants, and one grant was to develop this leadership program. The program was a partnership between the colleges of agriculture at the University of Minnesota, South Dakota State University, and North Dakota State University.
Prairie’s involvement in the project involved undergrad students from the University of Minnesota from 1995 – 2001 and the result was transformational. In an effort to recreate the success of that program. Prairie Loon developed her masters thesis around the topic. She then became involved with Second Life to further explore its potential for transformational learning. Prairie was only in Second Life for about a month when she heard about the Educators Coop from one of the many education-related groups she had joined. She came to the interest session, applied, and became a member of the team.
Unlike many members of the Educators Coop, Prairie is not a member of the faculty at her university and she doesn’t educate people in Second Life, in the traditional sense. She instead does staff development and training for university library staff on campus. Prairie brings this expertise into Second Life by leading discussions and encouraging brainstorming in educators that they may do their jobs even better. To facilitate this, she created this lovely space where small groups can meet to exchange ideas or reflect in solitude.
A position like Prairie’s is quite unique; tailored to her specific skill set. She is responsible for comprehensive education and development – everything from computer skills to ongoing development in issues related to libraries (eg., collection development, copyright infringement, etc.), soft skills like conflict management, new employee orientation, and project management, to name a few. She also informs strategy and helps implement broader library initiatives, so she connects to individual projects, workshops, and programs to affect the big picture. Most colleges rely on university-wide human resource departments for their professional development, but the University of Minnesota created this position just for their librarians, for which the U of MN librarians are extremely grateful and excited. Prairie hopes to offer more professional development opportunities to librarians in the future through Second Life, but right now is pioneering the effort through her personal time and finances.
For a future Second Life project, Prairie is interested in implementing a traditional salon. Popular during the 17th and 18th centuries, salons were spaces where leaders in society, art, and politics gathered to facilitate conversation, ask provocative questions, and essentially promote an atmosphere of creativity and synergy – most commonly lead by a female patron. Prairie is a trained facilitator with a gift for helping people take nebulous ideas and clarify them. She hopes to see the Educators Coop benefit from the synergism such a space could provide.
While Prairie’s primary goal is what small things she can do that would be useful and relevant to the Educators Coop and her own interests, she does have big dreams. She would like her compelling space to be a favorite spot for Educators Coop members to visit and that would facilitate creativity and clarity of thought. The design of the program would also provide opportunities for seemingly accidental connections with each other. The space could also potentially serve as a meeting space for collaboration with tools built in and one-button access for doc sharing, as a prosaic example. There would be lots of conversational nooks and crannies and inherent incentive in the build that would “reward” people for being there. The place would facilitate the capture of information from peoples’ conversations; as much about process as product.
Prairie Loon’s namesake are the midwest prairies. They are such an expanse of space and diversity due to all of the plants and animals that live there. Prairie also holds an undergraduate degree in Agronomy and Plant Genetics, so she thinks in terms of plants and plant systems quite often. Loon is in deference to Minnesota’s state bird and the fact that prairies are not in any way a loon’s natural habitat. In Prairie’s words, it is “a perfect storm of a name,” signifying her individuality and willingness to try anything.
In “real life” Prairie Loon is Denise Gamble, Director of Staff Education and Development at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Master of Arts in Work, Community, and Family Education with an emphasis on Human Resource Development from the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Science in Agriculture with an emphasis on Agronomy and Plant Genetics from the University of Minnesota’s College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences. To learn more about what Denise/Prairie does or about the University of Minnesota’s libraries, visit their Staff Education and Development homepage at: https://wiki.lib.umn.edu/SEDP/HomePage. To visit Prairie’s blog, percipio publicus, which contains scattered thoughts on learning, life, and whatever else happens by…sprinkled with navel-gazing and attempted avoidance of blathering narcissism, visit: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gambled/gambled/. Denise/Prairie encourages questions from any and all with ideas who need fleshing out. She considers it her commitment to humanity.
