LLL3D

Andy Powell of Eduserv has a Second Life avatar called Art Fossett who write a blog.  

In recent posts Andy/Art has made available two packages that look interesting and are free:

A meeting pod “a small, floating, meeting room with 8 scripted seats and a hand-raising, automated chairing facility”

Second Friend tweeter this works with his Second Friend package to send out bubbles of tweets

From the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA):

The Higher Education Academy Centre for ICS in conjunction with the University of Portsmouth is running a workshop on Second Life in Portsmouth on 10^th June.

This hands on workshop is aimed at colleagues who already have avatars and some experience of the environment but are unsure of where to go next!  The plan for the day is to learn form more experienced practitioners and to hear how others are using this technology in teaching.

As this is a lab based workshop numbers are limited, so if you would like to book a place, please follow the link;

http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/eventbook.php?id=199

There is a post on the JISC email list summarising the latest EduServ sponsored “Snapshot” of use of Second Life in UK universities and colleges.

There is a link to the report at: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/sl/uksnapshot052008.

I haven’t yet read it in detail but it would be interesting to know why these chose to limit the study (or at least the title) to “Second Life”.

The New Media Consortium are offering US$ 100,000 worth of prizes intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences in either Second Life or Wonderland. This looks a great way to get support in developing a small idea (you get $4,500 worth of development).

Paper Review:
Sun Services White Paper January 2008
Current Reality and Future Vision: Open Virtual Worlds
         For some time now the lack of a more general overview to work together with the more detailed considerations of emerging MUVE technologies has impacted upon the ability of researchers and designers to consider the place of 3D worlds in the […]

 Copied from an email list:
The Higher Education Academy Centre for ICS in conjunction with the University of Portsmouth is running a Master Class on 2nd Life at Portsmouth on 10th June 2008.
There is considerable expertise at Portsmouth on 2nd Life and its use in Education.  The format of the day will be very much hands […]

 Second Life (SL) is the name for the virtual reality world that you can enter and explore for free. You move there in space and over the beautiful landscapes in the form of your representative in the virtual computer world.This representative is called the avatar. He or she walks on the computer landscape as you […]

Just seen this announcement:
“On Shakespeare’s birthday, the SL Shakespeare Company invites you to witnesss a special advance showing of our upcoming Hamlet miniproduction. Please join us at the SL Globe Theatre on Wednesday,
4/23 at 6 PM SLT., for a self-contained Act 3, Scene 2, a.k.a., The Mousetrap
SL Globe Theatre: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/23/13/23
http://playbills.SLshakespeare.com“6pm SLT on 23rd April is […]

There are a number of events on the Second Life island of: jokaydia over the weekend on 18/20th April, everyone is invited.
Jo Kay is based in Australia, but she has organised some of the events at Europe friendly times.
For more details visit: http://jokaydia.com/jokaydia-events-calendar/april-events-on-jokaydia/
 
If you don’t get chance to join the events it is still worth […]

There was recently an update to Second Life, this is a “required download” (that is you must download it to be able to get in-world). I have now downloaded it on to each of the 3 computers I use regularly, and am about to make a request that the download is done on our lab machines.

Second Life now moans about the graphics card on two of the three computers, and suggest that I would like to upgrade, fortunately it does continue to run, and I haven’t noticed any significant difference.

However such changes could be the source of a problem if you were wanting to run a class for 20 people and discovered that your computers were not good enough. It would be good practice if providers were to offer to give you 12 months notice that their worlds were going to require you to upgrade your computer.

<imported from http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/2416.html> 
Steven Warburton set an in-world hand-on workshop, aimed at letting us all experience SL teaching from the student perspective as well as see a number of teaching tools in action. The invitation was sent out to the overarching group EVEN, that includes members of the MUVEnation and LLL3D project. The session was run […]

Steven Warburton set an in-world hand-on workshop, aimed at letting us all experience SL teaching from the student perspective as well as see a number of teaching tools in action. The invitation was sent out to the overarching group EVEN, that includes members of the MUVEnation and LLL3D project. The session was run by an avatar called Zuleika Deere, who is associated with an SL teaching institute NCI.

The session was help at Lake Gnoma Classroom, Gnoma (194, 217, 501), which must be a sky platform, but since I teleported directly there I didn’t realise.

The session was due to start at 9.00 am (local time), but few of us where there at time, it was some 20 minutes waiting while others were tracked down, Marga (Paz0 kindly updated latecomers so the rest of us weren’t delayed.

The teacher Zuleika, ran the class by giving us all a box with all the necessary materials, she pasted into the chat window instructions that were pre-prepared and in between answered questions. Some of the time I found this quite slow and I was doing other things. At other times great screeds of text was pasted into the chat and I had to scroll back to find the starting point of the text. Because we were a mixed ability group some people had more difficulty than others, but by following the instructions I made a skirt, and so did about half the people there (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssswills/2397601357).

One thing that I liked about the style of teaching was that Zuleika posted up slides of what the edit window etc should look like.

What I found most difficult was that I really don’t have enough space on my screen to see all the sub-windows that I needed. I also found that other people (and their names) got in the way when trying to get a view of some of the things on the board.

All in all it was an interesting event, I would like to engage in a dialog about the teaching techniques.

I have now got my acceptance for Twinity Beta (http://www.twinity.com).
I have filled in the profile data. I was surprised that the oldest one could be was 60 (the year of birth could not be earlier than 1948), this really is ageist. At the moment this isn’t a problem for me – but it will be […]

TechSoup are organising an event: Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities (see http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology) on Friday 29th November, from 9.00 am PST, in-world (SL) then a asynchronous discussion. It seems like it will be a good event, and should give ideas of good practice.

 I’ve just seen the following on a mailing list. It may make a good case study if some one can make the times it is on.“SLShakespeare company will be performing Act1 Scene1 of Hamlet at the SLGlobe on Sliterary from this Thursday.
This is a live performance, no bots, so anything can , and quite possibly […]

“Quest Atlantis (QA) is a learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. Building on strategies from online role-playing games, QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual […]

A few weeks ago I arranged to meet up with Caren/Claird in SL. She is completing her doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University on eLearning. She also belongs to a number of SL groups related to education.
 EduIsland 2
We started off at: EduIsland 2 which calls itself: the #1 home for technology in teaching, we met […]