education building

As a knee jerk reaction to proclaiming my return to this blog, (i promise ill write more than one post every four months … honest!!!) I wanted to get in a few quick posts right away. (not too mention the fact that I’m trying to find SOMEthing wrong with these templates but they seem almost flawless at every level).

Without many original ideas of my own at the moment, I look to see what my associate brian is up to, and wouldnt you know it he serves up the gold in a timely fashion once again. Its true, I have been playing in SL myself for the past couple weeks, (fashionably late as usual) but I did not feel I had enough experience to blog about it yet. I dont own anything there, nor do I buy or sell stuff. In fact I’ve only recently mastered the ins and outs of ‘waving’ and ‘jumping up and down’, but it doesnt really matter. There has been enough discussion amongst the ‘ol peer group lately to realize the very idea of a virtual ’second’ life, makes a mockery of the many meaningful encounters we experience right here in the ‘real life’. (Here come the gold) Brian points the way to Darrens magnifcent jest of the whole hype riddled phenomena, and I have to stop writing now for fear of detracting from that link. Here it is again. A good parody website is indeed worth 1001 words.
That said, I really wish my job entailed an hour and a half commute to secondlife over the one i currently endure. peace.

p.s.  any post about getting a life of any kind would not be complete with out a link to my mans customizable life patch.  oh sure, you may know him for his vintage wordpress themes, but did you know he does life too?

I received an interesting announcement today via an email, regarding an upcoming presentation on using Second Life as a learning environment. I havent thought about 3D multi user environments since I was working at techbc back in the day, and one of the first projects we undertook was a VRML learning space. Remember VRML? This was waaay back before blogs (so there are no links), when virtual reality was all the rage. There is a video however that I should go dig up and repost on this site. I’m sure it would be good for a few laughs seems as it would be almost a decade old! (gad is that how long I’ve been in this business?)
The announcement for this latest incarnation of 3D collaboration was listed on the elearning forum and described by them as…

Since opening to the public in 2003, Second Life has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 560,000 people from around the globe. Almost every week, articles are appearing in the press or the blogosphere exploring various aspects of Second Life. However, relatively little analysis and discussion has so far taken place regarding the future potential of Second Life to transform corporate learning and training as we know it.

So this is going to be from a corporate angle, but if you are thinking that 3D animated gaming environments have no place in a university setting, think again. I haven’t looked into this much myself, but Alan Levine, began a project with the nmc back in april using secondlife, which I have been meaning to find out more about.

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.

An interesting sidenote. Alan ended up having a slight disagreement with flickr about the terms of use, since screenshots from the seckr grouondlife playing environment do not technically count as “photographs”. THis must have sorted itself out because I see the special user account he set is still operational and the flickr group is choke full of “photos” of people learning in second life. I wonder what they are learning in there anyway?

If you are really interested in the potential uses of Second Life, you could do worse than checking out Eric Rice and his extensive use of the site for doing interviews, podcasting vlogging, and whatever other technology he is forging ahead showing others the potential of. He often gets in the news for such things, and also takes photos of his exploits on second life.