education building

saw a poster for this up here today, PUNK - Words, music, politics, influence

http://www.sfu.ca/punkconference/

North America’s first international scholarly conference on punk will be held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on April 24-26, 2008. The conference will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre, located in downtown Vancouver, close to historic Gastown and the original site of Vancouver’s first punk club, the Smiling Buddha. The conference will help promote the establishment of a punk archive at SFU’s Bennett Library

Its amazing that I didn’t come across this sooner, but I was pleased to see the conference organizers (Paul Budra and Stephen Ogden) are using a blog as the main point of contact for web communication.

http://blogs.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/punk

The SFU library has been running a number of blogs for awhile using b2evolution.net , which seem to be working well. This one will definitely be worth keeping an eye on over the coming months as preparation heats up. I may even consider a contribution on the topic of my masters thesis or something, particularly if I can get a few of my old cohorts together for another kick at the speakers. fuckinhellya!

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.