Posts tagged networking
In-World Laptops for Learners
Jan 29th
If my avatar already needs a personal time management and calendaring tool, then he certainly needs a laptop also, correct? A discussion on the SLED listserv caught my eye; Beth was talking about having had an in-world laptop created for her students.
From these laptops, students can email ANYONE (in or out of SL), access WebCT (or any CMS), go to our class blog, class wiki, flickr, Google,etc (there are like 20 links). He can custom design each laptop with your links and with your school logo. The laptops can be any color. He will place the vendor wherever you want it, as well, so students can purchase the laptops right on your land.
Following several emails from other list’ers expressing interest, Beth offered a demo, and since I was teaching that night, she even offered to meet up in-world to demonstrate this tool, and the scripter even dropped in for a visit. It’s a very nice tool with several interesting features that I want to highlight and discuss followed by a few details about the background on and availability of the laptops and a few thoughts for the Real Life Education (RLE) community.
There’s two basic functions of the laptop; clicking on the screen accesses web-based links which the instructor has selected to be included in the learner’s “library” of resources, and clicking on the keyboard makes available several interesting communication tools. In this particular instance, the links accessible from the laptop’s screen included several college-specific websites like the home page and the WebCT portal, a number of news sources, and Web 2.0 tools used by the course. The communication tools include the ability to send email from inside SL to other in-world addresses or web-based email; I was able to send email FROM my avatar to my regular gmail account! And, it’s possible to receive emails in-world only; sending emails directly to the avatar laptop! Not only that, it’s possible to access the in-world laptop via the web, without logging on to SL. Via the web-interface, it’s possible to send and receive emails from the Av-laptop, and the av-laptop will even tell you who is nearby in-world, without you having logged in to SL! It’s definitely a useful tool with interesting educational applications, including the ability to post an external blog entry via email from in-world.
The $100L Laptop Program anyone?
A couple of issues and ideas. . .
Currently, the laptops are not open source; if you want to customize the laptops or add content, you must contact the developer. That’s not an entirely bad thing, and Neo doesn’t charge a great deal for the laptops per student (about $5US ~ $1000L). And, he clearly does excellent work; as soon as I’m able to get back in-world, I’ll post a slurl to his storefront. With that said, there’s a definitive need, I think, for the education community to develop an open source version of this tool that relies on customizable and dynamically updated data, or for others who have created in-world computers to develop an educationally-centered tool priced as low as possible ($200-$300L ~ $1US).
Second, the in-world laptop I saw in the demo is based upon the SL Pear Computer platform and tools. The Pear Computer store is available in world at Porcupine (196, 31, 147). The store and their blog may be of interest: http://sl-pear.blogspot.com/
Finally, other SLED List’ers contributed other ideas and questions of interest. Intellagirl asked if the laptops could be automatically updated with new content and suggested a “binder” of sorts. Previously, she’s used a collection of notecards with links and information that were based upon the originals she possessed. By creating the dependent set of notecards, it’s possible for an instructor to update their copy which then cascades to each of the learner copies.
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Loading ...Fragmented We Will Be . . .
Jan 24th
The Real Life Education (RLE) Community in Second Life will be tragically and ironically fragmented if we continue our current “scheduling” and “calendar-itis” habits. In short, SL offers an in-world search feature to help residents find events in which they’re interested; the problem, to me, is that RLE Groups are not using the feature. Instead, they are creating their own web-based calendars in services all over the web. Second Life CAN bring us together, but if we continue to fragment the information that facilitates our meeting, networking and collaborating, we’re limiting ourselves as a community. That’s both tragic and ironic, especially since there’s a solution that meets everyone’s needs.
In the past week, I’ve diligently watched and searched the SL global events listing, and the RLE events are few and far between. At the same time, I have also been watching blogs and other feeds via a news reader and have noticed a good 10-15 RLE events that have occurred or will be occurring in the near future. If we do not, as a community, make an effort to use the in-world events tool, two things will occur to inhibit the collaborative growth of RLE in SL.
First, educators trying SL for the first time will find a virtual world that seems to severely lack RLE content and opportunities. If new educators dropping in-world for the first time stick around more than a few days, what are they going to use to search for RLE events? They’re going to use the in-world events calendar, and what are they going to find when searching for RLE events? Nothing appealing. As of this moment, there are 92 events in the education category scheduled as much as a month into the future: February 27. ONLY TWO of those are RLE. New educators will leave if they find only prim building and BDSM in SL on the list of “educational events.” The wonderful events available in Google Calendars spread across thirty different blogs are absolutely useless in that regard.
Second, educators that are intent on sticking around and learning and finding as much as they can – like myself – will be incredibly frustrated with searching the web seven times over
to find the scores of web-based calendars that have or will be created. At the very least, if RLE events are not scheduled via SL’s integrated tools, our ability to network and collaborate will be artificially and unnecessarily constrained.
The most frustrating issue for me, currently, is that Linden Labs facilitates the use of BOTH in-world and web-based calendars, but the RLE Community is not using the available tools. If you want a web-based calendar of just your events to put on your website, it’s possible to schedule those events in-world and have a web-based calendar generated automagically. And, by doing the manual entry in-world, residents searching there will be guaranteed to find your event. Here’s the process:
- Create your events in Second Life originally; when you do, use some sort of a unique identifier for your group: a combination of letters and/or numbers that don’t occur naturally in language.
- That information will be ported automatically, as are all Second Life events, to Eventful.com.
- With an account at Eventful.com, you can create a personal or a group calendar that will automatically add public events scheduled via the website based upon the keywords you specify. “What” is your unique identifier, and “Where” is Second Life. Violin! You have a dynamic, automatically updated web-based calendar for all of your in-world events.
- Not good enough? Don’t like the Eventful.com interface or features? A google hack? (yeah, I know… me too). Go to your Google Calendars and Add Other Calendar and point it to the iCal format/feed of your Eventful calendar. ! You now have a Google calendar that is also dynamic and automatically updated as you add or modify events in-world. You can then use the RSS/iCal feeds for the calendar as well as the embedded HTML code for putting the Google Calendar into your website.
Try it and see. I created a TUi – Second Life calendar at Eventful calendar which automagically adds events with “TUi” in the title (what) and occurring in Second Life (where). I then created the TUi Calendar from my Google account by pointing to the iCal format of the Eventful calendar which enabled a Google-style web-based calendar and the ability to embed that HTML Google calendar into a website (see below). I didn’t have to go that far, however; I could have just used the Eventful embedding feature. Second Life CAN bring us together, but if we continue to fragment the information that allows us to come together, we’re limiting ourselves as a community. That’s both tragic and ironic.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...History: Marie Antoinette in SL
Jan 22nd
Info Island II announced an event relevant to History classrooms. The event will be Friday, January 26th and Saturday, January 27th – both at 6pm PST. The description of the event . . .
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France in the 18th century, who was beheaded before the French Revolution, will visit Second life Library and the “Throne Room” on Info Island II . . . Marie will tell her story and introduce you to the people in her life during 18th century France. A young woman born at the wrong place at the wrong time, she will share her story from her point of view in an eighteenth century French environment with life size pictures of the people in her life. Contact Lorelei Junot for more information.
This event highlights two capabilities of Second Life of interest to real life educators. First, SL can credibly enhance role playing for educational purposes. I look forward to seeing, “hearing from” and perhaps interacting with a virtual representation of Marie Antoinette. Second, SL enhances the accessibility of subject matter experts; I’ve alluded to this capability before, but it can be summarized in this instance with a question, “How often do college or K-12 classrooms have access to an individual with enough in depth knowledge to assume the persona of a historical figure?” Not often, so I hope the event takes advantage of the opportunity to truly underscore the unique capabilities of SL in real life educational environments.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A YouTube Tour of Second Life
Jan 13th
One of the blogs/newsfeeds I read regularly mentioned a Second Life related video posted via YouTube, so I started exploring the site to see what could be learned or demonstrated about Second Life via already-posted YouTube videos. The collection of videos I marked highlight a number of educationally relevant possibilities in Second Life, and even the ones that aren’t clearly educational in nature, consider, “If these activities – through 3D building and scripting – are user generated via Second Life, how many different educationally centered activities are possible?”
An introduction to Second Life – a little dry and business oriented, but something for starters
Multimedia Broadcast of Live Events, Wimbledon Concept Video 2006
Multimedia-based Approaches to Marketing
Build a Virtual Campus: Bobcat Village – Texas State
Tsunami Simulation & Education
Virtual Conferences
Psycho-Educational Simulation of a Schizophrenic Episode
Integrating a Learning Management System – Moodle to Sloodle
Creating and Visiting Museums
Kayaking
Re/Creating Music Videos
Skateboarding
Auto Racing
Skydiving
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Networking has never been this easy . . .
Jan 6th
Following Louis Volare’s concert that I attended on 1/1/07, I stayed around the Nantucket Theater to learn as much as I could from others that had been in SL a bit longer than I had. I was fortunate to talk to Carmelita who knew Alaric, an educator in Second Life; she gave me Alaric’s contact information and sent him mine as well. Later that evening, Alaric and I were finally in world at the same time. I thought networking was networking, but SL created a few new opportunities.
Without SL, I think there’s very little chance Alaric and I would have bumped into one another; he lives in northern British Columbia, Canada, and I live in southeast Texas, USA. I think Alaric and I meeting virtually by chance is much less likely via other web technologies: IM, blogs, public wikis, or online chat. Why? Community chat is the most common means of communication in SL; other web tools, at least from my experience, require setting up specific conference/chat rooms and inviting specific users into them. SL, at its core, is a metaverse of community chat rooms which users can move easily between. It’s that characteristic of SL that made it very easy for Alaric and I to meet.
Also, SL offers increasing capabilities for voice chat, and until VoIP is more pervasive in SL, many users are opting to use Skype (www.skype.com) as an alternative. After visiting for a few minutes via traditional text chat, Alaric and I connected via a Skype call. I don’t think there’s any other venue or combination of technologies that enables the type of networking Alaric and I did that evening. The end result of the conversation is that Alaric, a distance educator teaching Math and Physics, and I, an educational technologist exploring the application of new technologies to learning environments were able to exchange ideas, in real time, and to some extent, in person. It’s a different type of networking.
That’s not all Second Life offers however. There are websites for groups of varying professional and personal interests, but SL makes it much easier to find and communicate with other, similarly interested people. In a matter of a week, I have been able to find several groups that I would either not have connected to, or would not be able to connect with as easily. Some of them are SL only groups while others are RL groups that have created a SL presence:
- Educational Podcasting, 245 members
- International Society for Technology in Education, 145 members
- Real Life Education in Second Life, 845 members
- Sloodlers, 174 members
- Webheads, 73 members
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, literally. Every SL resident can create their own group. If you meet someone in SL, you can easily see the groups to which they belong in their profile; and it’s only a short leap from there to become a member of that group yourself. Unbelievable networking opportunity.
Finally, there have been virtual conferences via the web for some time, but SL enables that type of activity in a way no other web technology can. SL makes a virtual conference seem much more like a RL conference than one conducted via email or discussion boards or chat rooms. Plus, given the general, freely available SL environment, it’s much more possible for an educator to create a conference or mini-conference than it was previously, and given the opportunity to communicate with entire groups of people at a time (the groups noted above for example), it’s much easier to advertise and solicit involvement of others. I’ve come across two past conferences in the past week: The Future of Digital Education and the Second Life Education Workshop.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Welcome to Capitol Hill . . .
Jan 4th
This afternoon, I attended a pre-opening event at the virtual Capitol Hill in Second Life. The event, as noted by a Rocketboom website, was designed to usher in the 110th Congressional Session; a NY Times political blog has a few more details. The event included a video stream from CSPAN of the morning’s proceedings which focused on the election and swearing in of the new Speaker of the House: Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker in U.S. history. After his morning speech, Representative George Miller joined the Second Life audience. Having been offered an invitation to the event by Rocketboom, I was taking as many “photos” as possible and also “shooting video” of select segments. It certainly feels like a historic event – Reuters, CNN, Rocketboom, ZNet and other media outlets were in attendance – but it is easy to imagine a far-reaching impact Second Life may have in the future on Real Life politics as our society begins to explore what it means to be a truly participative democracy. In fact, one question from “the floor” (which demographics and participant background should be available in the near future) focused on the future of politics in Second Life. Representative Miller indicated that there is interest on the Hill, and that there are already future events planned to allow general public participation in discussions focused on legislation before it reaches the floor the House and Senate.
The educational implications of a virtual Capitol Hill are far-reaching, as well. The Second Life Capitol already has venues for discussing major initiatives on the agenda for the first 100 hours of the new Congress: congressional ethics, minimum wage, and the cost of higher education as a few. Political Science, Government and History faculty, 9-12 and higher education, have an opportunity to bring their students into an environment, that while virtual, allows them the chance to participate in an authentic, real-world discussion directly with U.S. political leaders. More photos of the event are available, at least temporarily.
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