Sloog, you may remember, is a HUD that lets you tag places and people and search for them both inworld and via the web. MERLOT is a tool for indexing, and a database of, online learning and educational materials. SaLamander is a system to tie them together, led by Wainbrave Bernal, aka Jonathon Richter of the University of Oregon, in partnership with Sloog.org and yours truly.
What does it all mean? Well, anyone is welcome to go and pick up a Salamander HUD from the Centre for Advanced Technology in Education and when you find somewhere educational in SL, click the button, follow the instructions and register the site. The UOregon people will sift feeds and transfer them over to the wiki, and we will gradually acquire a register of folksonomy tags for education in SL.
Abraham Lincoln that is. The Alliance Libraries have secured funding for a "Land of Lincoln" immersive sim that will recreate Lincoln's birthplace, his Springfield house (please resist comments about Bart!) and will also look at his White House time.
This new area will run on a similar basis the Renaissance Island which looks at Tudor England, and is inhabited by volunteers who largely dress and talk in appropriate period style, as well as having the period setting. Land of Lincoln is still at the planning stage, if you would like to be involved please join the google group for discussion.
Machinima Guru, my Teen Grid alter ego, stopped by the College Fair on Sunday. It brought me back to the days when I had to wander around the smelly gym of my rival high school picking up pamphlets as I went along. Technology sure has come far! Storm Basiat, the dedicated teen manager for Eye4You, was waiting to send me a port as soon as I logged in.
When I arrived, I was greeted by two of the most adorable astronauts I've ever seen! I was able to listen to a few speeches before I had to log off. One of them, as presented by Daniel Voyager, was for TSL Greeters. When asked for comment, attendee Reallife Orca, of Digital Refinery, noted that "It was interesting to see all of the colleges who showed up, I was just a bit let down that no trade schools came out."
I grabbed pictures of everything I saw, but was really dismayed to find that I was unable to donate to the TG College Fund for some reason. If you would like to help, you can send your donations to Bluewings Hayek on the Main Grid. For a full write-up of the Fair from Storm, check out SLNN.
Literature Alive! (disclosure: I am an owner of this group and have been involved in these developments) is running two events over the next few days.
On Saturday at 8am SL Time students from De Sales University will be judged on their material for the "Literature of the Progressive Era" display in a funfair on land contributed by Finger Lakes Community College. From tomorrow you can judge which of the elements you find meets the criteria best - you are not judging the build (most of it is bought from in-world or created by people other than the students), but the content in terms of how well it teaches you about the era in question - a era of significant social change. You have the chance to vote for the best group, who will win a RL cash prize and leave feedback for the groups via an anonymous web-form.
Literature Alive! has also converted the British Gothic Literature classroom into a haunted house, with some help (and extra prims for a while) from out hostess, the Alliance Library, on Eduisland 3. As well as giving you the chance to learn more about gothic literature and the British authors, there is a hidden red cauldron. Find this to win a small L$ prize. There are other games and activites too, and no commercial activity, just fun for Halloween.
You may remember Harvard Law School's extrusion into Second Life, via the Harvard Extension Program, particularly the Evidence at Large subject on trial advocacy and evidence that took place in January this year, exploring the Bragg vs Linden Lab case. It was certainly one of the more interesting and fascinating things I've seen and done in Second Life so far.
Tomorrow (Wednesday), at 4PM SLT (US Pacific), there will be a second mock trial. This one will be exploring the case/charges against Paul Addis - the man who allegedly set fire to the Burning Man ahead of time. Second Life users are invited to attend and observe, or to serve on the jury. If you're interested, get on down to Harvard's Berkman Island with a little time to spare.
Incidentally, if you haven't looked at this course (lectures and office hours are open to at-large participants - no fees and no enrollment) you really should take a good look at what they've got going on. It really is a treat.
Colourblindness isn't something I'm afflicted with, although when I'm having a bad day I've been known to wear sunglasses to use to a computer (actually I use prescription filters, but they're a very dark green, so they double as sunglasses).
But, there's a mac programme called Sim Daltonism that, given I work with a range of learners with specific learning difficulties and disabilities I just had to look at. The picture at the top is SL with the commonest form of colourblindness. The picture at the bottom is the same view, taken at the same time. Kind of sobering - even if the main thing it's meant for is to check how well your website works for colourblind users.
[UPDATE]Visicheck is available for users of windows and windows machines, or online. Colour Oracle is a similar tool for windows, mac and Linux users. (Original lead via TUAW)
You may, or may not remember a piece I wrote in July about the report into the use of SL by UK Higher Educational establishments.
The snapshot has been updated, and the new version is available in pdf via this website. It also includes references to the writings of one Pasteur, E. which makes me feel inordinately proud!
If you'd like to read more about what Eduserv are doing in SL their main page is here. There are two further reports to come, one next March, the final one in September 2008.
One of the things, along with collaboration, that you hear educators in SL talk about is the ability to immerse the learners. Of course, with different disciplines you get a range of different explanations of what immersion means, but those involved in SL education tend to regard it well.
In an interesting parallel, the University of Surrey is running a conference to promote immersive learning "in the complex world" - in this case they're talking something like work placements to develop "real life" rather than "academic life" skills and to illustrate how it is embedded within experiential learning. However, it does seem that their conference is heading web 2.0-wards with collaborative conference wikis and the like and even if I can't make it to the conference (will have to check with the new RL job I'm starting if I can take a couple of days off, better yet, if they'll pay me to go!) I have a feeling it will make very interesting reading for those of working in SL education.
Even without that, some interesting questions to formulate your immersive experiences in SL:
What was the context/situation/challenge for your immersive experience?
What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way.
How did the experience change you? What forms of learning / personal development / change
came out of the experience?
What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?
What principles or lessons can be drawn from your story?
Avatar English is a program that proposes to take advantage of the strengths of SL to teach English to non-native speakers. It's a fun idea, and certainly helps the distance learner. Imagine, if you will, being able to walk through an airport and hear your teacher name each item as you go past it, or act out the scenario of buying tickets and stowing luggage, etc., all in English. Full immersion, as any language learner will tell you, is perhaps the best way to learn.
For more information on this and for a free 15 minute lesson, go to their website, or visit their SL location here.
Despite being one of the more lauded educational institutions in the US, Princeton University is having trouble attracting residents to its virtual counterpart in SL. Princeton has invested a good amount of money into its SL builds, but the space continues to receive only sporadic visits.
What are the potential draws of a RL campus dropped into SL? It's a place for alumni to visit for nostalgic reasons. It's a way to showcase new and in-process RL buildings, including new dorms. It can hold 'distance learning' classes. It can host speeches and events simulcast from RL, when students might be unable to attend otherwise. Are any of these valuable enough reasons to maintain a chain of 4 servers? Has Princeton fallen victim to the 'Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we' thinking that has seen many RL companies come and go?
It seems the love affair of the media, however 'interesting' the research, continues apace.
It also appears that, with the exception of those that hate SL we're moving past the attacks into more or less balanced pieces, and, in some of the mainstream media away from sex in SL as the core of the story at long last.
The NY Times is carrying another article. This one is making SL appear to be horribly bourgeois and all about keeping up with the Joneses, clothes, cars, sex beds and all. It's slightly misleading - in fact if I were a furry I might be downright insulted by "But the largest slice of the population follows the crowd, and the crowd is not dressing up as dragons." Even if I had to acknowledge the truth of it.
Finally, Education World carries a potted but interesting and useful guide to some good education spots in Second Life - along with a good piece of general advice: "these sites admittedly stress the 'wow' factor of a 3-D virtual environment. As Sean suggests, once you are hooked, you can find the more practical, but less dramatic, places."
More like these please in the mainstream media - certainly steps in the right direction.
You may not have heard about HealthInfo Island. It is, as you might guess, an island dedicated to providing health information, regarding health, wellness, communities, support and the like. On Sunday they will officially be opening their Accessibility Center between 4pm and 6pm (9th September).
The Accessibility Center provides continuing education and awareness about disabilities to the residents of and visitors to SL. The information available at the Center includes material about specific types of disabilities, accessibility in electronic games and virtual worlds, as well as assistive technology in the real world.
Displays at the Accessibility Center currently focus on mobility, vision, hearing and learning impairments. In-world resources for people with disabilities are also highlighted. Several sitting areas provide a pleasing place to sit for frank discussions on disabilities.
Speaking as someone with a hearing disability, and who works with people with learning difficulties and disabilities (the language used in the UK is a little different to the US), I spent a very happy hour looking around. Even if you aren't directly affected, it is well worth a look.
The witty and engaging Professor Robert J Bloomfield, JGSM, of Cornell University will be running a subject entitled Directed Studies in Business and Oversight in 'Second Life'. Professor Bloomfield is offering a 1- to 3-credit directed study to students interested in exploring and reporting on business and regulatory oversight in Second Life.
Second Life is a fertile ground for studying free market business in an unregulated environment - either because regulations do not exist, or the regulations that do exist for bodies claiming to be banks and stock-exchanges are not observed by proprietors - who may be dismissive or ignorant of the applicability of physical world regulations on their virtual businesses.
There's always a lot of talk about education in SL, at least among the people I talk to (teachers tend to clump together after all). There are wonderful examples of many different types of things that are already in SL for just about every discipline you can imagine, but Perplexity Peccable (Lexi, not Perp!) has put together this short video of science in SL.
It's only 3 minutes, it included a couple of bits I'd not heard about before, as well as missing one or two I have seen and been hugely impressed by (the Virtual Hallucinations area for one). It's well worth a look, and thinking about including it in your bag of contents to show administrators who doubt the value of SL.
Business and Oversight in Second Life is a new course at Cornell University beginning this upcoming semester, taught by Robert Bloomfield, known in-world as Beyer Sellers -- get it?
Bloomfield likens the current regulation-free market in SL to ' ... a financial wild west, a libertarian experiment.' It certainly does seem to be great fodder for a course on Finance, given that it's a wide-open arena in which the playing field truly is level -- RL companies compete fairly equally with single entrepreneurs for resident business. Additionally, the threat of governmental taxation looms over the proceedings, threatening to be the only limiting factor in how far one can take a virtual business.
Let's have more college courses about SL! 'Goreans and Ageplayers: Deviant Sexuality Under the Microscope'; 'Furry Like Me: Virtual Identity 101"; and the sure-to-be-popular 'Good Grief! Expressing Dissent in SL'
Sloog, you may remember, is a HUD that lets you tag places and people and search for them both inworld and via the web. MERLOT is a tool for indexing, and a database of, online learning and educational materials. SaLamander is a system to tie them together, led by Wainbrave Bernal, aka Jonathon Richter of the University of Oregon, in partnership with Sloog.org and yours truly.
Abraham Lincoln that is. The Alliance Libraries have secured funding for a "Land of Lincoln" immersive sim that will recreate Lincoln's birthplace, his Springfield house (please resist comments about Bart!) and will also look at his White House time.
Machinima Guru, my Teen Grid alter ego, stopped by the College Fair on Sunday. It brought me back to the days when I had to wander around the smelly gym of my rival high school picking up pamphlets as I went along. Technology sure has come far! Storm Basiat, the dedicated teen manager for Eye4You, was waiting to send me a port as soon as I logged in.
You may remember Harvard Law School's extrusion into Second Life, via the Harvard Extension Program, particularly the Evidence at Large subject on trial advocacy and evidence 
You may, or may not remember a 
Avatar English
It seems the love affair of the media, however 'interesting' the research, continues apace.
You may not have heard about HealthInfo Island. It is, as you might guess, an island dedicated to providing health information, regarding health, wellness, communities, support and the like. On Sunday they will officially be opening their 
The witty and engaging Professor Robert J Bloomfield, JGSM, of Cornell University will be running a subject entitled Directed Studies in Business and Oversight in 'Second Life'. Professor Bloomfield is offering a 1- to 3-credit directed study to students interested in exploring and reporting on business and regulatory oversight in Second Life.
