VECoP

Edublogs are running awards for the best educational use of virtual worlds. You can vote at http://edublogawards.com/2007/best-educational-use-of-a-virtual-world-2007/.

The shortlisted entries are:

Edtech Island
Jokadia Island
Schome Park
Second Life in Education
Suffern middle school in Second Life

The links give the SLURLs or blogs so you can see what is going on.

They are also running other awards for details see my post over at RedGloo.

Labels: Edublogs, MuveNation, secondlife, SL, vecop

A few days ago I had, via my SPAM box, an email from purporting to be from Linden saying:

"We have identified that you reside in a European country. Accordingly, your next bill will reflect Value Added Tax (VAT) charged at the rate specified by your country."

There is a load of discussion about this going on over at: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/28/questions-about-vat/

Apparently it is a real message.

Quite a few people on the blog are saying they hadn't received the email, I suspect Linden need to think about where they are sending such mail from and then we can add it to our White Lists.

Labels: Second Life, SL, SPAM, VAT, vecop

I went to a meeting today in Real Life about Education in Second Life. I’ve written a fuller report over at http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/1674.html.

But there was one really spectacular project called Theatron where they produce in-world models of theatres correct in detail. They even have to advise peopleto re-size their avatars – as apparently most people have avatars which are the equivalent to 7 foot tall!

The SLURL for their island is: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Theatron/183/23/48

Labels: CETIS, ecsl07, Eduserv, JISC, Second Life, vecop

I have added a new goal to my 43 Things: Visit Places in Second Life.
My motivation for this is: I have got a small amount of money to set up Community of Practice at my university to investigate educational possibilities of virtual worlds.
I thought an interesting goal related to this would be to set myself the goal of visiting 50 different places or events in Second Life. A visit should last at least 30 minutes, preferably longer. Having visited I will write a blog entry for the visit or event. I'm going to use the tag 50SL for these entries for pictures in Flickr and on my blog.
If you think it might be fun add it as your own goal, and use the tag 50SL, and we should be able to RSS them together.

Labels: 43Things, 50SL, Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

I saw an article on TechCrunch about Multiverse (http://www.multiverse.net) and thought I should check it out.
Multiverse was started back in 2004 by a group of “Netscape veterans”.
Their aim was to develop a new sort of games platform that allows “indie” developers to create their own games. Multiverse provides a range of tools and contents to help in the games development. Game players only need one client to access any Multiverse game.
Games developers run their games on their own server, if they are not charging users then the use of Multiverse is free, otherwise the usual model will be to pay 10% of gross revenue, or to make an upfront payment.
There area number of sample games to try. I’ve succeeded in downloading the client on to my tablet PC, but I haven’t got any of the games I tried to actually run, I get quite a long way along and get an application error or the like.
The whole idea sounds great, and I will persevere in trying it so I can get a proper view.

Labels: multiverse, vecop

I had another visit the Microsoft Imagine Cup site in Second Life. Caroline Phillips and Miel Van Opstal have set up a nice location and a good event. Miel has blogged about the island over at http://micromiel.com/2007/06/25/sneak-preview

The theme for this year's Imagine Cup is education (“Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all” - http://imaginecup.com), Reading had teams in various challenges, our Web Development team: Rediverse did ever so well, especially considering they were first years. The SL Island is dedicated to the Software Development challenge entries from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Caroline (Imagine Nishi) invited me to go along today as some of the teams were attending to show off their videos of their products and meet each other.

I got there to find quite a few people wandering a round. I had a chat with a guy from Portugal who told me about there entry which was to educate about cookery, I love that idea, and I wondered if the team knew about my object oriented cake examples.

I then met a guy who had an avatar called: "Creative Janus", he was from UAE, and their team had a very cool video that showed off their software that was going to save me time by allowing mobile learning. He (well I assume he was a "he") and some very snazzy shorts on, most of the avatars were new to SL and were wearing fairly standard newbie clothes, this outfit certainly stood out.

I went round and watched a few more videos and powerpoints. The ones I liked the best were those that told me about the products and a little about the team.

Imagine Nishi then introduced me to the Italian team, their mentor was part of the winning team last year. I had a long chat with them and watched their video, we also met a woman from Germany, who was part of the team that set up the blog site (I can't post there because I'm not a competitor L).

I then had a quick visit to the dance floor and then it was time to go.

I'll put my pics up on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssswills/) with the tags:
imaginecup secondlife vecop

Labels: Imagine Cup, Microsoft, Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

I met up with Sus in SL and she has bought a holodeck. There are apparently 25 locations to visit. We had a go on the space shuttle, including the experience of weightlessness; then some where more picturesque.

Sus and I had a bit of a gossip. Someone remarked when we are in RL we talk about SL and when we are in SL we talk about RL.

Labels: holodeck, Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

Yesterday I attended the Eduserv Foundation's symposium entitled; "Virtual worlds, real learning?" The event was quickly oversubscribed, and they appeared to have limited attendance to one person from the majority of institutions.

The event ran in real life (at the Congress Centre in central London) and at a couple of place in Second Life (SL). There was a limited communication between us and them, as we were discouraged from running SL as it would certainly have led to bandwidth problems. We could however see them and watch what they typed (well I could as I positioned myself near to a screen).

Following the opening remarks the first session was a presentation by Jim Purbrick (Babbage Linden), he talked about SL and its potential, it was probably a good overview for people without in- world experience.

The second talk was by Roo Reynolds of IBM. I knew what of their work – I have visited the Sear's shop; but it was interesting to hear of other things they were doing. There area few links that look worth checking out: http://eightbar.co.uk/ and http://www.rooreynolds.com/. He also mentioned a SL area for learning about SOA – will have to check out where that is.

The third talk was Holyrood Park – an initiative from Edinburgh University to set up a virtual campus. Good to see a traditional university taking such an initative.

Lunch was interesting (the SL folks didn't get lunch) I talked to a few groups about their plans and work.

The next talk was by Joanna Scott about Nature's use of SL – they have an island Second Nature. Essentially they are experimenting, but from their point of view it is a small investment and potentially a huge area.

Then came Gilly Salmon, of Leicester. I had attended a keynote speech by Gilly at iLearn Paris, and not surprisingly most of what she said in London was a subset of the talk in Paris.

The final speaker of the day was Stephen Downes (http://www.downes.ca/) – he took a view that SL wasn't the way forward, with the problems of commercial ownership and that it wasn't really Web 2.0. He was very entertaining.

Then there was a panel session. This included all the speakers, and introduced Sarah de Fraitis (who wrote the JISC report on Immersive Worlds). Sarah spoke for about 5 minutes about her work, she has just taken up a post of Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute in Coventry. Then questions were taken from both audiences. The questions were largely aimed at Jim on aspects of SL, particularly on open sourcing.

The event finished with a drink receptions, a time to network. I fixed a meeting with Stephen Warburton (Kings College London), he had done a lot of work on recent proposals we were involved in and we have some ideas for the future.

Labels: Eduserv, Second Life, SL, vecop

Sus Nyrop posted this over at CPSquare - I thought since she said "spread the word" I would copy it here:
"NMC online conference in SL, may 25
http://slbestpractices2007.wikispaces.com/
Second Life International Conference: Best Practices in Teaching, Learning and Research. A good friend of mine, professor Beth Ritter-Guth (alias Desideria Stockton), is preparing this all online, 24 hour conference on Friday, May 25 She kindly encouraged me to help with practicalities the European timezone. By then I'll be anderswo engagiert - in Porto, so I resisted this challenging temptation.
There are openings for keynote speakers and other presentations. Please spread the word! "

Maybe we should think about a VECoP presentation?

Labels: Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

Next Event

I was just talking with Nick/Corwin about organising another event (bridge building).

We suggest Thursday 3rd May 4pm British Summer Time (3.00 pm GMT), we could probably cope with a group at a different time.

Comment here if you can do that time or not.

Feel free to invite others.

Labels: Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

Another book review:

"the Complete Fool's Guide to Second Life" by Foolish Frost, I stumbled across this book, from a SL link, the book is at: http://www.sldrama.com/.

It is an amusing tale of a first visit into Second Life, supplemented by tips on how SL works and what can be done. As with other works on SL it is now out of date – it talks about First Land, which Linden has now deprecated, but other than that it appears to be current and I would recommend it as a style of writing that is readily accessible. It may be possible to use this style for other SL related training.

Labels: Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

Book review:

"second life – the official guide" by Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham. I have had a Second Life (SL) account for about a year, I see a lot of potential in Second Life, but by Real Life doesn't give me much time for messing about and discovering SL. I bought this book because I thought it would help me, and indeed I found lots of things in it that were interesting, for instance I didn't know that I had a Library in my inventory and for a lot of those objects I can access the script, this allowed me to take a script from a chair and experiment with it (I now can make my avatar sit upside down). There is an Appendix by Pathfinder Linden (John Lester) on real Life Education in Second Life, I particularly like his section entitled "work at unlearning", educators too readily fall inti the trap of trying to re-create lecture theatres for learning events in MUVEs. In places the book's multiple authors show and things are repeated and/or contradicted, a little bit of proof reading probably would have spotted this and may well have avoided the curious repeats in the Glossary.

Labels: game-based learning, Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

Discovering Second Life with a Sheep
Rosie
This tale begins with Rosie Luna on a Friday night, she was wanting to organise an activity where people co-operate asynchronously in Second Life. She needs something that can be passed around and people can take to different places, write about what they learn, and take some pictures. Leafing through her landmarks she finds a landmark for Freebie Warehouse (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Burns/95/148/79) and she decides to go and visit. The warehouse is full of people and crates; she checks out the contents of a lot of the crates and decides to take one labelled: 62 Decorations, she also picks up 69 Clothes.
She returns to Boracay and finds a quiet spot by the sea and starts to look through the boxes. One of the things she finds is a sheep; she names this.
The next day she returns to Boracay and decides that this sheep she will pass round, along with a notecard that people can extend the tale. So she takes a few pictures of herself and the sheep. Writes this notes and then passes it on to Futura Fortas.

Futura
So the story continues. I decided to take BaBa to the Holodeck @ the ICT Library (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/13/183/33) where I took her to a virtual church. After all being a lamb/sheep I found that it was appropriate. In the holodeck I discovered how to take snapshots. I'm the kind of person who hates taking pictures in First Life, so I've only owned one camera ever, which I had while on a trip to the States. I sold it of immediately when I returned home. Having said that, I quite enjoyed taking the pictures in SL! Especially because I could take pictures of myself, even from underneath myself.
I've now passed on BaBa in the hope that the new "owner" will take care of her. (Hmn is it a her....)

Corwin
Unfotunately BaBa had a rather traumatic first experience with Corwin! When BaBa was sent to Corwin he was in the Life Sciences Center at the NMC's Research Park.
Corwin stupidly showed her the lab he was in and Baba was immediately reminded of cousin Dolly. No way was that the route to be taken for Baba and she quickly made her feelings known in no uncertain terms. Corwin blushed in shock at the vocabulary under a young sheep's control! Corwin apologised profusely for frightening her like and quickly moved off to more pastural grounds. So they went to Tol Eressea where Baba met some friendly horses and ate some grass and drank some fresh water.
Finally calm she asked to meet her next new friend.

JoeC
BaBa now was visiting its (is it a she or a he) friends in the Hauwai Zoo. I couldn't put her on the ground (because she was afraid), so I carried her, and I had to rotate her a little so that she can see something.
She was also afraid after a while that I could keep her there locked in the Zoo, so I took her to a roman spa instead to relax.
Then she went to see Sus!

SusNY
Sus was visiting the office of the Danish newspaper 24timer where she is preparing a carnival fest on Sunday, (for Danes only). (We'll invite our international friends later on). BaBa had the opportunity to climb a small snow mountain, created at a photo exhibition from Swiss. Sus thought that BaBa needed a face lift, and tried tentatively to give her a pink rose fur dye, and a texture! She did look cute, until Sus discovered to her dismay that BaBa has lost her significant face!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boracay/174/67/26
This discovery led to abig cloning experiment! Apparently each time Sus took up her BaBa, there was yet another little sheep! So this is how we make sheep in world , sus said to herself and started to create a flock.

Day 2:cloning rainbow sheep
Baba now has a whole family of clones. For everytime I pick her up, I get one extra BaBa. I've had to find out how to differentiate one sheep from another,to make sure I can keep track on the OriginalMotherBaBa. I like pink sheep! And baby blue ones to. buty my absolute favorite invention is BaBaLeo! This is a crossover, a mule with leopard skin. In RL this would mean she would not be able to breed new ones. but in SL, cloning is as easy as copy & paste!
I've taken my BaBaLeo identical twins to a playground area called ImagiLEARNING 57, 188, 21 where they learn how to climb poles with monkey twins! The URL copymaker is out of order today ,just like the Teleport button. My interface is reduced and i feel very uncomfortable about this. It took me some days to figure out hwo to get access to my inventory and find BaBa again. And I apologize for not sharing too many landmarks as they're hard to track in the Inventory under the actual circumstances!

Morton Mains 181, 159, 107
At the old castle of Morton Mains, There is a ferris wheel! This is something Sus loves, so she tries to get poor baBa feel the spinning around. BaBa gets scared and jumps up in Sus' arms! And next time Sus and BaBa logs in, their friends get a good laugh because baBa is still in the arms of her care taker. However now is the time to move on Baba!
Rob will be next in line, and I'm so sorry for being late with this; we had major problems for a while! Bye bye BaBa ; I hope that I'm handing over one of the original , horizontal sheep and not a clone with a preference for vertical presence! Or you can have both BaBa and BaBa Leo which is an extra bonus sheep :-)

Rob
Being very new to Second Life, Rob doesn't really know where to go with BaBa so he asks the now well travelled sheep what she wants to do with her time. Not surprisingly BaBa is hungry after all her adventuring and decides that she wants nothing less than the finest grass.
After finding out from the internet that there was a golf course at Hollywood (191,15,175 ), I decided to take BaBa there for a bit of well deserved, well groomed grass.
It seems that this sheep has a disposition to cloning itself and I'm soon left with an entire herd of BaBa imposters feasting on the grass. I do my best to tidy up and decide that we'll go to find somewhere a bit more stimulating for the afternoon.
Success, I found Space Port Alpha (152,227,175). Not wanting to end up with more BaBa clones I decide not to let her go this time, and hold her in my arms while I sit on the tallest space rocket I can find for the view.
BaBa is tired after all this adventuring and now needs somebody to show her somewhere a bit more relaxing!

The end?
Well that is the end of the Baba game – it took some what longer than expected, and we are still hoping to see some more pictures.
However BaBa and her colourful clones are still out there, so watch out for BaBa the Sequel.

Labels: BaBa, Second Life, secondlife, SL, vecop

BaBa's journey continues ...

Baba was delivered to Corwin in the NMC campus' Life Sciences building.



Not a place he liked to be, so he was taken to visit a more pastoral setting before going to see JoeC/Simon.

Labels: vecop

Introduction - Andy Roberts - DARnet

I had my first 3d avatar made for me in year 2000, using a photo booth camera which took a full length portrait from 3 sides and then converted the images into a 3d digital model. The claim was this would soon be used all the time to represent myself everywhere on the internet. The result was recognisable, just, though a little creepy in appearance. The idea was way ahead of its time though, because there weren't any virtual worlds or games it could be used with at the time.

AT about the same era my internet activity consited of email, pure text newsgroups and cheesy homepages. So not a great deal has changed since then! That's not true, now we can add flickr photos and youTubes to our text based blogs and wikis.

I'll be trying to keep up with the group excursions into Secondlife, other virtual worlds and the various experiments which are being planned, and I'll write up some reflections here. The last one was published on my own blog - How I would like to use SecondLife


For more about me, please see my LinkedIn profile

Labels: andyroberts, introduction, vecop

Sus Nyrop - my intro






*Sus 1955 *Sus 1960* Sus 2001*Sus 2003 *Sus 2005 *SusNy 2007

As 2007 is said to be the year of the ME, I'd better follow up with my current intro version.
Sus Nyrop in Farum, Denmark, SusNy Foss in SL since October 06 where I joined just before the first million inhabitants: by now I think more than 3.5 million have opened accounts.
I'm currently involved in several web 2.0 teacher training projects in Denmark. I'm a free agent and independent researcher with a cyber anthropologist focus on teachers' virtual community practices, using social tools and strategies for their lifelong self directed professional development For a living, I'm doing occasional service as a state appointed external examiner (in Danish language and pedagogy) - for social pedagog colleges all over Denmark. This used to be my professional field, until I decided for a major change in my career. In 1993 I took an intensive beginner class of computer science, very traditional and outdated, but a solid foundation. I fell in love with my Macintosh computer, and did my bachelor in communication and multimedia at the Danish University of Education, Copenhagen in 1995. Since then I've been working slowly towards a masters (candidate) in general education, with a focus on edtech and online learning community processes. . Since 2001, I got together with Webheads, in 2002 I joined the Electronic Village Online and in 2003 I joined CPsquare, the community of communities of practice. I'm currently enjoying being a senior mentor in the traditional Foundations of CoP workshop - where Nick Noakes will be one of our virtual guests in a few weeks. I've found out that so many different paths lead me towards SL as I meet more people in world that I already knew from other contexts.

In my off line private life, I enjoy being a granny, and a loving partner with Bernt, a retired school librarian and sportsman. We share an interest in gardening, film, literature, art and music, and we have travelled in Europe and China.



secondlifedk.blogspot.com - a co-blog with four Danish colleagues (in Danish)

www.xanga.com/susnyrop (my first blog from 2002 onwards that I still keep for nostalgic reasons)
worldofwebheads.blogspot.com (a more recent blog - I need to update or abandon it one of these days)
teachingculture.wikispaces.com ( my portfolio wiki that I used for an international EU funded diploma course in teaching intercultural, 2006)

The Nordic Voice project (2005-06) was a community oriented experiment, targeting Nordic language educators with a special interest in voide enabled digital and online learning. I was a cordinator and facilitator in this context. We hosted asuccesful all online conference, and invited guest speakers, posted a newsletter, and found new collaboration partners in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. We were funded by the Nordic Council. ns05.wikispaces.com/

Labels: introduction, vecop

Catching up
Over the last week I lost track of the emails coming in about what we now call VECoP, so I though I would try and reflect/summarise the general mood and suggest some way forward.

Summary
Lots of people think we should look at virtual worlds other than Second Life.
We have a definite time zone problem in that if we are to meet synchronously someone will be in their pyjamas.
Getting sufficient time for doing this work is a problem for all of us.
Exchange of practice, recording best practice is important.
Trying our ideas with our own students and communities should be an aim.
Publishing what we do is important, well at least for us academics.
Getting funding is, for most, a necessity.

Way forward?
We should schedule some field trips, with a purpose, in to Second Life and other MUVEs. We should aim for the hosts to try to run such events twice, so that we cover a civilised time for all VECoP members.

We should look at what funding opportunities are possible (Marga: can you post a bit about what is possible for networks etc with the EU?).

Next Week
I have an idea for an asynchronous activity in Second Life that we can all participate in during next week. By asynchronous I mean we don't have to be there together (although we can schedule help if needed). If there is interest I'll set it up.

Labels: Second Life, vecop

Nick Noakes Corwin Carillon

I work as a faculty/educational developer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where I'm Director of the Center for Enhanced Learning and Teaching or CELT for short!

I have been working with a couple of educational non-profits, Educause and the New Media Consortium, in my out-of-work time for the past 4 years. I played around with graphical virtual worlds, Active Worlds, in 1995/96 when it first came out but it was so laggy and resource intensive that my PC couldn't really cope with it. Last June I was brought into Second Life by NMC colleagues and am the co-founder/facilitator, with the NMC's Alan Levine, of an in-world group (emerging CoP) called Teachers Buzz that meets fortnightly. For more on this see the NMC Campus blog and the NMC Campus wiki.

My passion is transformational change with teachers, learners and organizations, which has taken me from online learning to online facilitation to communities of practice to appreciative inquiry and back again.

I've stayed in Second Life, despite it's myriad issues, because of these interests and because these environments/platforms seem to engage people and their identities in new learning trajectories (see Etienne Wenger's Learning for a small planet).

Labels: introduction, nmccampus, secondlife, vecop