The Story of My “Second Life”

Very special thanks to Serena Kuramoto for pointing out this fantastic, just-published (19-Apr-2007) listing of online virtual worlds (both social networking and online collaborative tools) produced by the good folks over at TechSoup. It’s important because we as educators need to know what else is “out there” for creating teaching environments. Second Life is a [...]

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Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes) over at the New Media Consortium contacted me about speaking at an upcoming Teacher’s Buzz regarding the work I’m doing in SL, so naturally, I’ve asked Victoria Gloucester and Clare Lane to join me for the session … and hope some of you will be able to as well. This [...]

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The New Media Consortium (NMC) just announced they have built a system for Second Life account creation and new user orientation expressly for educators. By working closely with Linden Labs, NMC has the ability help educators create SL accounts and take them to NMC’s own custom, safe, (probably) griefer-free, teacher-flavored version of Orientation Island. This [...]

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What do you do when SL goes down in the middle of your lesson? Convene as a group to discuss and reflect. For more about this day’s class, including an incredible log of the in-world chat that preceded this picture, see: rampoislands.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html Pay particular attention to the chat log Peggy posted. Look at the interactions [...]

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Just updated my Readings page after my shipment from Amazon arrived with Gee’s work and Prensky’s too. Stumbled across Turkle’s 1997 work, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and added that to my list as well. Where do I place my order for an extra hour a day to immerse [...]

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This snapshot was taken about 2/3 of the way through the event – a good number of people had left by this point – but our SL network of friends was still well represented, wtih Existential Paine, Hodjazz Edman, Clare Lane, Victoria Gloucester, Kathy Dryburgh, BlueSkunk Johnson all present. Thanks for coming, guys! These events [...]

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FYI: there is a “social” tonight at the ISTE SkyPark, 6 pm SLT / 9 pm EDT. If you can stop by, please do. I don’t have a SLURL handy but will post one later. ISTE Socials are usually very busy, somewhat chaotic, mixed about 50/50 with newbies and veterans, and are usually fun. Last [...]

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Ok! Time to get serious… I’ve been in-world almost two months and at this point I’ve pretty much had my fill of random main grid exploration. I’ve enjoyed EVERY sim I’ve visited and nearly EVERY avatar I’ve interacted with. It really has been enjoyable and informative but it’s time I start focused explorations of MG [...]

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Decka Mah shares this blog that helps explain the developing link between Google SketchUp and Second Life. If you’ve never used SketchUp, it’s definitely worth a look, as it gives you a (reasonably) user friendly interface with which to create and manipulate 3D objects. Here’s an example: That’s a SketchUp rendering on the left , [...]

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Well after muffing the announcement time (I SWEAR I read that it was to be at 6:30 SLT last night) I managed to get over to Maggie Marat’s (Peggy Sheehy’s) Educator Show and Tell at the ISTE SkyPark on time last night. It was an incredible show, the first time I’ve seen the SkyPark filled [...]

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