CogBlogged Tagged ‘Second Life’

After all these years (like maybe 7? 8?) RSS is still so hot some regimes may wish to ban it, but it is the magic magic magic glue that makes content move around the web. Here is one little story. At NMC, I run a WordPress powered site to publish stories our Second Life work at the NMC Campus Observer, but we have only a handful of authors, and I must publish 98% of the content. Last year I had an idea to cleverly (I thought) embed a second WP site inside, as a NMC Campus Community Calendar, where people who were part of the NMC SL Community could post events. It is actually a second WP install in a sub directory, branded and designed to look like the main site (I wrote this up last year as Blog in a Blog). That is just the set up for the [...]

Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording ;-) Donning their gas masks, flame throwers, and edupunk t-shirts, Jim and Tom laid out the warnings of zombies and where they lurk in educational technology. The audience was warned before hand that this was going to be an intense, almost radioactive presentation, so we provided them safety glasses ahead of time. They started asking the audience what their fears were. [16:33]  Redbaiters Stanwell: What are scared of? [16:33]  CDB Barkley: getting sued [16:33]  Elli Pinion: lack of money [16:33]  Oggie Ballinger: Budget cuts [16:33]  Corwin Carillon: accountability [16:33]  CDB Barkley: losing students [16:33]  Mae Mathilde: lack of control [16:33]  Rane Mistwallow: security [16:33]  Hyperion Sands: privacy [16:33]  Ginger Questi: change [...]

My first presentation today at the eLearning Guild conference was “I’m Busy Enough.. What do I Need a Second Life For?” a tact I took as I expected SL was rather outside the realm of focus for this conference. Well, that was not fully correct, as there was a fair amount of awareness here of virtual worlds and Second Life, but when I asked the audience of 50 or so how many had Sl accounts, there were maybe 5, 7 hands raised. A number of others let me know they were there because “it sounded nothing like the other sessions my employer told me to attend” or “we’ll never use it at work but I want to know what I am missing”.

I am now owner of a plot of land in Second Life, 4096 sq meters on a new sim called “Sciences”, one of the NMC Educational Communities (land that is parceled and rented to educational organizations). As of tonight I have spent extensive amount of time walking the green carpet and tossing out objects. Actually I was there for about 20 minutes. Seriously (or semi-seriously), I have been involved in Second Life since March 2006, but mostly in a role of working with our NMC events, managing media, and running group activities. I have not really built anything, thought I like to boast about the quality of my plywood cubes. I have tinkered a bit with some scripting. But now I have a space to tinker, to express, or just to mess around in. There is an intoxicating allure of this as some virtual level of power?? Maybe, maybe not. [...]

I’ve made us here (and there and there) of Clustrmaps, the free web tool that can pin your web site visitors to a map by reverse geolocation mapping of their IP address. It’s very cool, and has the great attribute of what I am attracted to in Web 2.0 land- it’s free, easy to set up, gives useful features and services, and once set up, you can forget about managing it. But I just came across one I thought I had seen in an earlier incarnation, that does something similar, then again, very different- Frappr allows you to create a map for your site, but it is a Google type map, and your site visitors can add their own “pin” to geolocate themselves, add a photo, and a short caption (or shoutout). So in some sense it is a web site guest book, but mashed up with a map. I [...]