Third Life

After 12 straight days of organizing and documenting Second Life activities for the NMC Impact of Digital Media Symposium, I am ready for an upgrade. One things that worked well in this event was organizing the planning of it, the schedule, etc in a wiki and the schedule of events also became a place to hang all of the archived content in addition.

But it was not just us– we asked a lot of people for help, and got much in return, including the Second Life Librarians, GlobalKids, Slatenight, the Second Life Educators (SLED), and many colleagues I am forgetting due to amnesia.

In the tally of things, I have notched in:

29 Blog posts at http://www.nmc.org/sl/
9 sessions wereh we captured and published the chat logs (posted linked from the blog and the wiki schedule).
18 different events with flickr photos (almost 300 posted to a flickr set)
15 recorded live audio sessions, each posted to the wiki and the blog. These were recorded either directly from the SL music channel using WireTap Pro, or a few were done via Skype and recorded from there. Skype actually worked better than expected, especially on the mad packed Oct 19 section for the Slatenight event when we had people skyping in from Australia, the UK, and elsewhere. These were edited quickly in Audacity, exported as AIFF, dropped in my new love, the Levalator, and mp3-ed in iTunes. For those interested in the set up for live streaming, see the gliffy diagram that shows the pieces/ Our audio stream is provided by Limelight Networks, with a peak of 70 streams going on during the Howard Rheingold keynote.
1 video from some machinima recorded in world – needed some optimizing for web format, and managed to convert it to a Flash player format as well.

And this was a lead up event to what we calling our online conference in the “flat world”- the NMC Online Conference on Impact of Digital Media which starts tomorrow for two days. There is still time to register– a rock star format with many great sessions, headliners from Howard Rheingold and danah boyd. That will be two solid days for me inside LearningTimes and running around the behind thee scenes to facilitate the Elluminate sessions, where last Spring we had as many as 110 participants, and expect more with this line up.

But there were so many highlights of the SL events, among them:

Our sensors indicated we had well over 1300 unique avatars visit during the 12 day stint.
Keynote in world by Howard Rheingold — still absorbing the big ideas; we have just posted the audio to that blog post. w00t ! we made it into SmartMobs!
Camp Global Kids session — Barry and Rafi really blow the doors off of the stand there and lecture presentation style, by peppering a session with some active activities.
The whole set of 8 different sessions form Slatenight (Thanks Anya!) They were all great, Anya’s avatar discussion, the avatar fashion show, Lythe’s segment on art space, the panel discussion and live music performed by SL musicians (if you listen to only one podcast, check out this one!), Dell’s talk on the future perfect, and Heidi and Danielle’s sharing of lessons learned from using SL with Seton Hall students… and there were some Ozzies up til 4am to make this possible!
The Second Life Educators panel “”Are We Playing Games? Finding Legitimacy in the Academy”” was incredible– successes from 5 different organizations who are breaking new ground in SL.
Rich text-chat discussions from the NMC Campus Teacher’s Buzz Session, Troy MacLuhan’s “Life on Mars?”, Dan Zellner’s acting lessons, and heckling Henry VIII.
Live Press conference for the announcement of NMC’s campus expansion plans.
The in-world webcast live of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media project announcement, and more so because of the great backchannel conversations.
Our in world photo contest— I got to give away $11,000 (well it is Linden dollars, but still is not peanuts).