An interesting moment in transgressing my own boundaries between self and avatar. Rarely have we appeared together and here only in the name of science.

Video on original blog page and on  YouTube

This video came about from a little research that was carried out in advance of an upcoming, 7th July, symposium that we will be presenting to a remote conference audience in Kuala Lumpar. We cannot be there physically so my question was, if we decide to use Second Life in what ways can we create maximum social presence?I am an immersionist, that is I let StevenW build his own space inside SL, yet I am interested in ways to move information in and out of Second Life, punching holes through the membrane and linking in-world and out-of-world experiences. The porosity of SL has changed over time with channels open for: blogging; twitter; web-browsing; SL to Flickr; audio; facebook; and streaming video. Taking the scenario of a live face-2-face conference blended with SL participants I took a peek at the different ways to stream live video into SL. Inspired by posts from both Andy/Art and Rob Smart's blogs I set up a quick trial with Veodia, knowing their live video webstreaming service is now available for free and is offered in a format compatible with Second Life. So how was it? Well simple, so simple I was left wondering what the catch was, bandwidth issues aside. Here is a quick run through of the steps I followed:

• Opened an account with Veodia, a straightforward exercise;
• Clicked through the screens to start my first broadcast;
• Pressed the appropriate button and let my Apple MacPro do the audio-video and capture;
• Previewed the stream to check I was on air and then copied the rtsp URL provided by Veodia from the live broadcast page;
• Launched Second Life;
• Made a coffee while I waited to get in-world ;)
• Knocked up a quick media screen, set the textures and then pasted the rtsp stream URL into the land parcel settings;
• Pressed the media player button in SL;
• Bingo, there I was alive and kicking in the virtual universe.

Whether we will use this for the symposium I am still unsure, my preference I think would be to have the audience streamed into SL so that we have some sense of those who are watching and listening in the conference room. Testing the set-up with fellow panelists uncovered three issues that are driving me away from using SL as a conferencing tool:

• First and most obvious is the heavy bandwidth requirements for this configuration and the related issue of delay, around 3-5 seconds, between the capture and delivery of the video stream;
• Second is the lack of status or feedback indicators, the kind of thing you find when using a tool like Elluminate where you can ask the audience questions and get feedback through a series of emoticons that includes useful items like the 'hands-up' attention grabber;
• Third follows a similar line and concerns the difficulty in providing a mechanism for live audience participation. Setting up a back channel would be an ideal solution and making use of the main SL chat window would be the natural place for this. Yet to my knowledge it is still impossible to remotely work with SL chat so delegates would need to log into SL if they wanted to use the chat window. The option of using a lightweight client such as AjaxLife might be a solution, if the audience all have SL accounts or deploying a non-integrated chat client bought in through the in-world media browser. Both options are still not ideal.

There is perhaps fourth reason, intimated at the start of this post, the separation of avatar and typist. My avatar and me do not appear in public together, or least not very often and somehow that feels right. The quandry of where to post snapshots of us both together, Flickr seemed at first the obvious place, confirmed to me that despite the fuzzy boundary between real and virtual identities they remain in many aspects decoupled. SL is a different space and there exists a differentiated person which goes someway to explain my discomfort in completely collapsing our two identities.

Categories: Imported, MUVEs, Second Life, Video
Tags:

Difficult to tell a story when others already went though their duty: I too scavenged a hunt! and Scavenger Hunt in Second Life. I have also participated in the scavenger hunt organised by the team of the University of Reading (Karsten Lunqvist, Pat Parslow and Edwin Porter Daniels), here is my story:

So we met in the MUVEnation island, StevenW, the usual old Futuras, a slightly changed Ere and for the very first time Nifara, MelAnn and others whose name I struggle to recall, nor that I have met then IRL already. Nifara Blackadder organised the SL Scavenger Hunt and gave us an amazing list of heteroclitic objects: from a girl called Linden to Buddha, Constantinople, tea cup, Tuesday and the seven dwarves! Our mission was to produce, in 45 minutes, through whatever methods we thought were the most efficient, the largest quantity of items of the list. And we were told that we could find these items as freebies, build them or even buy them.

Blue and red team: off you go the competition started! And with the competitions, my fears. As I feared the process of creating teams. I wanted to participate in the activity as something social: to share and enjoy with people I know, with whom I spend time inworld. Not that I am closed to new encounters. But this wasn’t quite the activity to meet people, but to be effective carrying out a given task in a given time. Naturally I wanted to be in the same team as StevenW, but I would also have asked to be in the same team of Netty if she were there. Although I was glad to work with Ere. Curious of cooperating with Suzetta and MelAnn, but wondering what surprises their SL personas hold and feeling somehow that their RL presence (through their voice on the phone, an email or a blogpost) was blurring my perceptions of them inworld.

StevenW, blue. Me, red. Disappointment. What to do? Intense IMing on the backstage. Accept and play? Dull. I would have dropped. Too many things to do in the office. Stand for my choice? Annoying. I could not help feeling childish when asking to be in the same group as StevenW and all the fuzz that followed because we wanted to play together. But I wanted to play with him and could not see the point of joining a group of people I don’t even know. I wondered how others felt about this and I think that maybe some form of socialisation has to take part before creating teams. Now I recall other experiences of cooperation inworld and I have always felt this anguish of finding a partner and trying to escape to the anonymous cooperation, between strangers. Complicity, empathy: that is what I always look for! Thanks to Ere’s finesse and understanding the situation was solved. Phew!

Then serious things started. I created a group for organising cooperation, although we were force to move between our back-channel to the main channel and for listening to Nifara. Why I did not invited Nifara to the group? I would have been easier for him to follow the two group chats. But I felt this as an intrusion… Anyway, we discussed briefly the strategy: going first through our inventories, rezzing like mads, making little modification to existing objects and building quickly simple objects. Straightforward and committed to the task for StevenW. Suzetta, an incredible lateral thinking and creativity: duplicating mannequins for twins, duplicating the same mannequins for the seven dwarves, rezzing a dog called Tuesday, calling one mannequin Linden… God. And MelAnn a willingness to cooperate beyond limited skills, learning by doing and redoing, until the task was accomplished! What a team! I felt sorry for Suzetta problems with her laptop. And also wanted to help step by step MelAnn but I thought that another IM channel would have been too much. Then once my inventory finished, I went to Yadni’s Junkyard. I spent 3 minutes searching for the LM without success and then I recalled that maybe it was in my inventory and mentally thanked Torley for the ToW and Qtips for managing my inventory. I arrived to to Yadni’s place and (as always with freebies) was overwhelmed by tons of boxes, containing tons of objects that you have to guess under a generic title such “House furnitures”. I am looking for a bloody clown! TP back! TP back!, TP back!

Think Paz, think! “Whatever methods we think are the most efficient”… Time running, what I normally do when searching for an item in SL? Whoosh + dingding in my mind! Slexchange of course! But it was already too late to do what I use to: search for item on the web, locate the creator, search for the creator profile inworld, look at his/her pics, locate the boutique and search for the item, look, try and eventually buy. I don’t like buying directly from Slexchange as I cannot see the object nor try it in world first. So too late for this. Think… Well I can do the same but instead of searching the object physically I can represent it in a prim… Let’s go for it: clown, Batman, brain, tea cup and of course the leader of the blue group as well! Time over. We won.

3 snapshots of the victory:

• My first is laughing out loud at StevenW with a pair of wings pretending to be Batman.

• My second is incredulity listening to Nifara arguing that although we won, we won by a little margin as we have used too much jpgs. What Mr Nifara? Are you saying me that putting a jpeg in a prim has less value than other methods? And here, why on earth people like to change the rules, once the competition is over? “Whatever methods we think are the most efficient”. Nobody specified that in the list we had to find 3D objects and that representations of those objects did not count or did not have the same value… Why a representation of George Bush counted and not a representation of a tea cup? So why? And I think that from an external point of view a 3D object means much more work than its representation: ‘a simple photo’. But I would like to explain that there is also valuable work behind a texturised prim. In this case: searching for the item, screen printing, pasting in Photoshop, cropping a perfect square so as to have a good texture, upload the texture inworld, create a flat prim and texturise one of the faces. Is that less difficult than rezzing an object already present in the inventory? Why our clown had less value than our wig, mannequins, plane or whiteboard? So unfair.

• My third is discovering Suzetta and being disrupted by listening to her colleagues calling her by her real name: he, he, he. And also seeing the instructions with double RL/SL names, and seeing instead of Suzetta’s photo inworld a photo of her RL counterpart. ‘A problem, a problem!’ I shouted as I wanted to raise attention about the nature of immersion and our freedom to not to be ourselves inworld. Guys you are constantly going OC (Out of character)! And then someone said to Suzetta ‘Well, you are getting too much into this’. Today I reply ‘do not dare to call me by my RL name inworld, because I do not answer, I am not me’. (Thinking about this, I still wonder who has to sign this post: me or me?)

Paz Lorenz

Categories: Imported, MUVEs, Second Life, muvenation, storytelling, workshop
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I was the leader of the blue team at the scavenger mentioned in http://muvenation.org/blog/2008/07/02/scavenger-hunt-in-second-life/

My team started out with Vecna, Ere and myself Futura. Fraser joined in half way through. It was quite interesting for me as a leader to see how these self-confessed beginners in Secondlife, without much guidance from me, actually started working. The only thing I did as a team leader was to set up a group within SL to allow clear communication. Previous exercises have thought me the need for this! I decided that I wouldn’t do much as a leader, except when asked, and I didn’t have to do much.

I realise that this ended in 4 individuals working alone, only checking with each other once in awhile when stuck or asking if somebody already had found an item. With this laissez-faire regime in place I tried to observe the SL competencies that was used in this particular exercise. Highest on my list is Inventory Management, which turned out to be extremely important and also quite difficult (although perhaps not for Vecna, who had only been in-world once before, therefore didn’t have anything) shortly followed with Communication and Movement, and a bit of building.

Personally I did learn a few things on the fly while doing the exercise, and as an observer I believe that I wasn’t alone there. I think that the playful spirit of the exercise turned the learning that happened into play, which I think is a really valuable feature to aim for when designing teaching in SL.

The biggest lesson for me though, is that I need a bigger screen at home. At work I have a 24″ Widescreen, whereas at home it is a regular 19″ CRT screen. Running SL while interacting with people is close to impossible on a small screen. At one point my screen was completely filled up with menus, all of which I was using, disabling me to do any work.

Thanks to Edwin for organising the event!

Categories: Events, SL activities, Workshops, collaboration
Tags: , communication, scavenger hunt

Suzetta Blackadder has just been in world, as team leader of the Red Team, and we won a narrow victory. We made strong use of jpeg’s which was not well received, but we still managed to find a few things the other team didn’t manage, so we won through.

First of all, I have to say that I had a lot of technical troubles.  My laptop really isn’t up to SL anymore (it used to be fine, but over the last year the clients have become much more demanding on the hardware, and sadly this was very apparent in todays exercise) - so I had great difficulty even keeping up with the team communication, let alone getting anything done. But I managed to contribute a few things from my inventory and some suggestions, so hopefully I wasn’t a complete waste of space.

I thought the exercise highglighted a few difficulties rather nicely.  Not only the technological barrier caused by dependance on third party software, but the issues with trying to find a way of maintaining a mutually updateable list.  It would have been wise, in hindsight, to create a chatbot which could take notes for us, or some form of communicator which would keep track of a To Do list.  Maybe for next time.

Also, I think we were cheating, rather, having both Paz and StevenW on the same team.  They work far too well together and should be split up at all costs

However, I think it also highlighted that we could have worked really well together collaboratively.  I think it would be interesting to have a session where teams build something quite complicated, with perhaps one person doing 3D modelling, another adding textures (someone with design skills… so not me) and someone else scripting things as necessary.

It was good fun, despite the issues with my technology, and I think everyone learned at least something from it.  My biggest in-world take-home message today was that I need to keep my inventory better organised, because the search function left me waiting for ages and there was no apparent way of cancelling it.  And that is a message I can take and apply to real life too - my desk, for instance.

Thanks to everyone who was there taking part, and thanks to Edwin (Nifara) for organising and judging it!

Categories: Events, SL activities, Workshops, collaboration
Tags: collaboration, CoP3D, event, scavengerhunt

Well about 202m if you are given 15 minutes to build a tower and you have the physics switched on. That was the challenge I presented to all the avatars who came along to the SL social event organized during the Emerge online conference (23rd to 25th June). On paper (or notecard) a simple task and one that was reused from a teaching activity designed for the OpenHabitat project by Cubist Scarborough. In virtuality it was a more challenging competition than I envisaged. Building in SL requires a number of skills: knowledge of the client interface, the ability to interpret the ‘build’ dialog boxes, good camera controls and a design based visual grammar that can adjust to a 3D working space. Complicate this mix by making it a cooperative task and the constraints of SL as a tool for collaboration start to become uncovered. The permissions structure in SL means that object sharing is problematic and needs to be solved if team building is going to be effective. To progress, clear communication channels between avatars needs to be established, not a straightforward matter when the main chat window is clogged with the noise from competing parties busy issuing each other instructions and encouragement. From my perspective as judge and referee it felt like 15 minutes of mayhem. Thankfully, towers did appear out of the chaos and the most productive builders were those who in the end chose to go it alone. It was also a great insight into how to design a creative activity for a virtual environment such as SL. The issues that needed to be addressed (and were forgotten by me) were around scaffolding the activity – ensuring there were a set of baseline competencies in place from which creativity could emerge. Next time I will make sure: •    the instructions (and supporting resources) are given well in advance to allow the less experienced participants time to brush up on the skills that will be needed. A few Torley Linden tutorials would have been handy here; •    time is allowed for thinking and communicating strategy and possible approaches to the problem; •    that I do not shift everyone from one venue to another and breakup the natural conversational flows that are developing, in this case moving people from the social area to the building area; •    that if possible everyone is assigned to groups in advance and are not distracted by what can be a tortuous process of forming teams. Second Life can be deceptive. On the surface it presents itself as an environment that can be interpreted by understandings from the real world. It can seduce one into believing that ‘teaching’ practices that work on the outside can be readily transposed inside. It is a sobering experience when the particular constraints of SL kick back and even the best-laid plans begin to unravel. Thankfully here the entire session did not go completely awry and towers were wrought from SL’s basic prim set.  Congratulations to Art Fossett who was awarded the winners prize – a ‘Ruth’. Of course we will be expecting him back next year, or perhaps at the next social, to defend his title. See the full photostream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenwbohm/tags/towers/

Categories: Imported, MUVEs, Second Life, collaboration
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Je poste ce commentaire ici et non pas sur When it all goes wrong!, car il est rejeté par le filtre anti-spam du blog d’Eloise Pasteur. Un autre post en anglais: mais je ne fais pas exprès!

Eloise, I would like to give you some further insight towards understanding “A teaching nightmare!”. This post presents itself as a short narrative that was written as part of a wider research process using storytelling to describe experiences in the area of teaching and learning in Second Life. I have been studying ‘hand-on workshops’ for several months in the role of participatory observation. From the analysis and mapping of these workshops, we (Steven and I) elaborated a taxonomy that covers four main processes and 26 criteria.

• Taxonomy of Second Life practices in learning and teaching activities: Analysis grid for “hands-on workshops” - V.1 (1/2)
• Taxonomy of Second Life practices in learning and teaching activities: Analysis grid for “hands-on workshops” - V.1 (2/2)

Amongst the results of our research we found a tension between teacher’s IRL experience, pedagogical approach and the control of the virtual environment. Control (of the space, of conversational flow, of communication dynamics) appeared to be a factor that greatly influenced the outcomes of the workshop and the difficulty for experienced IRL teachers is that this belong to a specific set of knowledge and skills related to teaching in SL.
Reflecting about this I wanted to test with myself, and evaluate if an experienced SL denizen in the grid since 2006, IRL teacher for more than 16 years, but without any specific knowledge of the ‘backstage of ·hands-on workshops’ (e.g. never used a script to give automatic instructions) was capable of presenting a practical workshop and evaluating its outcomes. I wanted to know what other criteria for success I would find … when this time being an insider!
I agree, practice first is good advice. However in my opinion, this has a lower impact when plotted against other criteria such design/display of the learning environment. This experience allowed me to identify some missing criteria in the grid such as ‘interaction policies’ and ‘didactic strategies for individualisation of learning in a short synchronous session’. There is also one issue that interests me and this is about the time spent in the preparation of the activity. I would appreciate if you shared your experience about this.
Finally, a word about telling unsuccessful stories. I am convinced that unsuccessful stories can uncover good practices and help us to identify better ways of using virtual environments for education. Sadly these stories disappear behind the culture of the successful-look-at-me-teacher or the too-shy-to-recognize-I-have-also-failed.
I will kindly accept your offer to test the next workshop. So be prepared for an invitation! But I would also like to interview you as experienced teacher. Finally I was wondering if you would like to tell me a meaningful story about teaching and learning in Second Life: one that worth the effort to be passed on, that will smooth my path as a virtual teacher!

Categories: Imported, MUVEs, muvenation
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At the last Muvenation event we agreed to organise monthly in-world events to help project members to get more experience both of organising and participating in events. The first event was organised by Marga and it was entitled “Wig Making” – I must say I had never even thought about wig making in real life or Second Life. But I thought that I should show willing and sign up.

 

As with a lot of in-world events there was a lot of difficulty in getting everyone together. The size of the working area meant that people couldn’t hear each other (i.e. see each other’s chat). Marga’s central position meant she could. Initially we just put together a wig from components, and that was easy. Then we went on to building from prims. I had similar problems to other small scale building I have tried, I am not good at lining things up by eye (I think my astigmatism doesn’t help) - so my wig pieces didn’t really fit together. With fiddling with the camera and nudging pieces I was just getting there when we were instructed to rez a red nose which we were to link our wig pieces to. My trouble was that having rezzed the red nose I had difficulty selecting and moving it – I kept losing sight of it! At this point I decided to call it a day and I decided I really ought to get on with other activities.

 

Overall I think it was a challenging activity to organise and I don’t think it is one I would want to emulate. As a learner I wasn’t particularly engaged. Marga’s avatar has many wigs, my Rosie doesn’t when she was a normal colour she had her original hair do and this was only changed slightly in shade and length. Once Rosie decided to become blue I did change her hairstyle to be a matching hue.

Categories: MUVEs, Second Life
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So yesterday we have started the MUVEnation monthly series of “events”. We have agreed on this one month ago, moved by the idea of improving our project’s members SL competences and also creating opportunities for cooperation and group bonding. Most of us work closely together in real settings, but have few opportunities to spend time inworld.

An event can be everything: from a teaching experience, to a guided tour; from scuba dive party to a virtual barcamp.

From May 2008 and all throughout 2008, the partners of the project will organise an inworld activity for his/her fellows: 8 partners, 1 partner, 1 activity per month.

Someone has to start: that was me! This blogpost is the story of the first event that turned out to be a teaching nightmare!

One month ago, I planned to organise a ‘hand’s on workshop’ as a discovery of prim-hair making in second life: 1750-1795 in fashion: “Make wigs, make wigs, make wigs”. I decided to organise a hand’s-on workshop because i have been analysing the genre for 1 year, collecting cases and analysing good practices; although i have never given one as a teacher. But thought naively that my experience as a mentor and the results of my observations would be enough. Wrong!

It took me 20 hours to design and organise my 1 hour workshop. One full day for searching inspiration, selecting the theme, collecting resources, training myself to the task, designing the activity, preparing the description in the wiki and sending out invitations. Another 12 hours to prepare the teaching space, build the learning resources, search for inworld tools for delivering the instruction, chatting with Corwin Carillon (aka Nick Noakes), and testing the activity with Steven for final adjustments and ‘validation’.

Why I prepared a building workshop on making wigs? Because…

• I adore wigs. In my inventory I have at least 50 black, red and white wigs,
• I wanted to learn how to make prim-hair and I saw the workshop as a learning opportunity for myself,
• I wanted to test how well went a format insisting in only a few set of skills (making Torii, duplicating, basic texturising, linking) but giving freedom to students to play with size and position: freely shrinking and intensively aligning to death! i.e. giving them the opportunity to taste what building is, and not providing them with detailed instructions about size and rotation.

And the workshop started. And I was already trembling with excitation and stress. I needed one day more of work! And I am not a English native speaker. And I was with my new computer with an AZERTY keyboard mixing ‘a’ and ‘q’…

What happened?

• 6 people turned out and two could not join the location.
• Waiting for people and solving membership problems took us 15 minutes, so we started late,
• The space of the workshop, a square with avatars at 10 meters of distance from me in the centre, was too wide so they could hear me but avatars in the extremes could not use the main chat channel because they were at more than 20 meters of distance.
• We decided to use the group channel, but soon my messages were not getting in so I returned to the main channel and was dealing with Q&A either in the main channel or via.
• I experienced some problems relating to the workshop’s supplies: the pose stands in the area were locked so participants could not change the position to be more comfortable (I changed this after but again lose of time) and also the hair textures were no copy, so they did not came into the supplies folder.
• Although I have prepared images about each step that I delivered through a link to my Flickr account, participants were already too busy to open an extra window and consult them (as some of them told me). I have also made several wigs illustrating each state and asked them to wear, but they lacked of a visual and constant reference of the task.
• I had at least 3 different SL skills level from intermediate to very beginners, and the very beginners haven’t prepared the pre-required to the workshop and I haven’t prepare a back-up solution for this. With people struggling to rotate a torus and shrink and rotate within a limited space and in relation to their head, making a prim-hair workshop was a complete non-sense.
• I thought that giving room for freedom was an excellent idea, but participants turned out to be disrupted by instructions such as : “put the torus over your head, half inside, and modify it (CTRL+SHIFT) to follow the curve of your skull” (See: Follow the curve of your skull). Some kept me asking about the right dimensions for X, Y, Z, others kept the initial dimensions I have given, very few were comfortable with free modification.
• Participants did not stop asking questions, some repetitive, the same questions of their peers and i kept answering also in the main channel. I think this was very disruptive for all. Also it was for me impossible to manage different rhythms and some skilled avatars were stopped while waiting for the others. I did not have any back-up solution for this neither.
• Only two avatars out of six finished the task in 1 hour time (not counting the lose of time of the beginning), two left before finishing the task at 1:30 pressed by IRL commitments: i guess filled up with frustration because for one the rhythm was to slow, and the other had some problems visualizing the task and with rotation and positioning), two could not finish the task at 2:30 as they were newbies and had real difficulties with building and positioning. One reported me that her position in the grid was terrible to align objects on hear head, but it was too late to change position and accept the lose of the relative position of the wig, not already linked.
• It took me one hour to understand why to avatars could not link their wig: I discovered that instead of aligning the red nose to their body (See: Red nose), they have attached to their head.
• My English abandoned me several times: iIwas struggling to find the translation of “Glissez la souris autour de votre tête en sélectionant tous les objets”, “Aux extrémités du carré” or “Chignon!!!”.
• At the end, filled up with frustration as well, I finish the session with my neck, arm and little finger aching and I am not going to search for the translation for: “j’avais des fourmis plein les doigts”

Why on earth I did not listen to my inner teacher?

If I were in a F2F setting, i would have never carry on with the activity: I would have stopped, said to participants let’s change and tackle the basics. Or i would have split the session into two groups: guiding newbies step by step, provided intermediate participants with a self-paced tutorial and just giving feedback on demand.

I cannot turn back the clock, but i can tell what I will do the next time:

• Design a teaching space with pose stands free to modify ans ask participants to to work on a position they find comfortable. Instead of putting them all around a square putting them in a line or in several chess lines in front on the teacher. They will be all spread in a 20 meters diameter so they can listen to each other. And also this will facilitate my task on following them with the camera.
• Set policies for using the main communication channel and also for Q&A.
• Prepare a practical exercise to do before the workshop as an assessment of required skills. If the participants cannot go thought the task, then they cannot participate in the workshop: better to review the basics first.
• Prepare a mini task introductory to the main task, so participants understand the process that we will carry on. For example, building 3 boxes aligned vertically by duplication, texturising them, linking them making the middle as root, attaching to skull, rotating to horizontal, editing linked parts, taking back to inventory and wearing.
• Displaying big images of each step in front of the participants. So they can see them easily while they are working.
• Test the workshop long time before delivering, so as to have enough time to implement instructional changes.
• Prepare a back-up solution for fast learners so they can advance comfortably at their rhythm.
• Prepare the basic instructions in a chat giver so I can spend more time helping via IM and looking at participants’ wigs.
• Review my English vocabulary and namely the hair fashion one!
• And finally investigate more about posing stands and alignment issues when creating a wig. Interview an experienced hair builder?

By the way, I will implement these changes and offer the workshop as an SL educational events open to all. Never end with a frustration, always go ahead!

I would love that participants in the workshop put their comments here, so we can have a multi-voiced picture of the workshop

Categories: Events, Pedagogical approaches, SL activities, Teachers training, Workshops
Tags: Learning, Teaching, Workshops

Andy Powell of Eduserv has a Second Life avatar called Art Fossett who write a blog.  

In recent posts Andy/Art has made available two packages that look interesting and are free:

 

A meeting pod "a small, floating, meeting room with 8 scripted seats and a hand-raising, automated chairing facility"

Second Friend tweeter this works with his Second Friend package to send out bubbles of tweets

Categories: MUVEs, Second Life
Tags:

From the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA):

The Higher Education Academy Centre for ICS in conjunction with the University of Portsmouth is running a workshop on Second Life in Portsmouth on 10^th June.

This hands on workshop is aimed at colleagues who already have avatars and some experience of the environment but are unsure of where to go next!  The plan for the day is to learn form more experienced practitioners and to hear how others are using this technology in teaching.

As this is a lab based workshop numbers are limited, so if you would like to book a place, please follow the link;

http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/eventbook.php?id=199

Categories: MUVEs, Second Life
Tags: